I like the topic, but I think this is bad advice and almost certainly wrong.
I’ll ignore the saving vs investing distinction. I assume you meant investing, with a Kelly Criterion or similar risk/reward strategy.
But your main error is in thinking that you can’t profitably use your saved money sooner, if circumstances warrant. Investing with a 10- or a 40-year horizon is darned near identical. You’re really saving for ‘the foreseeable future’. You’re asserting that what you can get for $1-plus-future-growth averaged over all futures is higher utility than $1 spent today.
You’re also just wrong about happiness correlation with income—there are population effects that make it confusing, but it never seems to fully plateau, just becomes smaller increments. More is (nearly) always better. I think you’re wrong abut utility-per-dollar as well, but I have weaker models of that.
The stock market has never declined over a 20 year period, but it has declined over 10 year periods, so if you’re particularly risk averse, that could be quite the difference.
I like the topic, but I think this is bad advice and almost certainly wrong.
I’ll ignore the saving vs investing distinction. I assume you meant investing, with a Kelly Criterion or similar risk/reward strategy.
But your main error is in thinking that you can’t profitably use your saved money sooner, if circumstances warrant. Investing with a 10- or a 40-year horizon is darned near identical. You’re really saving for ‘the foreseeable future’. You’re asserting that what you can get for $1-plus-future-growth averaged over all futures is higher utility than $1 spent today.
You’re also just wrong about happiness correlation with income—there are population effects that make it confusing, but it never seems to fully plateau, just becomes smaller increments. More is (nearly) always better. I think you’re wrong abut utility-per-dollar as well, but I have weaker models of that.
The stock market has never declined over a 20 year period, but it has declined over 10 year periods, so if you’re particularly risk averse, that could be quite the difference.