One reason to make a lot of money is to get a good spot on the league table of rich people. [...] Being the richest person in the world does seem cooler than being the second-richest person on the world, though I doubt that your consumption basket changes much between those two spots. [...] And so you might imagine that the design of the league tables could motivate behavior.
Put another way: Had the Oracle of Omaha held onto his stake through the years, he’d have a net worth of almost $400 billion as of April 30, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That’s $67 billion more than the fortune of Elon Musk, the world’s richest person.
Charity-adjusted billionaire rankings! Why not? [...] When you irrevocably donate your stock to charity, you no longer own it in any legal or practical or economic sense, but should you still own it for league table purposes? Would that incentivize more donations? “You can give away all your money and still be rich (in our rankings)”?
Matt Levine mostly treats this as a joke, but it would be cool if someone put some effort into making a lux-looking billionaire ranking website that adjusted for charity. Matt reads his reader email, so I bet you could get it featured on his newsletter.
The Merit rank page is here:
https://rovas.app/users-merit-rank
It is automatically updated whenever a registered user earns Merits. This can happen if they donate money or own labor to Rovas, or to a particular Rovas-registered project.
The system keeps track about the way a concrete user earned their Merits, albeit this information might be visible (currently) to registered users only.
The application is a proof of concept I have been working on for ~6 years, but all users and transactions are real. 10 Merits represent one hour of labor, so an EU user for example with 10000 Merit score donated ~15 000 euros to the "commons" in their labor, or actual money assuming 15 euro/hour average wage in their country (opportunity cost).
The rank page needs some work, to better communicate this information. :-)