[snikeris]

> The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance.

What Keynes means by economic abundance is not the state where everyone has equally large bank accounts. Economic abundance is when even poor people have machines clean their clothes for them.

A tiny minority isn't hoarding all the washing machines, cell phones, and air conditioners.

[gervu]

Based on your quote, I think you may've meant to respond to the other reply.

But a great many people don't have washing machines or air conditioners. You can rent the former, at the cost of more money and time. People die every year from lack of access to the latter.

It's not like air conditioners themselves are necessarily insurmountably expensive, although that varies by location, but you have to factor things like socioeconomic access to housing that comes with or allows it, as well as the cost of power to operate it sufficiently, plus having it be affordable enough that you already have it before it's a heat-stroke-and-die problem for you to not have it.

Sixty year olds with bad hips and fixed income don't generally go out and buy an air conditioner because it's hotter that year. Not everyone is a healthy twenty year old male with flexible disposable income, and sometimes people die because of the assumption that those form a useful ideal model of the overall population.

[snikeris]

No, I meant to reply to you. I felt like you didn't have a good understanding of what wealth is, so I gave some concrete examples you might have nearby.

[gervu]

I have a highly complex understanding of wealth but I'm also very tired and typing into a web forum with a touchscreen. Some simplification is entailed.

Particular definitions of wealth depend on what's contextually useful, and are thus quite varied. But I've yet to see one that deals with having an increasingly poor Gini coefficient in a way that makes that a desirable outcome, or which absolves people of intentionally pulling on it for their own benefit without regard for how that impacts millions of others.

People doing obviously shitty things to society are doing shitty things to society, and you'd expect a good definition or model to show as much. If you fit an elephant to the data and squint in a way that makes it sound like it's actually good, when that contradicts observable reality to first order, it's probably a bad model.