> It's not particularly interesting for $450 dollars to change hands in a vacuum; the transaction is given meaning because it represents something about the painting that was created and sold.
And this:
> The biggest intended takeaway of my post wasn't even that the dollars being discussed don't correspond to anything, it's that they correspond to a bunch of different types of thing that don't sum together cleanly.
In particular resonate with me. This intended meaning I (personally) lost in the economic semantics. Hopefully my comment about not wanting to paint Amazon as some altruistic entity alluded to my own personal nuanced feelings here, but to expand on something that I think is more aligned with the point you were trying to make:
There is no doubt in my mind that the employment opportunities generated by Amazon provide value to the economy at large, but that doesn't mean that the value is as great as it could, would, or even should be. I think that there is a fair argument to be made that the labor practices at Amazon strays into labor exploitation and they only can do so since they benefit from an non-competitive market dynamic. And that bigger picture is potentially one of the bigger pieces of context which isn't captured by a simple payroll figure.