Re:U.S. personal income posts first drop in over three years
by bluGill on Friday March 01, 2019 @11:16AM
(#19282085)
You are confusing money for wealth. If I gave you back 3000 years in a time machine with a trillion dollars worth of gold (gold being money 3000 years ago) you would be much poorer than you are today despite having most of the world's money in your new era. Someone taking a log and turning it into a chair increases the world's wealth even if no money changes hands. Someone who prints money (via inflation or counterfeiting) has changed the amount of money in the world but has not changed the amount of wealth.
Re:U.S. personal income posts first drop in over three years
by nkozyra on Friday March 01, 2019 @12:07PM
(#19282808)
> You are confusing money for wealth
I was trying specifically to not do so; I was expressing money as the point-in-time measurement of wealth.
Re:U.S. personal income posts first drop in over three years
by r_smart on Friday March 01, 2019 @12:22PM
(#19283034)
That's the point though, it's inaccurate to do so. Money is a finite resource, but its value constantly fluctuates. It's just a unit of exchange that exists for convenience. The total supply of money does not correlate to the amount of 'wealth' in the world, such as it is.
I know this makes it a pain in the ass for you to make / explain your point, because there's no unit of measurement for wealth (hence why you used money at any given point in time). It just doesn't work that way though.
Re:U.S. personal income posts first drop in over three years
by jpadkins on Friday March 01, 2019 @11:50AM
(#19282551)
If you create a new good or or perform a service, you have created new wealth. (building a log cabin created wealth)
wealth is not zero sum.
Even money is not zero sum. Anytime someone creates credit, new money is created and the money supply is expanded. And money is not representation of wealth. It is a unit of account and transfer.
Wealth isn't something that be quantified objectively, so at some point you need to put hard parameters on what qualifies wealth or thresholds of wealth. At some level, "money" (which is the representation of wealth) is at any given point finite. This makes it inherently a zero sum game.
The "any given point" allows us to avoid arguments about fiat and monetary policy. At any given point if I get $1, that value comes from someone else (or elses) down the chain.