Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013) • Hacker News Board

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#101

Post by gshubert17 » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 9:08 PM UTC

airstrike wrote: post #98

bmer wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they are a human being.

And every human being is entitled to the same amount of wealth? Good luck with that battle.

Perhaps every human being is entitled to equal dignity. A certain level of wealth (dependent on the size of population and level of development) might be necessary to maintain one's dignity.

Within families we do not keep tallies of who owes what to whom. My parents did not present me on my 18th birthday with an itemized bill of what I had cost them. Nor did I do that to my children. Economics should be a servant of society, not vice versa.

Unfair distributions of dignity, income, wealth, and power seem easier to accomplish within large entities (corporations, governments) compared to families or tribes. Division of labor and specialization make it easier to justify unequal and unfair treatment.

What changes do we make to our values and ways of organizing ourselves, to have more just outcomes?

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#102

Post by airstrike » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 9:14 PM UTC

Matumio wrote: post #94

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…

You seem to have forgotten "the window" in the argument, separating a single participant from "society" (aka the Congolese people). If you accept that you only care about "the Congolese people" then the author's conclusions make a lot of sense. Except that they don't quite work without the window, which removes the needs of a single participant from the society to be optimized. A general conclusion like "wealth is to…

> What hurts is if a single person spends so much above average that it notably drains the number of workers still available to serve the needs of everyone else in that society.

While that could be true, we currently aren't really dealing with a shortage of doctors because there are too many people building yachts. If anything there are too many unskilled workers because our educational system has largely failed to adapt in the last 100 years.

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#103

Post by antidesitter » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 9:21 PM UTC

lumberjack wrote: post #46

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…

> How much more does Bill Gates really consume than your 'average Joe'? A lot. Just consider his preventative health care. I would bet it runs in the millions per year. Then consider the education and opportunities that he and his children got. And then consider that normal people cannot have those same things precisely because Bill Gates and his ilk lobby against any measures that might put some of the country's wea…

> Bill Gates and his ilk lobby against any measures that might put some of the country's wealth towards those goals.

Can you elaborate?

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#104

Post by SilasX » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 9:22 PM UTC

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.

So, you're saying that the worst possible thing someone can do is produce but never consume?

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#105

Post by notahacker » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 9:37 PM UTC

mbrumlow wrote: post #69

notahacker wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole article is a defence of the principle of actual hoarding as opposed to investment though, hence the author's expression of concern that spending the money might generate inflation, their focus on intertemporal arbitrage with assets rather than lending, and their contention that taking an asset out of circulation and profiting from its future price fall represents a tangible "time-shifting" service performed…

But how are you removing a asset from circulation? Like I asserted in my original post when you are not using money, somebody else is -- unless you are actually putting your cash in a vault. When ever you store money in a bank, it gives the bank the ability to make loans using that very money to other people who then can start other businesses which intern then generate more exchanges of cash with other people. So ag…

> But how are you removing a asset from circulation? Like I asserted in my original post when you are not using money, somebody else is -- unless you are actually putting your cash in a vault.

The original article - what we're actually discussing - chooses the example of buying and selling with cash through a window, and worries that actually putting the cash into circulation at all might create inflation. The example is carefully constructed to avoid anything being done with the money except buy and sell goods, and the act of withdrawing the grain from circulation is likewise celebrated as value creation. It's pure internet-Austrianism.

As for the real world, the ability of real world banks operating in a fractional reserve system to lend to boatbuilders is not constrained in any meaningful sense at the margin by speculators' willingness to deposit with them, whereas boatbuilders' willingness to pay staff and suppliers is entirely dependent on whether people who have accumulated wealth buy boats. So the causality works the same way: consumption, deferred or otherwise, is the necessary element for growth. And if people who've made a bunch of money off speculation want to really improve the world, they'll want their money invested somewhere more actively than a bank or spent.

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#106

Post by xenocratus » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 9:37 PM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #104

pesmhey wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, you're saying that the worst possible thing someone can do is produce but never consume?

Isn't consumption essentially you letting someone else be on the producer side? I agree that for one entity it might be good to produce and not consume, but it makes no sense as a general statement. Production and consumption can only exist together. Sure, we have to put some thought into what we consume, but consumption in/by itself can't be "evil"

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#107

Post by montalbano » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 9:50 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #9

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…

> What if money actually became more valued than what you can buy with money?

https://www.newsweek.com/hoarding-nickels-metal-prices-soar-...

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#108

Post by nostrademons » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

r00fus wrote: post #100

ChuckMcM wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I would use the word "interesting" it is more likely "illuminating" :-) But word selection aside, one of the problems that money brings is that it is a concrete number, and thus susceptible to being coerced into being a "score." This is particularly true when you have people who are insecure about their value, they might get it into their heads that the person with the highest "score" has the highest val…

I wonder if taxing stated wealth (even if at a miniscule percentage) would help avoid insane/gamed valuations.

You get other sorts of gaming. Property taxes function like this, and there's a whole industry around avoiding re-assessment, getting assessors to low-ball property, etc. right up until it comes time to actually sell the property, when you do a bunch of renovations, get it re-assessed, and try to get the highest valuation you can.

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#109

Post by cwkoss » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 10:11 PM UTC

The author of this article seems to fail at differentiating price and value, which seems to be a necessary premise for many of their conclusions.

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#110

Post by cwkoss » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 10:15 PM UTC

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 people listen to laymen economists because the majority of celebrity economists espouse logically contradictory theories that support their financial patrons.