Some questions and thoughts I’ve had/heard

• Why do investment banks have employees all work insane hours (e.g. 80 hour weeks) instead of employing twice the amount of people who work normal (40 hour) weeks? -suggested by Luke. Thoughts: There must be some mechanism that means that this state is more efficient. This could be because the field shifts so quickly that it is difficult to stay up to date on information, so long hours are necessary instead of spreading work/information over multiple people. Also, this might mean that the compensation of workers is different for companies e.g. less health insurance to pay, paying overtime is easier/cheaper.
• How can we make effective altruism more paltable/why doesn’t everybody get on board with it? Thoughts: To be honest, I don’t think that many people want to optimise for impact in their career. I think to optimise for impact you need to be fairly content with the assets in your own life to begin focusing significant energy on improving others'. This question puzzled me the most while I was in Oxford, because there are many intelligent people who seemingly were well off materialistically. However, I guess it is common to always want more?
• Wealth seems to be distributed on an exponential. Is it possible to create an economy where wealth is distributed on a different curve? e.g. a power law, or a linear curve (maybe even including universal basic income!) Thoughts: The idea of wealth scaling exponentially makes some sense to me, since the amount of “value”/people tends to increase somewhat exponentially as you move upwards. (If for example each manager manages 3 people at the level below, a level 10 manager manages 59049 people, an increase of roughly 20 000 times) More thoughts: Yeah I think I need to learn more economics.
• How do differences in friendship styles between countries form? And is there a ‘more optimal’ version(For example, UK is more individualistic, Spain is more group based, US people are more openly friendly/smiley)