Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what sense does a person who has just paid an engineer $599 for something "have no skin in the game"? Seems to me they have just anted up $599 worth of skin. Indeed, unless they return their new phone within a short period or the thing breaks under warranty, they're holding the bag. If they decide three months later that the phone sucks, it's not the engineer that feels sad. The engineer has made a profit. There's…
Let's say the average iPhone user makes $100,000 a year. That means the $599 iPhone is about 0.599% of that person's income. If they work 40 hours a week, out of a total of 168 hours in a week, that means they spent 0.143% of their year working to get the phone. But the person who designed the phone spent 100% of their working on the phone. So the average user spent less time on the phone, and they didn't design the…
Should people not care about (random example) the Grand Canyon because they have no "skin in the game" other than the tiny percentage of their tax money that goes to fund the operation of the park? A less-lofty example would be to argue that people shouldn't have a preference between a first-rate restaurant and Burger King, simply because a meal at the restaurant (though expensive) doesn't represent a significant portion of their annual income.