Magic Poriferan
^He pronks, too!
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2007
- Messages
- 14,081
- MBTI Type
- Yin
- Enneagram
- One
- Instinctual Variant
- sx/sp
Going from $10,000 on hand to $30,000 on hand would greatly increase a person's options. Going from $100 million to $300 million would probably have no perceivable impact on someone's life. In both cases, it is a threefold increase, so why would the impact be different? Because every additional dollar a person gets is less valuable than their previous dollar.
We do not live in a world where goods and services have their prices adjusted to the income or wealth of the consumer. If there is a house that would cost $100,000 when you make $30,000 a year, it will still cost $100,000 even if you start making $200,000 a year. As you become wealthier, there are just fewer and fewer things outside of your price range that you could potentially get, and what's more, they became increasingly less important. When we talk about differences within 0 to $50,000 of income, we're talking about differences in ones ability to eat, own a vehicle, being homeless to being a renter to being an owner. The range between $50,000 and $100,000 is not nearly so profound. Necessity never even enters into that difference, it's all luxury.
I believe there is a point even beyond luxury. While there is disagreement over where the threshold lies, almost every agrees to the concept of necessity vs luxury. Necessity it was you need to thrive while luxury is merely what you can enjoy. I would add another threshold after luxury. It represents the point at which you have enough money to buy more than you appreciate or comprehend. It is the point at which additional luxury becomes pointless. All additional accumulation of wealth is just avarice, as it is taking for the sake of taking. As such, I'll cause this the threshold of avarice.
All wealth accumulated beyond the threshold of avarice is economic waste. It adds no stimulation to the economy. It produces nothing, repairs nothing, serves nothing. Going back to a point I made in my entry about wealth inequality, it just sits in a bank paying interest, and you can't even count on that bank being in your country. It is at best spent in the least stimulating ways possible. On the other hand, the country has many people who cannot meet the threshold mere necessity, and it has many more people who cannot meet the threshold of luxury. This needs to be recognized as a flaw. This is a flaw of an economy. It is something that must be corrected where possible. It may be reality that this imbalance will exist, but it can be minimized, and it ought to be. Ideally, a society should never have one single person past the threshold of avarice and simultaneously have someone below the threshold of luxury. This isn't just about happiness and fairness (which are perfectly good causes, by the way), it's also about having an effective economy. An economy that met this ideal would be more productive and more innovative, because more money would be in the hands of people who would actually spend it on productive things, fewer people would be dependent on aid to get by, and more people would be able to afford spending their time on innovative activities. In a country like the USA, which has a GDP Per Capita near $50,000, every person that is below the threshold of necessity or luxury is an indication of wealth somewhere else in the country that is essentially being flushed down a drain.
We do not live in a world where goods and services have their prices adjusted to the income or wealth of the consumer. If there is a house that would cost $100,000 when you make $30,000 a year, it will still cost $100,000 even if you start making $200,000 a year. As you become wealthier, there are just fewer and fewer things outside of your price range that you could potentially get, and what's more, they became increasingly less important. When we talk about differences within 0 to $50,000 of income, we're talking about differences in ones ability to eat, own a vehicle, being homeless to being a renter to being an owner. The range between $50,000 and $100,000 is not nearly so profound. Necessity never even enters into that difference, it's all luxury.
I believe there is a point even beyond luxury. While there is disagreement over where the threshold lies, almost every agrees to the concept of necessity vs luxury. Necessity it was you need to thrive while luxury is merely what you can enjoy. I would add another threshold after luxury. It represents the point at which you have enough money to buy more than you appreciate or comprehend. It is the point at which additional luxury becomes pointless. All additional accumulation of wealth is just avarice, as it is taking for the sake of taking. As such, I'll cause this the threshold of avarice.
All wealth accumulated beyond the threshold of avarice is economic waste. It adds no stimulation to the economy. It produces nothing, repairs nothing, serves nothing. Going back to a point I made in my entry about wealth inequality, it just sits in a bank paying interest, and you can't even count on that bank being in your country. It is at best spent in the least stimulating ways possible. On the other hand, the country has many people who cannot meet the threshold mere necessity, and it has many more people who cannot meet the threshold of luxury. This needs to be recognized as a flaw. This is a flaw of an economy. It is something that must be corrected where possible. It may be reality that this imbalance will exist, but it can be minimized, and it ought to be. Ideally, a society should never have one single person past the threshold of avarice and simultaneously have someone below the threshold of luxury. This isn't just about happiness and fairness (which are perfectly good causes, by the way), it's also about having an effective economy. An economy that met this ideal would be more productive and more innovative, because more money would be in the hands of people who would actually spend it on productive things, fewer people would be dependent on aid to get by, and more people would be able to afford spending their time on innovative activities. In a country like the USA, which has a GDP Per Capita near $50,000, every person that is below the threshold of necessity or luxury is an indication of wealth somewhere else in the country that is essentially being flushed down a drain.
