[notahacker]

Jeff Bezos does not buy bread with every incremental thousand dollars, he spends $42million of them on a monumental clock. But perhaps it is more allocatively efficient to ensure that the beggar, lacking the funds to buy bread from Whole Foods, dies of starvation.

The assumption that because someone has more money, they would make better decisions on how to coordinate it was also what caused so many people to starve to death under feudalism.

[makomk]

Jeff Bezos does not buy anything with every incremental thousand dollars. In some important sense, it's not even money that can be spent. When people talk about Bezos' wealth being $200 billion dollars, almost all of that is just the last trade price of Amazon stock times his shareholding. (In some sense, it represents the value of an institution that supplies people with stuff more efficiently.)

Suppose we take that $200 billion from Bezos, who only spends a tiny fraction of that on actual things for his personal use that use actual resources like land, materials, workers' time, etc, and instead try and spend all of it on stuff that uses those actual resources like food, healthcare, etc. The only way to do that is to find people who'll do the reverse trade - who'll take hundreds of billions of dollars they'd otherwise have spent on things made with actual resources that'd make their lives better, and instead buy shares of Amazon with them. This actual money that represents an actual claim on limited resources cannot come out of the pockets of Bezos or other billionares, because they don't have that much - it has to come out of ordinary people's pockets. Same with the shuttering of businesses during coronavirus; it's ordinary people who'll have to feel the consequences of all the goods not produced and services not provided, because they're the ones who consume them.

The approach where people like Bezos become billionaires through coming up with ways to supply goods and services to people more efficiently doesn't have this problem, because it works by making the pie bigger for everyone rather than just trying to change the size of people's slices. And I'd personally trust Bezos to do this much more than all the people who seem ideologically opposed to the idea such a thing is even possible...

[notahacker]

> Jeff Bezos does not buy anything with every incremental thousand dollars. In some important sense, it's not even money that can be spent.

Luckily, nobody in the discussion has claimed this. What they have claimed is that it is possible a hungry person who died of starvation may have needed an incremental dollar more than someone who spent $42 million of their incremental dollars on a project to build a clock with no expectation of any return on it (or even a person of comparatively modest means who never has to look at the right hand side of a menu) and as such, diminishing returns to disposable wealth may exist.

Clearly actually addressing this claim is a lot harder than demolishing straw men and accusing everyone that suggests that diminishing marginal returns to money are a thing of being a communist.

Personally I'd trust people whose belief that markets are useful in generating wealth (again, not in dispute here) stops short of assuming that if people don't have money they probably don't need to survive as much as others need to conspicuously consume.

[makomk]

The problem with that argument is that $42 million is a lot, lot less than $200 billion dollars, especially when divided across even just the population of the USA. Not even enough for a dollar per person - in fact, when you consider that's over something like a decade, it's probably more like a cent per person per year.

By comparison, the National Endowment for the Arts apparently has a budget of $162 million per year. I'm sure there are plenty of hungry people who have much more need for that money, so by your argument maybe we should shut that down and give the money to them. It'd certainly provide them with a lot more funding than just the money from Bezos' clock...

[notahacker]

The problem is that again you are attacking an argument I did not make. At no point have I suggested "maybe we should shut that down and give the money to them" or that we could feed the entire population of the world using Bezos' clock budget, never mind enthused about US arts funding. At no point in this thread have I made any public policy recommendations at all.

I simply observed that it seems unreasonable to argue that a person saved from starvation by a marginal dollar doesn't feel more benefit from that marginal dollar than someone who wouldn't stoop to pick one off the street feels from marginal dollars that accrue to their bank accounts anyway. So some, but not all, redistribution can be positive sum.

Acknowledging the marginal utility of a [disposable] dollar to Bezos might be lower than that of someone earning less than subsistence seems both fairly obvious and not at all close to communism as the user I originally responded to suggests (Funnily enough, denying the validity of any sort of interpersonal utility comparison whatsoever actually does makes it impossible to make inefficiency arguments against communism or any other sort of government waste. Obviously millions of people behind the former Iron Curtain are wealthier today, but who's to say the Politburo members losing control over resources didn't suffer more?! I mean, that's silly, but so's arguing Bezos cares about loose change at least as much as the average poor person). Arguments against the idea that public might need education less than the wealthy needed to keep those dollars were pretty critical to there being a viable market and workforce for the Amazons of this world too.

If we actually want to discuss the efficiency and inefficiency of different forms of government and private [non]intervention it's much easier to do so without the unsupported and vaguely feudal assumption that no improvement on a status quo can be observed.