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Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

meltingasphalt.com

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Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#71

Post by airstrike »

> The yacht is made of wood, metal, and plastic. Building it requires many thousands of hours of effort. Workers have to find the trees, cut them down, haul the lumber across vast distances, cut it, sand it, polish it, paint it, etc., etc., etc. If you weren't commissioning the yacht, all of those materials and man-hours could be put to other, better uses. For all the good it does the Congolese people, you may as well pay them to build the yacht, then burn it before their eyes. Taking it through the window, into your own possession and for your own consumption, has the same effect.

Wow. A lot to unpack here. The author was doing just fine up until this paragraph.

What "other, better uses" does the author propose? Better yet, who defines what uses are better or worse? I'm sure those workers who chopped down the wood or built the yacht would much prefer I pay them than a different worker, even if I want to buy the yacht just to watch it burn.

The author fails to understand the fundamental principle of Utility[0]. It's intrinsically up to an individual to determine that which has utility for them.

> That's why wealth is toxic. As long as someone's money is tucked away in his bank account, we're safe. But the minute it starts to leak out, via consumption, we all become that much worse off.

What an outlandish claim. If consumption were to halt entirely, no money would exchange hands and we'd go back to fending for ourselves by foraging and hunting.

At some point, we have to stop listening to laymen. This is true of every field, but Economics for some reason seems to be the layman's favorite.

I'm not an Economist either, but at least I don't go around pontificating about things I know not to know.

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⁰ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#72

Post by yholio »

illumin8 wrote: post #67
yholio wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the money used to buy that yacht paid the salaries and income of all the craftsmen and laborers that built it for you, compensating them for the value they provide to society. The point he is making is that they are compensated but no net value is returned to society as a result of their labor and resource expenditure. The yacht "disappears" in your private marina where it will rot away providing you with a purely…

I'm not sure I agree with this. The yacht could get very little use, but so could a house that you build for someone. If the argument is that we should only build public goods that will be widely used like parks, I disagree, because the concept of private property is very entrenched in our society, even in socialist countries. I also disagree that the Warren Buffet statue would have a negative effect on the wealth of…

Buffet owns stocks in productive companies. If he starts selling this stock and gets enough money for his statue, by definition he's absorbing market capital that would otherwise be invested in productive companies. So he's effectively shifting investment from jobs in companies to jobs in giant statue production. The effect on the middle class jobs is largely nil.

If a billionaire is entombed in a safe with his symbols of wealth forever, it's as if his symbolic wealth ceases to exist. Effectively, the symbols of everybody else become more valuable to reflect the total quantity of products and services available. It's just like burning money, no wealth is destroyed, just redistributed to everybody else who holds the same currency.

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#73

Post by airstrike »

aylmao wrote: post #8
gtCameron wrote: post #2

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…

It goes on to explain it in the following paragraphs: > Don't get me wrong — this is far from the full picture. There are a ton of second-order corrections we need to make. We'd want to inquire how the money was earned, for example. If it's earned in free, honest, competitive transactions, it's going to be a better measure of value-added than if it's earned coercively, dishonestly, or in stifled markets. If it's earn…

> Don't get me wrong — this is far from the full picture. There are a ton of second-order corrections we need to make.

I'm sorry, but the author makes a terribly weak argument and than hand-waves any criticism away preemptively. That's not how this should work. That "ton of second-order corrections" would immediately destroy his argument.

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#74

Post by pesmhey »

airstrike wrote: post #71

> The yacht is made of wood, metal, and plastic. Building it requires many thousands of hours of effort. Workers have to find the trees, cut them down, haul the lumber across vast distances, cut it, sand it, polish it, paint it, etc., etc., etc. If you weren't commissioning the yacht, all of those materials and man-hours could be put to other, better uses. For all the good it does the Congolese people, you may as wel…

I think the author falls into the 'it's better to have cake than to eat it' camp. Of course wealth in this case is toxic - you miss the point of it.

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#75

Post by airstrike »

marnett wrote: post #40
ganonm wrote: post #31

"The point is, money spent on consumption is toxic — value-destroying" This is something I've been thinking about a lot recently. Surely when comparing inequality in societies, what we really care about is consumption. Singling out billionaires as an example of how unequal our society, I feel, is disingenuous. How much more does Bill Gates really consume than your 'average Joe'? Sure, he presumably eats good food, we…

You began by comparing Bill Gates to us as consumers, but ended comparing him to an institution, of which he is. His personal wealth is managed by a private investment company, and his impacts on the economy are matched only by others of equal diversified wealth, world governments, and other powerful institutions. Bill Gates being one man with the power of governments and institutions is the inequality we are all tal…

Did you create the same value to society as Bill Gates? So why do you think you deserve the same wealth?

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#76

Post by james_s_tayler »

This is such a bone-headed conclusion.

The system is an abstraction of money in -> goods out. It doesn't specify anything about amounts and it places restrictions on goods vary sparingly.

If you were to place restrictions on goods out some kind of ideology then where do you stop the restrictions?

No yachts, they're wasteful!

No luxury cars, they're wasteful!

You don't need a bigger TV, the one you have already works. Don't be wasteful!

You don't need luxury food. Regular food will do.

I mean... you just end up with some god-awful Marxist hell hole of a system that doesn't work very well.

No thanks. I'll let the occasional person who has earned just buy their wasteful yacht because in aggregate, over time that seems to accrue the highest benefit to me no matter who I am.

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#77

Post by airstrike »

skybrian wrote: post #43

The article is contrived, but the part he gets right is that spending money is exercising power, and it matters how you spend it (or give it away). If you're wealthy then you should think carefully about what you encourage by how you spend your money, to avoid encouraging the wrong things. Once you've spent the money, though, other people will have it, and they have the power to spend it on their wishes. If you assum…

> Maybe cut through the layers of abstraction? Directly hiring people makes you the boss and you get to decide what kind of boss you're going to be.

In theory, yes, but then you can't diversify as much as you can by just consuming goods and services provided by different companies and workers.

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#78

Post by airstrike »

pesmhey wrote: post #74
airstrike wrote: post #71

> The yacht is made of wood, metal, and plastic. Building it requires many thousands of hours of effort. Workers have to find the trees, cut them down, haul the lumber across vast distances, cut it, sand it, polish it, paint it, etc., etc., etc. If you weren't commissioning the yacht, all of those materials and man-hours could be put to other, better uses. For all the good it does the Congolese people, you may as wel…

I think the author falls into the 'it's better to have cake than to eat it' camp. Of course wealth in this case is toxic - you miss the point of it.

> Of course wealth in this case is toxic

Says who? That is not an axiomatic truth. You'll need to provide evidence.

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#79

Post by squish78 »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #13

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…

He lost me when he compared it to being a plumber.

If we didn't have plumbers, our infrastructure would collapse very quickly. Without sanitary waste disposal, disease would run rampant

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#80

Post by squish78 »

castlecrasher2 wrote: post #12

I generally categorize philosophy and ethics works into separate categories: profound, interesting but not particularly useful, and inane. This one falls squarely into the third category, especially when the author tries to play off spending money on yourself as wrong. To be fair, he seems to be entirely Utilitarian so I guess I can't blame him for suggesting self-flagellation.

In his world, it seems like the only equitable solution is for everyone to become subsistence farmers and hunter-gatherers
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