> if someone is selling a product or service and making $100,000 a year, and you offer them the opportunity to make $199,000 a year with the condition that half is locked away in an account they can never spend, just about nobody would take that offer.
Then that's not really making $199,000 a year. They'd be making $99,500 which is less than the profit-maximizing scenario that pays $100,000
That's because you've redefined "profit" to "usable profit," showing that profit is not the goal in and of itself.
My point, and the point of the author of this blog post, is that nobody is motivated by "haha numbers go up." We're motivated by wanting to do things with our profit - our goal is not to accumulate money but to spend it (either now or in the future).
Maybe a better example is, if someone were making $100,000 now, and they had the opportunity to move to a country where they'd make $199,000 but the cost of living were twice as expensive, would they take it?
It's quite easy to show this is not true: if someone is selling a product or service and making $100,000 a year, and you offer them the opportunity to make $199,000 a year with the condition that half is locked away in an account they can never spend, just about nobody would take that offer.
As the blog post says, "The whole point of money is spending it to enrich your life and the lives of those around you. It’s a means to an end; it’s not the end in and of itself."
(You seem to understand this already when you suggest that customer preferences can be shifted - if it were true that we were all maximizing for profit, why on earth would someone buy, say, toothpaste for $4 from a company that claims to be doing good for the world when they could instead buy equally-functional toothpaste for $3?)