Also, I saw an assumption about financial investment being a moral positive slip in there. I've become less convinced of this recently.
At the bottom of an industrial, technological, geographic, or demographic S-curve, opportunities are plentiful to forego consumption today in order to create wealth tomorrow. Investment is useful. Rates of return are positive, incentivizing it. Cool. What happens at the top of the S-curve, though? Those opportunities dry up, relative to available capital. There's nothing inherently bad about this. Quite the opposite, it's a good thing! "Our work here is done." It's a big problem if you make your money by investing, though, and everyone at the top of the social pyramid does, so they exercise their immense political power (they're the top of the pyramid, remember) to ensure that the "growth" continues at all costs. It doesn't matter if it's artificial growth, it doesn't matter if it comes at greater expense to someone else, it doesn't matter if it causes social problems -- they keep pumping all the same because it is in their interest to do so, and they keep pumping until something bursts.
In this framing, encouraging financial investment is not an unqualified moral positive. If financial rates of return are low, I'd expect quite the opposite, with investment in financial instruments as a moral negative while investment in, say, better food or used cars would be net positives.
Morality aside, I'd also expect this dynamic to be reflected in rates of return: if rich people can satisfy all of the market demand for financial investment, the best rates of return will be in non-financialized investments, like buying a new used car to replace an increasingly expensive clunker.
This is one of the reasons certain economists recommend cash payments over benefits like SNAP for poor people. People generally have a good idea of how they could invest in themselves for an immediate improvement in their situation. Be that getting the money for a down payment on a car, house, or apartment; getting tools they need to start side business; taking time off to take a class at a community college; etc.
At the bottom of an industrial, technological, geographic, or demographic S-curve, opportunities are plentiful to forego consumption today in order to create wealth tomorrow. Investment is useful. Rates of return are positive, incentivizing it. Cool. What happens at the top of the S-curve, though? Those opportunities dry up, relative to available capital. There's nothing inherently bad about this. Quite the opposite, it's a good thing! "Our work here is done." It's a big problem if you make your money by investing, though, and everyone at the top of the social pyramid does, so they exercise their immense political power (they're the top of the pyramid, remember) to ensure that the "growth" continues at all costs. It doesn't matter if it's artificial growth, it doesn't matter if it comes at greater expense to someone else, it doesn't matter if it causes social problems -- they keep pumping all the same because it is in their interest to do so, and they keep pumping until something bursts.
In this framing, encouraging financial investment is not an unqualified moral positive. If financial rates of return are low, I'd expect quite the opposite, with investment in financial instruments as a moral negative while investment in, say, better food or used cars would be net positives.
Morality aside, I'd also expect this dynamic to be reflected in rates of return: if rich people can satisfy all of the market demand for financial investment, the best rates of return will be in non-financialized investments, like buying a new used car to replace an increasingly expensive clunker.