Useless Money: A Humanist Sermon

[rug]

June 13, 2016
by Adam Lee

This is 432 Park Avenue:



It’s the newest addition to the New York City skyline, an ultra-luxury residential skyscraper in midtown Manhattan. With a top height of almost 1400 feet, it’s the tallest residential building in the world and the second tallest building in all of NYC, ahead of the Empire State Building, behind only the new One World Trade Center.

Despite its neck-craning height (it actually required approval from the FAA), 432 Park Avenue has only 104 apartments. The first one that sold went for $18 million, and prices go up – way up – from there. While it was still under construction, the penthouse apartment was sold, with great fanfare, for $95 million. Another penthouse in another NYC skyscraper, One57, sold for over a hundred million dollars.

The apartments in 432 Park have eye-popping views of the city and every lavish touch imaginable. Yet most of them won’t even be occupied. As many as three-quarters are expected to be vacant, because people aren’t buying them to live in, but as investments. Many are billionaires from corrupt oligarchies like Russia, China and the Gulf states, who buy property in the West as a convenient place to store their cash that’s out from under the eyes of their rulers.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2016/06/useless-money-a-humanist-sermon/

[Jim__]

1. I agree, of course, that the super-rich have more money than anyone ever should.

But this paragraph seems self-contradictory:

These super-rich people long ago passed the point where they could fulfill any desire a human being could possibly have. Having more money would, literally, be useless to them. Yet they continue to strive, to compete against each other for wealth and status, to see who can run the fastest in pursuit of the unreachable horizon. For all their riches and all their power, they’re living in slavery to the false belief that more money means greater happiness: ...

If their money gave them the ability to fulfill any desire they could possible have, they would not desire more money. The problem may well be the delusion that with sufficient money, they can fulfill any desire. Probably a number of their desires go unfulfilled because they spend all their time pursuing money.

My bet is that most of us, if given the opportunity, would take the money, and follow the same delusions.

[rug]

2. I think it means that the acquisition of money would become their only desire.