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Notes -
Riffing on this discussion I would like to present a scenario:
I am the CEO of a struggling startup, expecting to take a call from a very busy potential client. We are out of funds and will go bankrupt without the client’s business. The client, a CEO, is busy and if I miss this call he will certainly not bother to call back.
Unfortunately my phone has died at the crucial moment. I’m in a cafe so I run up and down the tables, begging to borrow someone’s charger. Somebody gives me the charger, I take the call, and my startup goes on to make billions. The call, and therefore the charger, has made me rich beyond imagining.
One the one hand, lending me the charger was an utterly trivial act: even ten dollars in thanks would be a little windfall for the lender. On the other hand, without the lender I would be destitute instead of a billionaire. How much of a debt do I owe the person who lent me their charger?
Edit: ‘owe’ in a moral sense, as opposed to enforceable by a court.
Owe? Nothing! In the scenario outlined, there was no offer, and no acceptance; no bargain was struck.
If I were personally made a muti-billionaire in this scenario, and the real alternative was in fact me becoming destitute, I would probably give the cord lender a million bucks as a show of gratitude. Someone who gave the cord lender less than, oh, $10,000 in this scenario I would regard as tastelessly cheap. But I would also regard it as tasteless of the cord lender to anticipate such a reward. In moral or legal judgments, it is appropriate to feel that one is due what one is owed, and that one owes what others are due. But I think aesthetic judgment applies better to scenarios like this one, where no contractual or moral obligations seem to be in play. It is a more beautiful world, where people penny-pinch neither their helpfulness nor their gratitude.
Really? My intuition is that I would give the lender $100 and go on my way. Largest bill there is, big enough tip to make someone's day, small enough to be trivial to me. I would do the same if I won a million bucks at the casino; give the croupier a hundred to satisfy the social obligation to tip after a big win and think no more of it.
I was actually in a similar situation once, albeit on a much smaller scale. I dressed up nicely and drove to my alma matter to do a video interview (because my house was a mess), but when I got there it turned out that my laptop was too old to run the video software (it was still running on Windows Vista!). I asked one of the students I saw there to let me borrow her laptop for the interview, and she agreed. I used it for about 15 minutes in a chair next to her. When I finished, I gave her back the computer, and asked her if she would like something for her trouble. If she said yes, I would have pulled out a twenty and given it to her. She said no, so I just thanked her and went home.
Now, I found out later that I didn't get the job, but if I had, it would have been worth tens of thousands of dollars a year to me, since I was unemployed at the time. Was it cheap of me to have only offered her a twenty, or to have not insisted after she turned me down once?
This dovetails pretty well with my wife's recent argument that America needs a $500 bill, because the $100 increasingly lacks the gravity it once did.
Technically there are 500 dollar bills that are legal tender. But they haven’t been printed since 1945.
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