11–20 of 149 posts
This is immediately troubling and betrays a naive understanding of currency and human behavior.
This article essentially writes off and lumps together all kinds of toxic behavior we see in private markets.
I don't admire the guy for failing to adequately state the value he's bringing to the table.
More to the point: most of society is by his estimation engaging in trivial bullshit. Faux intellectual software developers like to self-flagellate. Sure. We work on stupid stuff. But what do they think toy makers, the entire entertainment and financial industries, fashion, much of the auto industry, and even the majority of the housing industry are busy doing? They're all selling products that people don't need and probably won't make them much happier or better off. Don't like it? Go be a hermit. The story of the twentieth century was the pursuit of largely pointless (from a well-being perspective) excellence. That will probably remain the case for the rest of human history, since we already have almost everything we need for well-being built in, and the small remaining set is really cheap and no longer economically significant.
(I guess this is ultimately the point of the article . . . sort of . . . but I'm so over the trope in the first section that I just had to react to it.)
In the buying-an-iPhone-is-consumption-and-bad spending example, if the iPhone is also used to increase the reach or efficiency of production, does that cancel it out? I like the yacht example better.
if i extract 100 tons of carbon from the earth in the form of petroleum, then sell it to make a profit of $100, that profit does not take any externality into account. i could be making it such that $101 dollars of future economic activity is prevented by virtue of the extraction process or subsequent combustion and ruination of the environment. the petroleum "provided value" -- positive short-term value, but with a stiff cost of net negative value in the future. the fact that i subsequently use those $100 that i made to consume some product isn't relevant. society would have been better off if i hadn't made the money in the first place.
this stuff isn't hard.
This went off the rails for me at the end. If earning money is good for other, but spending money is bad, then the "best" thing I could do would be to earn money and hoard it under my mattress. However, that would be the worst thing I could do for society, because I would be removing that resource (whether it has intrinsic value or not, it is still a resource) from society. In order for me to earn money, someone else…
Why would you be removing it from society? Presumably you will be using it in the future.
You can trivialize almost any profession by stating it reductively. "All we do is put boxes on a page, or change the color of the boxes." OK, well all a farmer does is dig some dirt, and sometimes put some plant bits into it or pull some out. All most doctors do is talk to patients and sometimes give them some pills. All a soldier does is point guns and pull triggers. All a factory worker does is pretend to be a robo…
Ok, I read through sections I and II, and no further. Sticking my neck w-a-a-a-y out there, I would loan the francs on my table to Congolese who could convince me they can make a business, provide a product or service, grow the business and employ other Congolese. Essentially, become a bank that makes only business loans. Perhaps charge interest, perhaps not. I'd recycle loan payments to make new loans to new entrepr…
"Imagine a particular bag of grain that you bought at T1 for 200 francs, and then sold a month later, at T2, for 800 francs."
What about at 1600 francs? What about at 16000? The original argument was about morals, not math or some kind of utopian economy where every transaction is fair.
It's interesting to speculate on what would happen if some of these foundational assumptions of economics didn't hold. What if money actually became more valued than what you can buy with money ? What if supply didn't create its own demand? What if people didn't try to make money to satisfy their own wants, but to one-up their neighbors in the pissing match of life? You'd see a lot of strange behavior. Instead of con…