There's a logical contradiction at the heart of this. If spending money destroys social value and receiving it represents the creation of social value, then ev

There's a logical contradiction at the heart of this. If spending money destroys social value and receiving it represents the creation of social value, then every act has to be neutral. When you buy the yacht from the Congo at the end and light it on fire, you can't have destroyed value overall, because, well, the yacht builders got money so clearly they created as much value as you destroyed. (Represented in some weird hedonic sense as the pleasure you got from the burning yacht, perhaps.) Slightly more technical translation of the above: this essay is a great illustration of the vacuity of the revealed preference theory of value, important in economics but widely shredded in every other discipline just because it entails silly consequences like whenever someone pays you to do something that indicates that you did something genuinely valuable for them, an idea that reduces the notion of "valuable" to nothing but observed behavior.