
Knuth on money and dropping out of graduate school - gsivil
Then in the middle of graduate school
I was offered to drop out of college
and write compilers for a living at an annual salary
of $100,000 in 1962 dollars.
That would correspond to about $10,000,000 a year now
or something like that, not quite as much as a CEO — but anyway<p>I was offered, leave graduate school and get rich, and<p>I decided, you know,
I really wanted to spend my life not maximizing
the total amount of money that I got.<p>I wanted to do things
that were interesting to me,
that I thought would be useful to others.<p>And I found that money was a threshold function.<p>If you don’t have enough of it, you need it;
but after that point,
then it’s just a problem because you really
have to enjoy having money and figuring out what
to do with it responsibly,
which is something that I never wanted to do.
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dhathorn
According to the inflation calculator:
<http://www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi> $100,000 1962 dollars is $712000
2010 dollars. A lot of money, for sure, but not 10 million.

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jgamman
I think that was sarcasm - perhaps a 'basinga' would help?

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alderssc
Knuth's observation on money appears to be explained by the economic 'law' of
diminishing marginal utility.

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zem
why the scare quotes around "law"? it's a universal enough facet of human
psychology that the word seems perfectly applicable.

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CyberFonic
The cost of living wasn't as crazy in 1962 as it is shaping up for 2012. Fifty
years can make a heck of big change in lifestyle expectations and costs.

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nandemo
Sounds unplausible. Source?

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gsivil
<http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb23-3-4/tb75knuth.pdf>

page 259.

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nandemo
Thank you. I find it surprising that one (even Knuth) could get such a high
salary for programming back then.

