5 ms·

The most objective measure of "greatness" we have is money, which comes from people who think something is great and are willing to pay for it. Sometimes this

The most objective measure of "greatness" we have is money, which comes from people who think something is great and are willing to pay for it. Sometimes this works well: for example, pretty much everybody thinks Toy Story is a great movie, and Lasseter and Pixar were rewarded handsomely for it. Sometimes it doesn't work so well: for example, Wall Street thinks money is great, so they spend a lot of time and energy figuring out ways to extract more money from people.

TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
> The most objective measure of "greatness" we have is money Why is this more objective than other metrics? The fact you can easily put a number on it doesn't make it objective. It's a definite indicator of wealth, but surely greatness is a different thing?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- canadianfella 5y ago
  What other metrics?
simonh 5y ago
An awful lot of them spend their time figuring out how to extract less money than other people, but make sure they're the ones doing the extracting. That's competition for you.
underwater 5y ago
Money is a measure of the ability to earn money, nothing more.
nxpnsv 5y ago
As soon as money doesn’t only come from customers directly purchasing a thing you make, that is not a great metric. Money is more complicated than that.
stkdump 5y ago
I wouldn't say it is the most objective way. It is a remarkably simple way to accomplish a number of excellent things and with more success than other methods humanity tried so far. I hope we can come up with something better in the next few hundred years. The main problem of money lies exactly in its simplicity, i.e. everything becomes fungible, which in reality many things just aren't. To work around this we needed to invent stuff like taxation and legal persons. A mind-boggingly huge part of government and thus man-power is set aside to work around the problems that the fungibility of money creates. I am pretty sure there are superior technological solutions, where the rules/laws don't have to work-around ever more clever ways that cooperations and rich people use to work-around the limits we try to set for the fungibility of money.
Emma_Goldman 5y ago
I don't think this is anywhere near as obvious as you make out. Film is an odd example, given that the films that lay claim to being great works of art (e.g, Koyaanisqatsi, Wild Strawberries, The Battle of Algiers) are rarely the most popular and highest-grossing films (e.g., Transformers, Avengers, Toy Story). We usually mean something by 'greatness' quite different from 'popular'. Even if we just focus on popularity (i.e., first-order preference satisfaction), money is a very rough proxy for it: 1. Lots of profitable activities, once you price-in their externalised social costs, are net negative. Given the scale of the climate and ecological crisis, that is very far from a marginal phenomenon. Ecological economists like Herman Daly argue that once ecological costs are included in the national accounts, we are running a GDP loss. 2. Some commodities are instrumentally necessary but intrinsically negative. Many people acknowledge that social media is a net negative, but use it anyway because it helps build their profile and career. Market dynamics often transform intrinsically positive activities into merely instrumentally necessary activities, e.g., the marketisation of academia means researchers spend their whole career optimising for maximum articles and grants, not great work. 3. Market demand reflects the stratified incomes of people around the world. Markets are therefore heavily skewed in favour of the interests of the rich. 4. Market exchanges which are mutually beneficial for the transacting parties often have unintended effects in the aggregate, sometimes negative, e.g., no one wants Facebook to be a monopoly, and no individual makes it so, but it is the aggregate consequence of people joining Facebook.

TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago

> The most objective measure of "greatness" we have is money Why is this more objective than other metrics? The fact you can easily put a number on it doesn't make it objective. It's a definite indicator of wealth, but surely greatness is a different thing?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
canadianfella 5y ago
What other metrics?

simonh 5y ago

An awful lot of them spend their time figuring out how to extract less money than other people, but make sure they're the ones doing the extracting. That's competition for you.

underwater 5y ago

Money is a measure of the ability to earn money, nothing more.

nxpnsv 5y ago

As soon as money doesn’t only come from customers directly purchasing a thing you make, that is not a great metric. Money is more complicated than that.

stkdump 5y ago

I wouldn't say it is the most objective way. It is a remarkably simple way to accomplish a number of excellent things and with more success than other methods humanity tried so far. I hope we can come up with something better in the next few hundred years. The main problem of money lies exactly in its simplicity, i.e. everything becomes fungible, which in reality many things just aren't. To work around this we needed to invent stuff like taxation and legal persons. A mind-boggingly huge part of government and thus man-power is set aside to work around the problems that the fungibility of money creates. I am pretty sure there are superior technological solutions, where the rules/laws don't have to work-around ever more clever ways that cooperations and rich people use to work-around the limits we try to set for the fungibility of money.

Emma_Goldman 5y ago

I don't think this is anywhere near as obvious as you make out. Film is an odd example, given that the films that lay claim to being great works of art (e.g, Koyaanisqatsi, Wild Strawberries, The Battle of Algiers) are rarely the most popular and highest-grossing films (e.g., Transformers, Avengers, Toy Story). We usually mean something by 'greatness' quite different from 'popular'. Even if we just focus on popularity (i.e., first-order preference satisfaction), money is a very rough proxy for it: 1. Lots of profitable activities, once you price-in their externalised social costs, are net negative. Given the scale of the climate and ecological crisis, that is very far from a marginal phenomenon. Ecological economists like Herman Daly argue that once ecological costs are included in the national accounts, we are running a GDP loss. 2. Some commodities are instrumentally necessary but intrinsically negative. Many people acknowledge that social media is a net negative, but use it anyway because it helps build their profile and career. Market dynamics often transform intrinsically positive activities into merely instrumentally necessary activities, e.g., the marketisation of academia means researchers spend their whole career optimising for maximum articles and grants, not great work. 3. Market demand reflects the stratified incomes of people around the world. Markets are therefore heavily skewed in favour of the interests of the rich. 4. Market exchanges which are mutually beneficial for the transacting parties often have unintended effects in the aggregate, sometimes negative, e.g., no one wants Facebook to be a monopoly, and no individual makes it so, but it is the aggregate consequence of people joining Facebook.