[erulabs]

You’re not wrong - certainly land is one of the long term investments - but I have a hard time saying land purchases from other humans is more or less “productive” than latte-purchases - for varying definitions of productivity of course. I also fully agree waste to curription, monopolies, violence, etc etc are real things, but again I’m not sure how to measure that between land and coffee (just to keep the mental experiment going).

If all land was owned by one evil monopoly, and it was slowly being sold, even at insane prices - is that not productive in the sense that land in the future is more distributed than land in the past? Certainly it seems to me to be at least as worthy as short term entertainment and luxury - particularly ecologicaly - but purely economically too?

Anyhow - you’re not wrong at all - investment in land is certainly one of the things being favored instead of coffee - but this seems exclusively like a value judgment to me (who is to say what the price of land ought to be but the owners of the land?)

[AstralStorm]

Per se, land is not productive as neither is any capital good. What is productive is people utilizing that capital good - and the rate of converting the capital good into money is actual labor efficiency. Many capital goods have total capital efficiency close to 1 but exceeding it. (e.g. homes)

Factories producing a lot of income have capital efficiencies much higher than that.

Consumer goods do not have any kind of capital efficiency. This means that typically their total economic efficiency is lower, sometimes much lower, than 1.

(note that certain goods can be considered both capital and consumer, e.g. cars - it depends on use)