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Wealth is about value. Personally I never cared much about the latest smartphone, I wouldn't mind going back to my phone from 5 years ago. As for skyscrapers, as COVID19 has shown, we don't need most of them (since people can just work remotely). The money would have been better spent on giving millenials higher salaries (or better, investing more in independent startups) so that they could afford to buy their first house in the suburbs instead of keeping them enslaved to their landlords and their corporate paymasters in the city centers. In terms of the things that actually matter, wealth hasn't grown at all.

I can stack millions of rocks on top of each other into a giant pile but that doesn't mean I've been productive or that I created any wealth if nobody benefits from my pile of rocks or if people are coerced into accepting its legitimacy as a measure of wealth.




Wealth is about perceived value. What you personally perceive as valuable is different than the majority of participants in the economy, so trying to enforce your judgments upon the system to show that no value was created is pointless. You clearly have many gripes with various aspects of the economic system, but my point is that value is still being created. I've created a ton of value since 2015. The professional hardware and tools I use have improved tremendously since that time. While the exact value below the paper wealth numbers may be difficult to ascertain, it doesn't mean no wealth was created. It should be obvious that things are still advancing to someone in the tech space.




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