throw0101011

An extra million dollar on the piece get spent by many organizations and people involved and increases the production of the resources they want and decreases the allocation of resources to produce things other people want.

Unless they store most of it in a bank somewhere and don’t use it, it has effects on the real economy.

The difference is the number of people a product or a project will likely help times the ‘utility’ each person receive.

> Once you start down the road of being dictotoe of spending on expensive things that aren't solving starvation, all kinds of things like space exploration, the development of the internet, etc all become "sorry effects". Guess how many villages could be fed on the budget of the Apollo program.

I do not advocate dictating spending but propose designing a better incentive system for rich people to spend money on useful things. See my reply to another comment down below.

What are ‘useful’ things?

Your examples here have good probabilities of turning into ‘utility’ for the masses. Cure of cancer (obvious), Apollo program (many scientific advances), ...

Bidding up prestige and coolness is a zero sum game and only increases a small bit of satisfaction of a few rich people.

It is about valuing the needs of the rich and the masses more equitably.

With a different kind of accounting, people behaviors may change. The wealthy art consumers want status, prestige, and acceptance as one of the ‘cool’ crowd. Or when buying for investment, they expect some will buy from them for those effects.

If we make it much more prestigious and ‘cool’ for people to show off their equivalent donations to starving children, fewer will bid for the drawings and more will donate.

Not referring to this specific exhibit but other pieces by a similar artist. Thousands of people can create this kind of paintings for cheap. That it still sells for more than what many people can make in a decade or a career means a stratospheric concentration of wealth in society or a bubble in the commercial art world.

If there is real scarcity because of climate change or other widespread disaster, how much can a piece of this ‘quality’ be sold for? A loaf of bread, or less?

That millions of children still starve but a piece of simplistic art is worth more than the value of food a whole village consumes in a decade is a sorry effect of the financial system we use or the way our society assigns ‘coolness’ score to people and activity.