Published in The Left is Right on Medium.com, Dec. 8, 2024
An armchair economist’s look into the mind of the billionaire class
The billionaire class has certain advantages in getting what it wants, which seems to be to create a trillionaire class. It certainly has nothing to do with just living the good life or doing good for others. Most billionaires lavish on themselves, but are pretty stingy toward others. It seems in practice to be just about having more than everyone else. Acquisition gone pathological.
My understanding of economics is fifty years out of date, harking back to the one and only macro economics text I tortured myself with back in college. That text, if I remember correctly, had it that wealth creation comes about by increasing the store of recognizable assets. The more tangible and long-lived those assets are, the greater the chance for them to create real fungible wealth. Fungible essentially means that other individuals besides the current owner of an asset recognize that asset as valuable. As such, the owner has some assurance that they can trade the asset for something else. Money is that kind of asset, even though modern money is increasingly nothing more than an intangible fiction, supported by the good faith of banks and governments.
Whether there is enough fungibility in the universe of possible assets is getting more problematic. Mother Earth is increasingly pissed enough at our species that she is resorting to taking out large quantities of formerly fungible things, including most obviously ocean front coastline and arable land. And, of course, we’ve helped her along by depleting our stores of many other assets, such as forests and wetlands. Even some things that we never regarded as assets, like glaciers, are by their melting influencing the disappearance of an actual asset like fresh water. So now our billionaire asset hounds are trying to creatively monetize stuff that we used to take as part of Mother Earth’s community property. So, for example, icebergs calved off glaciers are being explored as potential sources of fresh water to combat desertification. Robbing Peter to pay Paul.
So the idea that trillionaire inclined billionaires desire to increase their personal wealth comes more and more to rely on non-fungible tokens (NFT’s), like art and music that exist only in digital form, but are protected by fungible copyright. Computers generate other fake products, like derivatives and bitcoins, which in spite of their ephemeral existence are still considered fungible. It’s like modern day alchemy, making something valuable out of trash. It’s easy to tell the difference between the sketchy value of these sorts of assets — modern equivalents of snake oil — when the bottom falls out of their markets and they’re exposed as the junk they intrinsically are.
It’s hard not to think, as the sceptics do, that it’s the increasing rarity of finding new sources of good assets on earth that’s driving the desire by some wanna-be trillionaires to explore (read, rape and pillage) the Moon and Mars. Then it will be on to the rest of the solar system and then the galaxy and then the universe! By that time, though, Mother Universe, say the astronomers and cosmologists, will likely have decided to close up shop and either spread stuff out so thinly that it stays out of grasp or so compactly that nothing can be extracted. Do the wanna-be trillionaires have some plan to monetize black holes? Maybe so. It’s a fact that you can now ‘buy’ a star, which, by the way, you would have no real possibility of escaping to when Earth fails.
This pessimistically dark story of modern finance and wealth creation has a moral, of course. Supposing Mother Earth herself as our modern Aesop equivalent, she might state that moral as: “Greed creates it’s own downfall.” And then she would add parenthetically: “I had a good thing going. I won’t go down with you.”