| > Surely at some point you stop spending it on yourself Only for a limited definition of "spending on myself". Self actualization is where desire truly is boundless. 10B is not a lot of money if your goal in life is now to end malaria or build a city on Mars. Another issue with your thought experiment is that you're now relatively rich. If in some distant future you have the purchasing power of a billionaire of today without being relatively rich, many people will be looking for new ways of outdoing each other. Of course, consuming zero cost goods is not a measure of wealth, so they'll be consuming whatever isn't zero cost then. > I generally like the argument that price (of a competitive good) should reflect the amount of energy it took to create. I don't. The price of physical energy fluctuates with how difficult it is for humans to tap it. I prefer the mental model that the price reflects the human difficulty - perseverance, pain, time, intelligence, physical force, ... - required to provide something. |