Comment by ihumanable

Thanks for the thoughts they are also interesting.

Sorry I saw your comment after I wrote this reply to someone else, I’d be interested to hear your take on this hypothetical situation too if you don’t mind. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40911779

I agree with you though about the idea that the market works well when those that receive the most value spend the most money. While we have very high rates of wealth inequality, which also seems to be something of an emergent property of this system, once you have even medium amounts of inequality the system becomes interesting. I think expanding on your thoughts it comes down to the relative value of money being different for different people. If I have $100 then $10 is a LOT of money, it’s 10% of all my money. If I have $1000 then $10 is probably not a lot of money to me, not trivial but it’s only 1%.

Now this is an order of magnitude but if you asked someone if a system where the wealthy had 10x as much money as the poor they’d probably say that the inequality wasn’t so bad. But even in that case the guy with $1000 would probably be willing to spend $11 on some good that the other guy wants maybe infinitely more, just because that guy can’t really afford it.

It’s a fascinating way of looking at things I hadn’t quite ever thought about in terms of relative value of money itself. I don’t have any real point I’m making here, just thanks for contributing I found your reply interesting and it made me think.