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recipient of the original dollar pays for the things
he
needs. They, in turn, buy from others. Had Buffett spent more of his income, he would have sustained more jobs. Each of the ten thousand people he hired to paint his portrait would spend the money he paid them, thereby generating employment and income for many others. All of them, painters included, would also pay taxes. And their spending and tax payments might well support, directly or indirectly, AIDS research, teaching, nursing, and other endeavors more socially useful than the ten thousand portraits of Warren Buffett.
    Consider the nearly $100 million Kenneth Lewis earned as CEO of Bank of America in 2007, as he was leading the bank toward collapse (and absorption by Merrill Lynch). To spend it all, Lewis would have had to buy $273,972.60 worth of goods and services every day that year, including weekends. If he had devoted twelve waking hours a day to the task, he’d have had to spend $22,831 every hour, $380.52 every minute.
    In the year prior to Lehman Brothers’ catastrophic inability to pay its bills, its then CEO, Richard Fuld, collected $500 million of compensation in salary and shares of stock. Fuld had a penthouse on Park Avenue then valued at $21 million; an estate in Greenwich,Connecticut, worth an estimated $25 million; and an art collection valued at $200 million. Steve Schwarzman, head of the private equity firm the Blackstone Group, was another free spender. He held a sixtieth birthday party for himself that cost $5 million. Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft, owned two 757s and a helicopter. But these and other high rollers—the modern equivalents of the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies, and the Rockefellers, who built mansions, threw grand parties, and owned their own railroads and oil wells in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—still manage to spend only a modest portion of their yearly incomes.
    It is a problem few of us are acquainted with, but the fact is that the richest human beings find it difficult to spend more than a fraction of their fortunes, notwithstanding an abundance of pricey temptations. The sheer magnitude of the task of spending obscene amounts of money can be surprisingly challenging. Few people have the time, energy, or stamina that’s required. The true advantage of a fortune lies less in its purchasing power than in its power to confer high social standing and attract the adoring and enthusiastic attention of other people who want some of it.
    Nor, it turns out, do most rich people have the appetite to spend all the money they accumulate. Being rich changes the very nature of desire. As we shall examine in more detail later, happiness diminishes rapidly after the first flush of acquisitive excitement. That second piece of pie never tastes quite as good as the first. Once we have had our fill of anything, additional portions aren’t as attractive to us. (In some cases they can even make us sick.) How much additional bliss can one obtain from owning a fourth home or a fifth sports car or from sitting down, for the hundredth time, to a dinner of $80-an-ounce Beluga caviar and Corton-Charlemagne wine? Paul Allen’s first 757 jet may have lifted his spirits as well as his body, but it’s doubtful he experiences the same rush from having two.
    One ethical argument for redistributing income from rich to poor comes from this psychological truth. The nineteenth-century founder of a branch of ethics called “utilitarianism,” Jeremy Bentham, thought the purpose of all law should be to produce the greatest possible happiness, counting each person’s happiness equally. Taking a thousand dollars from someone who’s rich and giving it to someone who’s poor might diminish the former’s happiness slightly, Bentham reasoned, but would almost certainly increase the happiness of the poor person far more.Taxing the wealthy to help the poor, as Bentham saw it, therefore increases the sum total of happiness.
    But Marriner