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Comment by AussieWog93 | Hacker News Reader

>Take the Moby Dick example... the author says you don't get the return on it until you have paid the 16 hour price of reading it... but isn't those sixteen hours the actual reward? You don't read a book to be finished with it, you read it because you like the reading process. The reward starts the first minute you start reading the book.

Honestly, I'm not sure if you can say that the money spent is truly a "cost" either.

Consumers love buying books (spending money) as much as they love reading books (spending time).

There is definitely a sense of reward in simply buying a book - even one you never read - just as there is for buying clothes you'll never wear or gadgets you'll never use.

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> There is definitely a sense of reward in simply buying a book - even one you never read

Is there? Doesn't that just make you feel like an idiot for wasting your money? The only feeling I ever get after spending money is "this better not suck".

Feeling a sense of reward simply for spending money sounds unhealthy.

>Is there? Doesn't that just make you feel like an idiot for wasting your money?

Of course there is. Most books people buy can be borrowed from a library for free, but people still do it.

Afaik this is called Tsundoku in Japanese.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsundoku

If it makes you happy, is it really wasting money?

Personally, I only think money is wasted when you don't get what you were trying to get when you spent the money. So if you decide to spend your money buying a delicious burrito, but it turns out to taste bad, then it was wasted money.

If you are trying to buy a book to bring you the joy you feel when buying a book, and you get that joy, then it isn't money wasted. If you buy it and then regret it after and don't feel the joy, then it was wasted.

> If you are trying to buy a book to bring you the joy you feel when buying a book, and you get that joy, then it isn't money wasted.

It's still wasted. That person would just be an egocentric idiot. Even if they are a happy idiot.

A capitalist society cannot work properly if the experience of buying is valued at the cost of whatever is bought.

Neither can this world or society sustain widespread wastefulness. It hurts everyone (else).

Wasting money on things that are unused causes labor and resources to be diverted from more worthy endeavors. More directly it causes the price of those goods to increase, or even become unavailable.

Defining waste is almost impossible when you see things in these terms. Is culture a waste? Are things not needed to survive waste? Are activities only valid if they generate enough new knowledge or happiness - who judges that?

Ultimately you need to trust that if someone spends, there's utility to the spend, otherwise they wouldn't have - even if the act of spending is the benefit itself.

It's not for 3rd parties to judge the usefulness of the spend. To illustrate this, think about the typical teenager who's mom says wastes all their time on "insert hobby mom doesn't like" and extrapolate that to the world's consumption habits. Everyone thinks others are wasteful.

> Feeling a sense of reward simply for spending money sounds unhealthy.

It seems healthier than having a sense of anxiety. Living in a moneyed society requires spending money, so why attach a sense of dread to it?

You should think about the kind of behavior either of these feelings encourage, or discourage.

Also, if the experience of spending itself was valued at the amount being spent, this economy would break down in an instant.

>You should think about the kind of behavior either of these feelings encourage, or discourage.

If I was going to drive myself to destitution chasing good feeling like a rat in an experiment, there are far more effective hits I could get than just "the feeling of spending money on something I like, but may not actually use."

I already have to have the skills to not let good feelings completely drive my decision making, so what benefit is there to making an unavoidable process into a source of negative feelings? Would it be healthy to feel nausea every time I eat so that I don't overindulge?

>Would it be healthy to feel nausea every time I eat so that I don't overindulge?

It might be healthier than becoming obese which comes with it's own negative feelings.

And yet I have enjoyed food for nearly 32 years, and I am if anything underweight. Enjoyment is not synonymous with overindulgence.

That's nice anecdata, but there's still an obesity epidemic with at least ~70% of the US population being at least overweight and 40% being obese.

Despite obesity being a (if not the) leading cause of death, people are overindulging anyways.

It would appear that overwhelmingly people will act against their best interests if it just makes them feel good. At least when it comes to food.

I'm happy for you that you appear to be an exception.

Kickstarters? Pateron? Boy Scout popcorn? That water bottle that an NGO was supposed to ship you for anything over a $20 donation?

There are some uses of money which are primarily philanthropic or social messaging. In these cases, the utility of the good or service is ancillary to the purchase. As overall economic welfare continues to improve, the niche for these things increases. The split between purpose and utility varies, maybe 5/95 for that chocolate bar that says it is protecting the rainforest (doubtful) but 40/60 for Girl Scout cookies. It's hard to straddle anywhere near that 50/50 line, but again, as the niche expands, the markets will eventually figure out more products for the space.

