As for goods, forget showing off. “If you want to live like a billionaire,
buy a $12,000 bed,” says a financial-planner friend of mine.

Ever since I read PG discuss the smallness of the actual differences between the lives of tech millionaires and Joe Average, I've wondered how much money it would take to live with principally the same standard of living as someone who can buy whatever they want. Obviously, most of the wealth of a typical billionaire is never used for any material purpose.

In the spirit of the quoted financial planner, therefore, I propose to discuss and uncover the areas where a lot of money is still able to buy more comfort and capability than a mere paycheck. If we could shrink these gaps, standard-of-living per dollar would increase, which would be very nice.

+ The quality of living quarters is basically as good as it can be, even for smallish sums. Fifty million dollars won't improve the quality of our hot water, good beds, good insulation and home entertainment by much. Rich people can still buy huge properties, but the utility of a private forest is small. Perhaps the biggest change that could happen here would be if people decided to not to skimp too much on the parts that matter.

+ Free time and attention. It is a pain in the ass to have to work for a living, usually at a somewhat painful job. Not quite sure how to tackle this problem. Robotics and artificial intelligence, maybe. It won't be solved in the forseeable future.

+ Efficient personal transportation still requires a lot of money. Think private jets: being able to travel to any location on earth as quickly and painlessly as anyone. This will probably remain a hurdle in the forseeable future, although the cost has come down a lot quite recently. It remains a matter of cheap airframes and cheap energy. Believe what you may, but being able to move ten of fifteen times faster than a car is a great boon. Get a private pilot's license, and you'll get the idea.

+ Personal attention. Money can buy all sorts of servants, therapists, coaches and mentors. I question how much of a boon many of these services actually are, but some of them would be very comfy. For example massage therapists, housemaids or chaffeurs. Also, learning new skills comes easier if you have world-class teaching talent available: the kind of teaching talent which would be bored to death and vastly underpaid teaching in public schools. Ironically, the most useful of these services (housemaids or nannies, for example, or prostitutes if we want to step into darker territory) can already be rented on the open market quite cheaply. Not to the same level of availability or quality as a billionaire could, but still vastly better than nothing.

+ Personalized health care. Even in Scandinavia, getting an appointment with the doctor and then an appointment with the required specialist is annoying enough to make you wish for something better. Health care is expensive enough as it is, but having a specialist watching you closely for a long time is much more so.

Can anyone think of any areas I missed? Perhaps some of these points could be separated into more sub-points..a list like this compiled 100 years ago would probably lump a lot of the luxuries we have today (washing machines, hot water, automobiles) into the same categories...