Meaningful Returns

Sometimes complex systems–like the human brain, or the universe that quantum physics studies–display what are called “emergent properties.” The phenomenon the term describes goes something like this:

Suppose you have a widget that seems to be doing something fairly simple, and then you get a bunch of those widgets and put them together. You might understandably expect that when you did this, you would just have a bunch of widgets doing the same things, only in larger numbers. But in fact, they start doing something completely different–and more complex–altogether. In other words, the sheer scale of the interactions of those little, simple things (like neurons or subatomic particles)  causes not-so-simple, properties to emerge from those interactions.

I came across this idea in the psychologist Dan Gilbert’s amazing book, Stumbling On Happiness, wherein he’s discussing emergent properties in the context of our consciousness and the ways we experience the feeling of happiness. It’s a really fascinating book that I highly recommend.

But it struck me today that money has, in a way, some emergent properties of its own. We think that having more money is the same as having less money, except we just have more of it. And of course that’s true, but only partially. Because when you put a whole bunch of money together (a different number for every person), you find that you not only have more money than when you had less money, but you also have complex decisions to make that you never had to make before, and those decisions create a different set of consequences affecting a different set of dependents. And suddenly it’s clear that having 50X dollars isn’t just 50 times more than having X dollars, but that you have to craft a new equation altogether in order to describe the relationship. Biggie really was right.