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I rather pointedly refuse to call the accumulation of capital in the hands of a small group of people "wealth". The fact that we use that notion of wealth as an

I rather pointedly refuse to call the accumulation of capital in the hands of a small group of people "wealth". The fact that we use that notion of wealth as an index of how our societies are doing is part of the problem we have at the moment. If you want to get technical, I'd suggest we scale the notion of wealth by the marginal utility of the additional capital given to an individual. Wealth is giving a person living paycheck to paycheck enough money to have leisure spend time with their kids. Giving a billionaire another million dollars isn't wealth. They don't give a fuck about it except in the most abstract, brain-sick, anti-social sort of way.

edouard-harris 7y ago
Wealth isn't identical with money, or with capital accumulation. If you create an app that lets 1000 people do something they couldn't do before (or that lets 1000 people do with ease something they could only do with difficulty before), then you have created wealth for those 1000 people.
- vincent-toups 7y ago
  I don't disagree with this, of course. Some startups do create some valuable services for people. But society would be better off if those services were owned by the people using them and the surplus value was going to more people rather than a few investors.
  - bpt3 7y ago
    Why would the users of the service be the appropriate people to benefit from its creation, instead of the creators?
    - vincent-toups 7y ago
      Ideally they would be one and the same, but the short answers is because more even distribution of money and power in a society is a good in itself (from my point of view). And because large amounts of wealth in the hands of small individuals is useless and even bad.
      - bpt3 7y ago
        I have created and supported products I have no ability to use because I'm not a large enterprise, and I don't think I'm particularly unique. Because of that, I disagree that producers and users of a product would ideally be one in the same. If organizations are required to perform all development and support in-house, specialization will be difficult if not impossible, and innovation and improvement will slow significantly. Wealth and power distributions are relative, and if you're saying that moving towards a more even distribution from where we are now would be a good thing, I agree. However, I don't think a perfectly even distribution is desirable or even possible. Also, large amounts of wealth in the hands of a small number of individuals is far from useless (it's not buried underground or stored in a vault), and whether it's bad or not depends on the context.
mercutio2 7y ago
I think the social utility of wealth, for the owner, is an under-discussed concept; capitalists have convinced society that it’s impossible to even discuss it, it’s a natural law that all accumulated wealth belongs to its holder. I, like you I suspect, disagree with that framing. Nevertheless, I think trying to redefine wealth (which has a pretty clear economic meaning, regardless of your beliefs about appropriate distribution) isn’t really a good conversational gambit. The accumulation of wealth can be destructive, no doubt. But defining away liquid societal resources with broad based utility, because they happen to be too expensive for the general populous, doesn’t strike me as a way to convince people of the merits of a different distribution.
crazygringo 7y ago
If you "rather pointedly refuse" to use words according to their dictionary definitions, then you're going to have a hard time having productive conversations. Wealth means money or equivalent value (goods, conveniences, etc). Marginal utility means marginal utility. They're both tremendously useful concepts, but trying to confuse the two means nobody will understand what you're talking about.

edouard-harris 7y ago

Wealth isn't identical with money, or with capital accumulation. If you create an app that lets 1000 people do something they couldn't do before (or that lets 1000 people do with ease something they could only do with difficulty before), then you have created wealth for those 1000 people.

vincent-toups 7y ago
I don't disagree with this, of course. Some startups do create some valuable services for people. But society would be better off if those services were owned by the people using them and the surplus value was going to more people rather than a few investors.
- bpt3 7y ago
  Why would the users of the service be the appropriate people to benefit from its creation, instead of the creators?
  - vincent-toups 7y ago
    Ideally they would be one and the same, but the short answers is because more even distribution of money and power in a society is a good in itself (from my point of view). And because large amounts of wealth in the hands of small individuals is useless and even bad.
    - bpt3 7y ago
      I have created and supported products I have no ability to use because I'm not a large enterprise, and I don't think I'm particularly unique. Because of that, I disagree that producers and users of a product would ideally be one in the same. If organizations are required to perform all development and support in-house, specialization will be difficult if not impossible, and innovation and improvement will slow significantly. Wealth and power distributions are relative, and if you're saying that moving towards a more even distribution from where we are now would be a good thing, I agree. However, I don't think a perfectly even distribution is desirable or even possible. Also, large amounts of wealth in the hands of a small number of individuals is far from useless (it's not buried underground or stored in a vault), and whether it's bad or not depends on the context.

mercutio2 7y ago

I think the social utility of wealth, for the owner, is an under-discussed concept; capitalists have convinced society that it’s impossible to even discuss it, it’s a natural law that all accumulated wealth belongs to its holder. I, like you I suspect, disagree with that framing. Nevertheless, I think trying to redefine wealth (which has a pretty clear economic meaning, regardless of your beliefs about appropriate distribution) isn’t really a good conversational gambit. The accumulation of wealth can be destructive, no doubt. But defining away liquid societal resources with broad based utility, because they happen to be too expensive for the general populous, doesn’t strike me as a way to convince people of the merits of a different distribution.

crazygringo 7y ago

If you "rather pointedly refuse" to use words according to their dictionary definitions, then you're going to have a hard time having productive conversations. Wealth means money or equivalent value (goods, conveniences, etc). Marginal utility means marginal utility. They're both tremendously useful concepts, but trying to confuse the two means nobody will understand what you're talking about.