> That water bottle that an NGO was supposed to ship you for anything over a $20 donation?

"This NGO better be honest". It's not about the water bottle.

When I spend money, I expect something (to happen) in return. It doesn't have to benefit myself.

If you enjoy wasting money on books you are not going to read, I suggest you just set the money on fire instead. Or bury it and take the location to your grave. You'll do everyone else a favor by driving down the cost of goods, and nobody had to labor or waste resources on something you weren't planning to use. The economy will instead find something useful to do it with that labor and those resources.

Alternatively donate it as in your example - if you want to benefit someone specific. Maybe to the author whose book you weren't going to read?

>nobody had to labor or waste resources on something you weren't planning to use

If someone buys a collectible book with no intention of reading it, is it really a waste of resources?

Stuff is collectible because it's not being made any more and can't be. A signed first edition of something can't be sending an economic signal to produce more.

The money paid represents labor and resources forgone, and the more that the collectible costs, the more labor and resources is reserved for better purposes.

It is depriving someone else who would like to own it and possibly read it, but is that honestly a loss to society?

Here you are describing an edge case with collecting things because :

- You still need to manage / expose / dedicate space / maintain your collectibles to enjoy them

- It can be an investment so it’s really different than buying something to use it. It’s buying something hoping to resell it. Still, we could say you also pay with incertitude, maybe stress and responsibility if it’s something expensive.

>You still need to manage / expose / dedicate space / maintain your collectibles to enjoy them

This is true. A sense of proportion is always useful. Wouldn't you expect maintenance to be orders of magnitude smaller than creating things in the first place, very generally?

>It can be an investment so it’s really different than buying something to use it

I don't know what you are trying to say. Investment is inherently deferred consumption, and the higher the value, the more consumption is deferred. That leaves more resources for people who need them.

Imagine a stylized society with one rich person who has a billion dollars, and everybody else is poor.

If that person spends their billion dollars on a rare book, then the only thing that has been taken away from society is that book. And usually there is more than one copy of a book, so other people can still read the story, they just don't have the specific physical object.

But if they spend their billion dollars on, say, constructing a palace, then the resources could have been used to build thousands of homes for ordinary people.

Money is not a resource.

> > There is definitely a sense of reward in simply buying a book - even one you never read

> Is there?

W-w-what? Of course there is reward in simply buy a book. Or, perhaps, one could say there is reward in the possessing of the book, and maybe not the purchasing. Or maybe that's a distinction with no distinction. In any case, it's certainly true that one can get reward from buying books without the necessity of reading them.

> Doesn't that just make you feel like an idiot for wasting your money?

Sorry, I'm not seeing where any "wasting" enters into it. If I buy a book I want, the reward is having it. There is no waste. I got what I wanted. What you're saying only makes sense if you make the rather odd assumption that the value of a book is exclusively in the reading of the book...

I mean... do you, or have you ever, collected anything simply for the sake of having that something? Stamps? Vinyl records? Magazines? Bicycles? Video game consoles? Something?? I mean, it's quite a common activity. I would think most anybody would be able to relate to this.

I have bought books that I thought I wanted to read, but then left on the shelf without reading for almost 20 years.

Then when I did read them, they greatly affected me, and were as worthwhile as I had originally hoped.

I could've died without ever reading them, but I still bought them to read at some undefined future date.

If I wanted to have books on a shelf for visual decoration, I believe that there are fake books available. But I have enough real ones.

Getting a signed first edition or something for the collector value seems reasonable to me, but I don't know why I would want it if I hadn't read some version of it.

> I mean... do you, or have you ever, collected anything simply for the sake of having that something? Stamps? Vinyl records? Magazines? Bicycles? Video game consoles? Something??

I do. But only digitally nowadays. I hardly own any physical goods. Maybe $10-$15k taken together at most. I realize this puts me close to an extreme end.

As a kid I used to 'play' trading card games - but I hardly played them and mostly just spent a large portion of my meager allowance on buying painted cardboard. With the benefit of hindsight I could've spend that money on things that would have brought me considerably more joy, but I consider that a valuable lesson in itself.

I don't begrudge people their collections. There's still purpose in that. However buying something for your collection is different from buying for the sake of buying.

Owning a library is not so that you’ve read every book In collection, but it’s a research area where you can spend time to read new books. Some of the books in your library may never get read, and that’s ok because they’re always close at hand if you need it.

Antilibrary?

https://fs.blog/the-antilibrary/

Then download Moby Dick from Guttenberg.

You pay literally for physical copy only in this case. You literally can get it for free.

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