How much money is enough? | Vicki Robin | Big Think

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How much money is enough?
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There is a point when you have enough of what you need, says author, speaker, and social innovator Vicki Robin. And anything past that is just overindulgence and doesn't take into account your environmental impact. Once you become aware of your financial sweet spot and how much you really need to consume, you will naturally spend less and be happier.
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VICKI ROBIN:

Vicki Robin is a prolific social innovator, writer, and speaker. She is coauthor with Joe Dominguez of the international best-seller, Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence (Viking Penguin, 1992, 1998, 2008, 2018).
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TRANSCRIPT:

Vicki Robin: We talk about the old roadmap for money, and the old roadmap was born really out of the industrial revolution.

It was born out of the sense of the “wild west,” of “anything is possible,” of manifest destiny, of American exceptionalism, whatever you want to say.

Or you can go back even further to capitalism itself. But the roadmap is: “growth is good, more is better, whoever dies with the most toys wins.”

It’s a materialist roadmap, and the part of the roadmap is not only that; it’s an empty world.

“Uh oh, there were people here before the white people came. And, you know animals. There was already a living mature society—“ “No, no, no. It was empty.”

And then the other part of it is that one of the essential ingredients of it that still people, even if intellectually they understand it they do not get it, is that in that roadmap the economy can grow forever and the Earth is like just sort of a toy chest. You just keep reaching in there and pulling out resources, reaching in and pulling out resources. So the economy can grow infinitely because the Earth is an infinite cornucopia of resources.

The fact of the matter is that the economy is a fabrication, our economy is a fabrication, a set of rules inside a finite planet.

There’s a way to measure. There’s a way to measure the human impact, the impact of human consumption on the Earth. It’s called the ecological footprint, and they can measure every little scintilla of, you know, my watch and my eyeglass. Everything I have, everything we sit in, everything we walk around on, they can measure that in terms of the amount of the planet it took to develop that.

So we have measured the amount of planet we have and humans are consuming more than the amount of planet we have every year (that can be regenerated) ever since 1986.

That, to me, that data about overshoot has been a central feature of my life. When I learned that, it was just sort of one of those things that’s obvious, like, “certainly we want to change.”

So the old roadmap this idea that the Earth is a set of infinite resources, and the economy can harvest those resources every which way from Sunday in order to produce economic growth.

That’s fundamental and then it trickles down to the human as: “More is better.”

And part of that is as the economy grew, as industrialization permitted more products to be produced with less human labor there was a sort of a peaking out of consumption around the 1920s and it became a problem, like what are we going to do?

So there’s several ways to expand markets.

One is you export and another is to educate your citizens to want more than they need.

And then you’ve got an infinite market called the endless willingness of people to buy into the story of ‘more is better’ and ‘keep buying stuff.’

So that is the old roadmap: Growth is good, more is better, game over. Not talking about the context of our lives, the social context where fairness is sort of like built into us.

Babies all come with that stamp on them, you know. Fairness is important and so you cannot stretch fairness and believe that there’s no breaking point. So injustice aside, environmental integrity aside, more is better, growth is good, party on.

The new roadmap says that there is something called “enough” and “enough” is not sort of like this oppressive ceiling that, you know, “Okay, I’ve got enough and I can’t have any more.”

No, enough is this sort of vibrant vital place. What we teach is an awareness about the flow of money and stuff in your life in light of your true happiness and your sense of purpose and values. And that your “enough point,” having Enough, is having everything you want and need to have a life...

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John D. Rockefeller: “Just a little bit more.”

paulespinoza
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It depends on individual but I think half a million is enough to retire and live in Portugal or Thailand.

dannysze
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It really depends on where you live. If i had $500/month where i live it'd be fine. If i had $1000/month it would be perfect and i could afford everything i need to be happy and live the life i want. In other places $1000/month is not even enough to subsist.

YuliSagitta
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If you think of your life as a business, happiness is the product you make. You wouldn't want to use more resources than necessary to make the product. Or better yet, you'd minimize the resources and input, to maximize the the happiness output.

JimRamirez
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I wait tables for a living, and sometimes when it’s slow people ask me, don’t you wish it was busier? I’m like why? They are like, so you can make more money. I’m like, I don’t care about money. I care about good service, that always surprises them and they leave me a fat tip. But I’m just being honest. I hate money, I only need enough for my bills. After that, I can live off good fortune and sunshine.

ratatataraxia
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The necklace looks like a lot more then enough....lol

bakkasur
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If I had her necklace I'd feel like I'd had enough too

JeremyIan
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"Does it make you happy ?"
Exactly; I couldn't agree more.

When it comes to money, that's all you need to ask.

hermanjohnson
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Vicki Robin. The mortal enemy of Gordan Gekko.

deathbycognitivedissonance
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I'm loving the comments about her necklace :D

felipemp
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Best advice was said by Mama Gump.... "there's only so much wealth a man really need.... the rest is just for show"

gunfunandstuff
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How much is enough? More than I have that's for sure...

ChunksPlace
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Human nature: There's never enough! I want more!

williamlouie
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I want to know specifically how we "measured" the amount of resources the earth has and therefore how we measured what we've used. Does this include scientific advancement to use less resources? Does it include resources that haven't been discovered or exploited yet. It seems subject to speculation... or scientific woo.

onaughto
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Great video! I'm really impressed!, So uncommon point of view! 'Growth is good' - that is soooo our culture we live in 😓 That type of philosophy can be unhealthy and even dangerous in some cases. Again - great video 👏

bonheur
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“Greed is Good” - Gordon Gekko.

If it wasn’t for people that wanted more, YouTube and that iPad your watching this on wouldn’t exist.

brianmcg
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I had much higher hopes for this video. Was thinking it would be our relationship with money

joelfarmer
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If you ask politicians, no amount is enough.

bpdmf
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At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history.
Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have — ENOUGH.”

HermanHerrera
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There are many people that are conscious of their spending but there are also many that take advantage of that to get rich. You can't tell someone they have to be mindful of others, it has to come from within. As long as there are people that exploit others to get ahead we'll never reach a true balance.

Think about it like this: If I own a fishing farm and earn a profit of $1000 a month but have to pay $200 for a filter that keeps the water clean, I have net profit $800. If everyone did the same we would all be profitable enough. But, there is always that guy that decides to remove the filter so he earns the full $1000, while polluting the water and eventually reducing profits for everyone. Nobody wins, but the greedy person sure made a lot of money while it lasted.

That's basically the mentality that we need to get away from and I'm not optimistic that's possible.

fabled.