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276 sats \ 38 replies \ @SimpleStacker 17h \ on: Jeff Bezos’s Yacht: Driver of Economic Activity econ
Wait, wait. Isn't this a version of Bastiat's Broken Window? i.e. Economic activity in service of an end that has no value.
(I'm not claiming whether or not Bezos's yacht has any value. I'm just pointing out the fallacy of pointing to generated economic activity as an end in itself.)
@Undisciplined
The broken window fallacy is wrong because there's no value in diverting activity towards fixing a window that didn't need to be broken.
Bezos' consumption of leisure isn't analogous to the window, because it didn't already exist absent that economic activity.
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Got it. The fallacy in the broken window fallacy is "we should break this perfectly good window in order to generate economic activity," which is clearly a fallacy
I still maintain that there's a flavor of this. It's kinda like if a billionaire decides to privately fund the construction of a bridge to nowhere. We all understand why it's bad if the government decides to do that, but if a billionaire does that it's ok because it's a private choice? A lot of weight is being hung on the private surplus of said billionaire.
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Yes! The revealed preference of voluntary exchange is the difference.
Extremely wealthy people can afford extravagant excesses and there's no accounting for taste.
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Extremely wealthy people can afford extravagant excesses and there's no accounting for taste.
I think this crystallizes one of my main gripes with economists.
It's true that there's no accounting for tastes, and therefore we don't account for it in our measures of surplus which (rightly) try to import as few subjective assumptions as possible.
But saying that something increases economic surplus, broadly defined, is not the same thing as saying this is good. When people write articles defending Jeff Bezos's yacht as morally good, I just think it rings hollow to most people and it makes economists look like dicks.
I think I'd say something like, "I don't think this is the best use of resources, but Bezos has the right to spend his lawfully obtained wealth how he wants, and look it does employ a lot of people and grow the economy in all these ways. So even if I don't particularly like it, I can't really argue with it. What would you rather do? Tell people what they can and can't spend their money on?"
They'd probably go into some rant about how billionaires shouldn't exist, but then we can talk about how Bezos's wealth was obtained in the process of real value creation.
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That's a completely fair perspective. Obviously, we are each entitled to our personal normative assessments of how resources are deployed and are under no obligation to approve of how any spends their money.
I think the point of articles like this is to point out that Bezos is transferring his purchasing power to a whole bunch of people who make his yachting possible. One way or another, that purchasing power belongs to Bezos and is his to transfer to others on whatever terms he wants.
The question then is whether those recipients of Bezos' wealth are particularly less deserving than anyone else.
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Haha, I just remembered that you're the Minimalism is Pro-Social guy :)
If they did the work for the companies producing the ship, outfitting it, supplying it and running it, they deserve it! They earned it and Bezos wants to pay it. It is all voluntary.
it makes economists look like dicks.
Can’t disagree with that. Trying to be morally neutral does make people look like dicks no matter who they are. Sometimes, you just have to say something about some of this isht.
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Personally, I kind of like that we often look like dicks for trying to dissect tricky subjects that make normal people angry.
Willingness to entertain unpalatable views is my favorite trait that most economists share.
And there is nothing we can do about it, even if we wanted to do something. They can do what they want, and I don’t care! It is economic use of resources.
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If it's not an economic use of resources that would have to come from how the wealth was obtained in the first place.
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I am just a bit confused about Bezos and the origin of Amazon. Who were his original backers that he could lose billions of dollars monopolizing the book market and spreading out from there? I made a lot of money at one time during the .com crash by buying puts on QQQ and AMZN. Did he make that company on the economic means or the political means?
You betcha!!! Actually, it feels good sometimes and definitely gets some peoples blood pumping!
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We all understand why it's bad if the government decides to do that, but if a billionaire does that it's ok because it's a private choice?
A waste of resources is a waste of resources, no matter which way you cut it. However, if a billionaire decides to waste his own resources, isn’t that a free choice he can make? If he makes too many of those kinds of choices, he will not remain wealthy for long, will he? Perhaps this is why we say, “Rags to riches to rags in three generations!”
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Just sayin’, he must really value, very highly, his consumption of leisure! That is slightly beyond my imagination, but, then again, I didn’t start Amazon with my wife, either.
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It seems crazy to us because our budget constraints are so different than his. Who knows what kinds of crazy shit we would do with that kind of purchasing power.
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Well, there are some things that I would like to do, but not to that scale, not even close to that scale. Although, he did do a nice production of.a rocket ship trip for us to see! Again, he sure must love his entertainment!
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Something that exists being maliciously destroyed and replaced may be a far different case from using a ton of money to buy entertainment de novo.
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The yacht is being produced and staffed de novo. It is not replacing something that was there but maliciously broken. Perhaps, if you asked Bezos, the yacht has an immense value as demonstrated by his choice demonstrated preference. He saw more value in the yacht than in $500 million! His money, his choice. He must really value his entertainment highly!
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His money his choice? He just enjoys the surpluses provided to him by human labor.
One problem yet to be solved in human society is who benefits from the spoils.
Unchecked greed is often celebrated and as soon as someone criticizes it they ate slapped with the communist label
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Greed is one of the easiest things to slap on a person, isn’t it? Easy to throw that around. I wonder what he was doing the first five years of Amazon’s founding. He was the entrepreneur, he deserves to get paid for it.
Everyone can perceive extravagant waste and greed, is everyone, therefore, communist? No, I don’t think so, only regular people.
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Not saying he doesn’t deserve to be paid but how much money does one man need?
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Money is fake anyway, who cares.
Perplexity :D :
Ratio Comparison
• Bezos’ wealth is more than a million times greater than the net worth of a median U.S. household.
• To put it simply: Bezos’ net worth is so high that his $500 million yacht is a much smaller fraction of his wealth than a typical car is for a median U.S. family.
• For a typical family, a $30,000 car could be 15% (or more) of their net worth.
• For Bezos, the $500 million yacht is only about 0.2% of his total net worth.
That is like asking how high is the sky! Or what’s the limit in a large poker game. I wonder if he had a limit at all.
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