Yes, and also numerical "wealth" is not the same as stuff. Rich people often have very high numerical wealth, but actually don't have so much more "stuff" - houses, medicine, food, etc. They will certainly have more of these things, but maybe 100x not 1Mx.

For example, let's say that Musk is 250k times wealthier than I am. Does he have 250k shoes? Houses? Not really.

And it's the consumption of stuff that is really the share that one takes from society, not "wealth." Having $1 might be wealth, but it is not until I spend that Dollar on an apple that I have taken something from society.

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wyre 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is contradictory to how I understand economics. The consumption of "stuff" contributes to GDP, which is one of the first things people use to correlate to quality of life.

Also, spending money and the consumption of stuff isn't "taking something from society". It is someone's job to grow, harvest, process, transport, and sell apples. Spending a dollar to purchase an apple supports all of those people directly. Those people spend their money on stuff and it circulates. Nothing is being "taken" things are bought and sold on a free-market.

I am arguing that hoarding wealth is the share that one takes from society. You are right that Musk doesn't have 250k shoes or houses, but that's why its problematic, it is wealth that could be spent circulating through the economy, it is wealth that is a claim on future labor and resources, it is the power over his companies, employees, industry, and society. All of these are a much larger "take" from society than buying an apple, a pair of shoes, a house, or any other good or service.

	▲	brailsafe 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Agreed, but > The consumption of "stuff" contributes to GDP, which is one of the first things people use to correlate to quality of life. It's one of the first things governments use to correlate to quality of life, and imo it's a good way to get away with papering over inequality. A country's GDP can be stable or slowly growing and it won't be in recession, and yet much of that GDP can be produced by one generation of people who are in a class that's multiple orders of magnitude wealthier because the newest generation of people has to pay them to have a roof over their head and subsidize their retirement. The GDP comes from the appreciation of their property value and the rental income, while a massive proportion of working age people are just able to consume and work, largely for those same people. Very wildly different qualities of life even below what Mag World would consider Rich, maybe not in the moment when someone can but themselves some literal or metaphorical candy, but in terms of viable upward mobility and precariousness long-term. In order to buy the house I live in the basement of, not even owned by a much older generation person in this case (seemingly a single mom, but an investment banker afaik), I would need to be able to sustain a $2m+ mortgage and come up with a $400k+ down payment, it will never be possible, and even though I never wanted that for my future, it's depressing that it's just laughably and insanely out of reach, GDP kind of hides that this is the case for many.

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Epa095 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

He has infinitely times more jets than me though.

But the focus on their personal consumption is not the most important. There is a limit to how much ice-cream a person can eat, and at some point the money is no longer used for direct personal consumption. But rather to influence the world in whatever direction they want.

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dougb5 10 hours ago | parent [-]

It reminds me of how Sam Altman recently said: "I'd rather hear from candidates about how they are going to make everyone have the stuff billionaires have instead of how they are going to eliminate billionaires." But the hyper-wealthy don't just have _stuff_, they also have power to make decisions affecting society -- to buy elections, to buy social networks, to influence which countries we do AI chip deals with, to start new cities, and so forth. A world in which everyone has the same amount of this decision-making power is probably not a world in which billionaires exist.

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23 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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rectang 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, "don't look at wealth inequality" boils down to an argument for shifting political power to the wealthy — which I'm sure its proponents genuinely believe is for the best.

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onraglanroad 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I'd rather hear from candidates about how they are going to make everyone have the stuff billionaires have instead of how they are going to eliminate billionaires."

I'm sure you would prefer the impossible dream than the guillotine, Sammy boy.

	▲	gopher_space 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Biologically speaking Altman is what we’d call a “piñata”.

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10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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fragmede 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

More to the point, he has the same 24 hours in a day as everyone else. His money lets him do different things with those 24 hours than you and I, but he still only gets 24. (Until he gets to Mars, then it's 24.66.)

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Nifty3929 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And roughly 80 or so years as well!

	▲	fragmede 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Between Bryan Johnson, and then also Xi and Putin getting caught on a hot mic discussing how they're going to live to 120 or 150, I wouldn't be so sure.

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vjvjvjvjghv 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"Until he gets to Mars, then it's 24.66."

That's a cool life hack! Venus is even better with 5832

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lazide 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Eh, even the ‘taking’ in this example isn’t so simple.

By spending that $1, you’ve also given a farmer (plus middle men, plus a retailer) $1 they otherwise wouldn’t have had - and relieved them of an apple they already have too many of.

The big ‘taking’ events are when things are destroyed without an exchange of value (aka if those farmers can’t sell the apples because a new law passes, or there is a disease event, or the like), or where a market is cornered/controlled/manipulated to the extent someone is forced to sell for an artificially induced (lower) price, or sell at an artificially induced (higher) price.

