> if money is like potential energy It's not. Money (as in paper or digits) has "intrinsically" no value. It's a sort of game of chairs (and accounting) that s

> if money is like potential energy It's not. Money (as in paper or digits) has "intrinsically" no value. It's a sort of game of chairs (and accounting) that society is living with because we have no alternative. It does seem that it has potential energy because society has decided so: People will recognize your money with their potential energy. In a sense, inflation is people distrust in the system. Hyper-inflation is people refusing to work with the system. > what is the eventual physical utility of all this stored wealth? You can't store wealth in money or bonds. If you want to store real wealth, you should try storing useful everyday things like water. But then you'll have storage costs and redistribution issues. If you store phones, they'll quickly lose value. That's why people use money despite the government continuously debasing it. > I would argue that there are sufficiently many inefficiencies in most governmental bureaucracies as to result in a similarly poor usage of money as a billionaire who spends some of their wealth to construct a mansion on a private island. Exactly. A billionaire that is living in a studio and cooking his food is exerting the same tax on society of a Starbucks barista. On the other hand, a millionaire with a yacht, is very taxing on society. If you have a housing shortage, it makes more sense for people to build houses for themselves and not yachts. > I don’t know the answer and don’t really have a strong opinion either way without further research No one does, really. No one understands this at the micro-level as the economy is an emergent phenomena. The Fed just increase/decrease supply; and is basing its model on the idea that 2% inflation is good (and deflation is bad!). > but sometimes I wonder if despite the problems they cause, billionaires sort of represent the “exploration” part of “exploration vs exploitation” in reinforcement learning, as they slightly destabilize a societal system that might otherwise be stuck in a rut or a local optimum. The system will swing. People having equal wealth does not mean prosperity and growth. They might just be stuck there. In this case, it makes sense to throw money at someone (or anyone) who is willing to innovate among the herd.