Wealth vs freedom

H.L. Mencken once said that a rich man is anyone who earns more than his wife’s sister’s husband. The anthropologist David Graeber takes a slightly different view. When I interviewed him about his wonderful book Bullshit Jobs, he explained that, rather like the Laffer curve, there is an optimal amount of wealth for anyone to have: if you have too little wealth, you spend all your time worrying about money.