Smaller ‘taking’ events are when something is actually consumed, but that has to happen eventually, and someone paid for it to happen. Which means they also traded something else for that money (time, work, whatever).

Otherwise, it’s numbers moving from one side of the book to the other. Things aren’t lost/destroyed, but are moving around.

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Epa095 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Money is not like mana in a game, it does not create things by itself. It is more similar to votes, each dollar is a vote into the economy for what should be created, and where the goods and services should go. And the more money you have the more votes you have.

So yes, he payes for the apple, and that's good. But the apple existed, and would be sold to someone else if he had not bought it. The accumulation of wealth does centralise power over the economy, what gets produced, and how it gets consumed.

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lesuorac 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, there's an economist comment on "We can afford everything that we produced".

Like when the Apple is produced it's not because a dollar bill was sowen into the ground. The actual inputs of production are not money but money is the lubricant that allows the goods and services to flow around in the economy. We always run into the situation where goods and services are produced and not demanded and that causes them to no longer be produced but the lack of money didn't cause their existence no more than money produced them in the first place.

Without it, societies had to have informal debts where you knew you helped your neighbor harvest crops so they would later do something for you (or perhaps you helped them harvest their crops because they provided shelter). That whole barter shit is made up.

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lazide 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Eh, that is overly reductive.

There would not be so many orchards or apple farmers growing apples if they could not exchange those apples for goods and services they wanted effectively.

At the level of a large scale apple orchard, money is the only thing that works effectively for that.

If people only grew enough apples that they wanted to eat, most people would be unable to get apples, and most apple lovers would be spending a lot of time they could be doing something else trying to grow apples. Overall edible apples would be dramatically lower, even non-existent at some places/times.

For example, imagine the shitshow if people had to refine their own gas, or barter/trade for it directly. Zero chance 99% of society would be able to do that.

Same with miners and raw materials, machine manufacturers and machines, solar panel manufacturers and solar panels, etc. etc.

Money itself isn’t a good/service, but it makes the act of making/exchanging/selling/etc. easy and possible at scale. Which is valuable on its own. And since it provides a generic ‘value’ proxy for all goods/services within the economy, if anything it is the most consistently valuable thing in a functioning economy - it’s a wildcard for value.

This does have a limit of course - too much money in too short/concentrated an area causes all sorts of crazy things to happen, as the induced effort/incentive to produce something outstrips the realistic ability to do so, causing escalating ‘money fights’ for the same goods, as the value of the goods starts to dwarf the perceived value of the money itself. (Inflation)

Just like too little money in too concentrated an area/time causes crazy things to happen because the perceived value of the money itself starts to outweigh the actual value of the transacted goods, and transactions can start to grind to a halt in an effort to conserve the increasingly valuable money itself. (Deflation)

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Epa095 9 hours ago | parent [-]

All you say is true. I never argued for the irrelevance of money. The voting power into the economy is extremely important, and it plays a vital role in the orchestration of the real economy (the part actually producing stuff and services).

But it is not such that billionaires provide some value with their consumption (they can provide value in other ways though). Yes, for the individual Yatch-producer (or farmer) is it nice that they get to sell their product, but for the economy at large all it does is move production-resourced from other things which could otherwise be produced to the production of yatches(or whatever the billionaire wants).

So yes, the billionaire does not take from the farmer. But he does take from the economy at large (in the same way as my consumption does, but to an extremely different degree).

	▲	lazide 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Billionaires don’t generally become billionaires by spending a lot of money on watches or apples or the like. They become billionaires (generally) by owning things and making those things more valuable in other people’s eyes. The vast majority of Elon Musks wealth, for instance, is in stock of Tesla, SpaceX, X, etc. It’s an entirely different kind of situation, because the wealth is generally due to other people’s estimates of the productive output/wealth generation of those assets increasing over time. In the musk example, it would be like if someone bought and then came in and funded the expansion of a big apple orchard that previously no one had ever heard of, and then made it internationally famous so that everyone wanted to be a part of it - and sold shares in that orchard to people. Now people are eating more of that orchards apples, everyone values that orchard more, and now what previously he owned but was cheap is now worth a lot. That is legitimate value creation, as much as you might hate him or the process. If he did it by burning down other orchards, he would be a criminal. But like in the spacex case (or Tesla case), it’s pretty hard to argue that is what happened. Maybe some light fraud here and there, at most. It mostly came from a lot of salesmanship and light/moderate gaslighting, but they are legitimately valuable companies - albeit maybe shouldn’t rationally be at the P/Es they are. But he is making the irrational happen. And that is making a lot of people money that otherwise wouldn’t, and making something happen that otherwise wouldn’t. Those people are very happy he is doing what he is doing. For the alternative, see the USSR. I’ve known people who lived in that system, and it was terrible.