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Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

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Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#131

Post by afgioionio »

airstrike wrote: post #75
marnett wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I doubt you'll find many people on this website who think Bill Gates's tenure at Microsoft was good for the world. He was a ruthless monopolist who lied, cheated, and stole his way to the top.

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#133

Post by AmericanChopper »

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 people didn't try to make money to satisfy their own wants, but to one-up their neighbors in the pissing match of life?

This premise contradicts itself. Wanting to use your money to one-up people IS a want. You’re simply judging what some people might want. I’m not saying some people don’t want that, or that it’s not worth being judgemental about, but it entirely undermines your point.

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#134

Post by nostrademons »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #133
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 people didn't try to make money to satisfy their own wants, but to one-up their neighbors in the pissing match of life? This premise contradicts itself. Wanting to use your money to one-up people IS a want. You’re simply judging what some people might want. I’m not saying some people don’t want that, or that it’s not worth being judgemental about, but it entirely undermines your point.

It behaves very differently from an economic perspective, though. Normally, when you trade away money to satisfy a want, you no longer have that money. That's what lets us speak of things like the velocity of money, time value of money, indifference curves, indeed the whole idea of being able to "value" goods and services because a currency of known & roughly constant value was traded away to obtain them.

If you're just interested in money as a score or means of signaling social status, you continue to have that money while deriving value from it. There are other systems that have this property - notably, productive assets (you can continue to derive income from land or capital without trading away that asset) and social status itself (bestowing some of your status on others near you actually raises your status, it doesn't give it away). But these systems function with very different dynamics than the classical competitive markets you'd study in Econ 101, or that TFA is describing. In particular, they're subject to positive feedback loops and winner-take-all results rather than equilibriums and stable prices that competitive markets produce.

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#135

Post by AmericanChopper »

nostrademons wrote: post #134
AmericanChopper wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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? This premise contradicts itself. Wanting to use your money to one-up people IS a want. You’re simply judging what some people might want. I’m not saying some people don’t want that, or that it’s not worth being judgemental about, but it entirely undermines your point.

It behaves very differently from an economic perspective, though. Normally, when you trade away money to satisfy a want, you no longer have that money. That's what lets us speak of things like the velocity of money, time value of money, indifference curves, indeed the whole idea of being able to "value" goods and services because a currency of known & roughly constant value was traded away to obtain them. If you're j…

Any form of investment is a positive feedback loop, and doesn’t produce some bizzare are ‘winner takes all scenario’. To the point made in the parent comment, wanting to buy a Wraith as a status symbol is a want just like any other, and is not a symptom of a dysfunctional market. Consumerism in general isn’t a symptom of a dysfunctional market, and I’d be willing to bet that the majority of the people who comment on HN derive their income from consumerism in one way or another. The nature of investments isn’t a symptom of a dysfunctional market either, for an asset to be productive it has to be generating some value, if an individual invests in an asset, they will never benefit from 100% of the productivity of it. The assets they invest in the economy will be generating income and wealth for others too, if we’re talking about a particularly wealthy individual, then it will be thousands of others. I’ve worked at plenty of funded startups, in each of those situations, the wealth of such individuals has been directly paying my salary.

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#136

Post by sowbug »

mbrumlow wrote: post #21
sowbug wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The area under the curve is empty until then.

What do you imagen happens to unspent money put in a bank?

Money in a bank is typically lent back out again, where it continues to circulate in the economy. That's irrelevant to this comment thread, though, which gtCameron kicked off by stating that hoarding money under a mattress is bad for society, to which dnautics responded by noting that even mattress money is eventually spent.

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#137

Post by nostrademons »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #135
nostrademons wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It behaves very differently from an economic perspective, though. Normally, when you trade away money to satisfy a want, you no longer have that money. That's what lets us speak of things like the velocity of money, time value of money, indifference curves, indeed the whole idea of being able to "value" goods and services because a currency of known & roughly constant value was traded away to obtain them. If you're j…

Any form of investment is a positive feedback loop, and doesn’t produce some bizzare are ‘winner takes all scenario’. To the point made in the parent comment, wanting to buy a Wraith as a status symbol is a want just like any other, and is not a symptom of a dysfunctional market. Consumerism in general isn’t a symptom of a dysfunctional market, and I’d be willing to bet that the majority of the people who comment on…

"Wanting to buy a Wraith as a status symbol" isn't the scenario I'm positing. "Wanting to have a million dollars in the bank" or "wanting to be a billionaire" or "wanting to make 1000x on cryptocurrency holdings" is. There's a key difference - in the former case, a transaction has occurred, and now Rolls-Royce is $350k richer. In the latter case, no transaction occurs - the person's enjoyment is derived entirely from the number on their bank statement, not from any product that they bought with that number.

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#138

Post by AmericanChopper »

nostrademons wrote: post #137
AmericanChopper wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any form of investment is a positive feedback loop, and doesn’t produce some bizzare are ‘winner takes all scenario’. To the point made in the parent comment, wanting to buy a Wraith as a status symbol is a want just like any other, and is not a symptom of a dysfunctional market. Consumerism in general isn’t a symptom of a dysfunctional market, and I’d be willing to bet that the majority of the people who comment on…

"Wanting to buy a Wraith as a status symbol" isn't the scenario I'm positing. "Wanting to have a million dollars in the bank" or "wanting to be a billionaire" or "wanting to make 1000x on cryptocurrency holdings" is. There's a key difference - in the former case, a transaction has occurred, and now Rolls-Royce is $350k richer. In the latter case, no transaction occurs - the person's enjoyment is derived entirely from…

If their money is in the bank, you can almost guarantee that it’s being productive. If they withdraw all of it so they can keep a huge pile of cash in their house to look at, then your argument would hold. But the system highly incentiveses people to not do that.

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#139

Post by iso1337 »

hinkley wrote: post #39
iso1337 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can try out kiva.org My problem with it was that most of the businesses were of the retail type (selling clothes on the streets). I’m not an economist but that seems to me to not have much potential for lifting many out of poverty.

The context would matter. It’s a very common refrain to describe how many hours are wasted each day acquiring some necessity like food, water or shelter (I roughly include clothes under shelter). Opening a clothing shop in the central market of the largest town wouldn’t move the needle. Opening it in your village or the nearest crossroads could alter many lives.

That’s a good point. Unfortunately kiva doesn’t give you many tools to make those assessments. You get a picture of the person applying for the loan, and then about a paragraph describing what they will use it for. Very light on numbers and no follow up on how their business is doing post-loan. After a while it felt like the site was selling me the feeling of being a good person, above all else.

Re: Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

#140

Post by rabidrat »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #65
mcfunk wrote: post #53

The framing of this is all wrong. The problem isn't that developers are overpaid, it's that other industries' laborers have had their work systematically undervalued, all the way down to people performing essential services who can't afford to feed their families on full-time work. However you want to argue about payment/wealth being a problem, ultimately, the idea that workers being compensated "too much" (when defi…

>all the way down to people performing essential services who can't afford to feed their families on full-time work. This is a feature of the system, not a bug. If these folks weren't barely making it, there'd be more free energy for rentiers to extract through various rent-seeking behavior, and since rentiers have significantly more political power, the system would get subtly worse for the everyman in whatever ways…

Can we strike at the root and try to reduce rent-seeking behavior? Even if we can't eliminate it, there was a time when 'usury' an ugly moral sin and Jubilee was an actual event, so at least we understood who the jerks were, instead of blaming ourselves for being indentured servants in a rigged system.
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