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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.

You've put my thoughts about this very succinctly. Completely agree.

That money doesn't just vanish though. It's a wealth transfer from Adam to Bernice. Adam's bank balance drops from £100m to £99m, Bernice's goes from £100m to £101m.

If that transfer didn't happen, then both bank balances would remain at £100m. Nothing is lost or gained, it's irrelevant (Although in Banksy's case the original first sale often involves a transfer of wealth from Adam and Bernice to a random person)

There's nothing inherently good or bad about rich people playing money games with each others assets, it's not the same as Adam paying £10m to destroy a town and gain £20m in profit from exploiting the resources, or indeed divert tens of thousands of high-skilled effort per month into something like the Apollo program.

The transaction costs are bad, which may or may not be substantial.

Any transaction costs go to paying the auction house for things like catering, electricity, security, rent etc. No worse than a bunch of rich people spending money at a restaurant.

There's an argument that auction houses aren't paying their way for the services they use (especially in expensive areas), and other functions occupying that space could be better for society. A land value tax would solve that. I'm not aware that auction houses rely on other things like copyright or patents that can stifle economic activity.

Miles Mathis is very provocative on what 'art' is - he feels it is a massive money laundering exercise... http://mileswmathis.com/launder.pdf

  > Once you start down the road of being dictator 
  > 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.

Feels super weird to me that in its full context the point of this sentence wasn't "We should stop letting people starve to death instead of sending people into space"

> Feels super weird to me that in its full context the point of this sentence wasn't "We should stop letting people starve to death instead of sending people into space".

I think the point was that you can apply that logic to anything... However if you really wana talk about spending on space programs vs spending directy on starving people, consider where we would be technologically, scientifically etc as a society if we always chose to spend money on the needs of others (of which there is an endless supply) directly rather than invest it in lofty ideas - It's pure speculation, but I image the difference would be direct spending would only ever briefly solve short term problems, but ultimately civilisation as a whole would be in a worse place.

In other words, we can take knowledge with us into the future, not food. and in this context, banksy is politically charged knowledge striving for change - which is bought and sold by rich people for better or worse.

We could invest in lofty ideas to alleviate starving...

Isn't that exactly what happened? Banksy is an artist who feels that capitalism causes suffering (presumably including starving). This sale results in his ideas about alleviating starving by ending capitalism to be propagated and provides him with the funds to further propagate those ideas.

"Why Explore Space? A 1970 Letter to a Nun in Africa"

http://myscienceacademy.org/2012/08/13/why-explore-space-a-1...

NASA Associate director Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger elaborates on this topic.

That's a famously unconvincing argument.

How so?

Money is not really a scarce resource though - we can always print more of it. A million dollars spent on an artwork doesn't mean there are a million fewer $1 tins of beans made. That's not how the economy works.

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.

Yes, it has effects on the real economy (although in the case of these high-value positional goods I'd argue they're rather smaller than you might think - as likely both buyer and sellers are simply swapping for money which otherwise will sit in a bank account so the effects are limited to those imparted by the middle-men).

My point was, the economy is not a zero-sum game.

Money is the force carrier for the value field. Humans exchange value, quantized as money, and the value field is stronger in some areas of our world.

Like any force carrier, they are fungible, and they are constantly being created and annihilated. Banks emit and absorb them strongly, other organizations less so.