This is an underrated property of wealth accumulation: beyond a certain point money doesn’t cover useful things, but vanity projects, and is being wasted.
The typical cliches in this subject are that nobody can decide what’s worthwhile or not so we have to let the people with accumulation decide and that it stimulates the economy, no matter what kind of spending it is.
Claude can point out the flaws in those arguments fairly easily by now.
This has to be some sort of record. Not only did you set up a strawman to facilitate a shallow dismissal, rather than tilting at it yourself you simply assured us that AI is capable of shredding it. Somehow you've managed an even more offensive variant of the "condescendingly hand out a reading assignment to strangers" trope.
That's good for the economy. Vanity projects help the wealth spread around. Think of all the people who received income by working on this house. It's a much bigger problem when wealth is hoarded.
Being silly and obstinate when knowledge is in arm’s reach? Making people spell it out for you because you don’t have the respect to look yourself?
OK here’s the short version: the economy has a limited amount of resources and the way they’re allocated matters. A yacht built means no hospital built. Making people work on useless stuff for the rich is demoralizing because their life’s blood is used on meaningless projects. Growing a luxury industry incentivizes gifted people to seek employment in it rather than in other fields where they’re. It matters what the economy does, not just that it grows.
Every LLM will tell you that if you ask. You just didn’t ask. Because you think nothing of others and their time.
LLMs will tell you whatever you want to hear. You subtly direct them with the way you ask the question, and then they give you the answer you want. That's basically what they're trained to do. So of course they always give you the answer you want -- but you can't just go around telling people to ask an LLM to back up your argument, as other people will get a difference answer.
I don’t think that’s true anymore. You can ask for weak points of a position (e.g. that luxury spending is good for the economy) and they will give you a reasonable answer.
You could do the opposite - what are the weak points of the position that accumulation of wealth leads to waste and see what are the weak points there.
And then think which position can be dismantled more easily and is therefore less well founded. Or ask for a steelman version of it.
But that's such a waste! 5 whole people taken out of the economy, no longer producing value, just going around consuming resources in retirement. How is that any better than me spending to build a nice house that facilitates my family's comfort and my friends' enjoyment of getting together to play games?
Yeah, I don't think building a house dedicated to LAN parties is a waste of money at all: it provides a substantial benefit for those that get to use it!
You mean 1.075M? The house was the bulk of it. But that’s the point. A private individual will use his economic power on vanity spending and it won’t materialize into anything efficient or useful.
You seem to be suggesting that there's a problem with private individuals spending their money as they see fit because that leads to what you see as wasteful vanity projects. So I'm asking how you think the world should change to compel these individuals to spend on things you believe are more efficient and less wasteful? I would point out that spending $1.075M on food for starving people probably scores more utilitarianism points than an internet cafe though in your zero sum world.
When I say that people (or as you refer to them „private individuals”) using their economic means (and therefore resources and time of others that they hire) on misguided projects is a negative phenomenon, that’s a whole complete statement.
I don’t need to design any world changes to go with that. So your line of inquiry makes it seem like you’re fighting some phantoms or replicating debate strategies that you’ve observed. That’s unnecessary. The statement still holds up.
The only objection you can make is the silly one: actually it’s not up to me to decide what’s misguided, it’s up to those people who have the means. Or you can say doing useless crap is actually good which is not even a valid objection in my book.
I noticed you edited your original post to point out these “silly” objections. The point of saying “private individuals” is that they have the right to determine for themselves what is a good use of their money and your opinion about whether it’s wasteful is irrelevant. I was assuming you had some ideas about how to reduce the waste but apparently not, you just wanted to tell everyone about your personal preferences for how other people spend their money.
Maybe they should be shamed for vanity projects and not admired?
Maybe admitting that the phenomenon exists is the first step before any ideas can even be discussed? Clearly it’s extremely difficult for people to recognize.
You don't get to decide whats useful and what's not useful for other people. It's extremely disrespectful. I'm sure you'd hate it if someone were to look at your life and label parts of it that way.
The typical cliches in this subject are that nobody can decide what’s worthwhile or not so we have to let the people with accumulation decide and that it stimulates the economy, no matter what kind of spending it is.
Claude can point out the flaws in those arguments fairly easily by now.