• MushuChupacabra@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Absolutely none of society’s problems can be solved through power and wealth concentration.

    In the metaphor of an economic system being a living thing, money is blood. Blood circulates, and keeps the organism alive. Blood pooling in one spot and not circulating well can be fatal.

    • HubertManne@kbin.social
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      10 months ago

      this. I repeat it often and get chanllenged because im not an economist but I don’t care. Its obvious in the way it works. Money only has value when exchanged. A dollar sitting has just the value of the paper like material its made of, but a dollar when used to purchase it has its economic value. Its like potential and kinetic energy.

      • yo_scottie_oh@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        A dollar sitting has just the value of the paper like material its made of, but a dollar when used to purchase it has its economic value.

        But doesn’t this logic only work if people are physically stashing benjies under their mattress? Because let’s say some fat cat keeps a large bank account balance. The bank doesn’t just take the fat cat’s money and put it in a drawer. That money gets re-circulated back into the economy in the form of customer withdrawals, loans, etc.

        What am I missing?

        • HubertManne@kbin.social
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          10 months ago

          maybe but it kinda skews everything and what we see now. The wealth disparity has this own knock on where yeah the wealthy realize the valuelessness of the currency itself so they try to put their money in anything they can. this inflates the value of things (stocks, homes, etc) such that they have no real basis in reality. People invest just to invest and not because they have researched a particular thing and see value. It has value because everyone thinks it has value. bitcoin is like the ultimate embodiment of this as it should be a currency (not really it uses to much energy) but instead its treated like an investment but it has less value than fiat currency (which is backed by taxation)

      • MushuChupacabra@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Pretty much. Put the following hypothetical scenario to your detractors. Let’s suppose for the sake of arguement that the way that wealth is concentrated now/status quo is justified and required:

        If a bunch of AIs can mimic the wealth concentration behaviors of the top one percent, could you fire the one percent? The AIs would keep the wealth, as no actual human would be required to be the hoarder. The top one percent can then have their economic outlook capped like the rest of us, while the AIs keep the wealth as per usual.

        Would there be anything fundamentally wrong with that arrangement, given that the wealth concentration is a requirement?

        • HubertManne@kbin.social
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          10 months ago

          interesting but the detractors are really just doing the bs you can’t say anything because your not a recognized expert. As if economics were physics and even then einstein was not a physicist till he was (I am in no way suggesting im einstein or einstein like. Just point out he had things right (albeit not completely worked out) before he was a recognized expert).

    • SparrowRanjitScaur@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I think the shortness of human lives fosters short term thinking. If people lived long enough to deal with the long term consequences of their actions I think the world would be a very different place.