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Comment by fluoridation | Hacker News Reader

I honestly don't understand what you mean.

>billions go into inflated transfers and club losses that generate little beyond spectacle

"Club losses"? If you pay a football player 100k to play a match, even if the point of the match is nothing but spectacle, that money doesn't evaporate. The player will spend it on the economy. What else could he possibly do with it besides spending it or tossing it in a fire? If a club spends 10M on something entirely frivolous -- say, a giant concrete football -- that money also doesn't simply disappear, it's used to pay the people who will make the raw materials and the people who will design and build the thing. Only individuals and distinct entities lose money. An economy never does.

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The point is how it circulates. If €200M goes into a transfer fee, it is locked into a prestige loop instead of funding productive investment, it gets trapped in a cycle that reinforces inequality and produces very little outside of image-building. The recipients of this money are a tiny elite which they then spend mostly in elite consumption loops: luxury real estate, yachts, exclusive services, tax havens.

Speaking capitalist language, overinflated football spending is a misallocation of capital on low-return assets which creates market distortions.

>luxury real estate, yachts, exclusive services, tax havens

All of that eventually has to flow back into, as you'd put it, non-elite segments of the economy. What, do you think shipyard workers eat yatchs? There's no subnetwork in the economy where money flows in and never comes back out. That just doesn't exist.

"money always comes back" view is too simplistic. Value can absolutely be destroyed or locked away:

Build a $2M missile -> launch -> it explodes. The workers get wages, sure, but the capital value is literally blown up. No ongoing benefit to the wider economy.

Stadiums for Olympics/World Cups -> billions spent -> used for 2 weeks -> abandoned. Money circulates in construction wages, but the asset sits idle, draining maintenance costs.

Buy a $450M painting -> store it in a tax-free warehouse -> never seen, never sold for decades. That capital is locked — the flow stops until resale.

So yes, wages circulate. But the end product can be waste, destruction, or dead capital. That is the difference between circulation and productive reinvestment.

>Build a $2M missile -> launch -> it explodes. The workers get wages, sure, but the capital value is literally blown up. No ongoing benefit to the wider economy.

>Stadiums for Olympics/World Cups -> billions spent -> used for 2 weeks -> abandoned. Money circulates in construction wages, but the asset sits idle, draining maintenance costs.

You have no possible way to quantify the wastefulness of an action. Blowing up a rocket can help prevent more waste. You can feed someone a bowl of soup that makes them sick. With what omniscience do you get to deem a club's expenses wasteful?

>Buy a $450M painting -> store it in a tax-free warehouse -> never seen, never sold for decades. That capital is locked — the flow stops until resale.

No kidding? The thing you bought stays with you until you sell it? Sorry, how is this different from literally anything else?

>But the end product can be waste, destruction, or dead capital. That is the difference between circulation and productive reinvestment.

Let's say I'm the richest man in the world, and I use half of my wealth to pay people to dig the biggest, deepest hole possible, and then the other half to fill it back up. I'm sure both you and I will agree that that's a purely wasteful endeavor that would accomplish nothing. Ignoring ecological destruction, who was harmed? What was lost, and who lost it?

>What was lost, and who lost it?

What's lost is opportunity. All that wealth could have gone into projects that produce lasting value: infrastructure, innovation, healthcare. Instead, it was sunk into an activity with no return. Misallocation of capital is a loss measured in foregone progress, society ends up poorer than it could have been, because while we could have had a new hospital or brigde, workers were busy digging some literal shithole. Does it answer your question?

>What's lost is opportunity.

Surely it's my problem and my problem alone if I want to lose the opportunity to spend my money in something fruitful to instead spend it in something pointless and worthless.

>while we could have had a new hospital or brigde

Well, no. It was my money I spent. Regardless of what I was going to do with it, building hospitals and bridges was never in the cards.

Let's say that I made my fortune... whatever, selling tickets to football games. Well, the opportunity to do those things was lost little by little every time someone bought a ticket. So what do you want? Do you want a centrally managed economy where individuals cannot make purchasing decisions? You do your government-assigned job, you get in line for your government-approved meal, and for entertainment in the afternoon you can attend a play about how great the ruling party is and how everyone must do their part for the good of the nation. There, that's what an economy with no misallocated resources (by the parameters you've set) looks like. No one can incorrectly spend their money because there's no money to spend. The government has complete control.

No one is saying you should be banned from digging holes. The point is: if too much capital keeps flowing into holes instead of hospitals, bridges, or innovation, the economy produces less long-term value. That imbalance is what we call a misallocation of capital.

In other words: criticising waste != demanding central planning. It just means recognising that not all spending contributes equally to future prosperity.

>if too much capital keeps flowing into holes instead of hospitals, bridges, or innovation, the economy produces less long-term value [...] not all spending contributes equally to future prosperity.

Mmh... In an absolute sense, sure, there are actions that destroy wealth. Like I if I buy huge reserves of minerals and smelt them together so someone else has to spend vast amounts of energy to recycle them back into a usable form, that's definitely harmful. Or as a more realistic example, if I build a factory to churn out millions of worthless gadgets no one wants, where the raw materials could have been put to something useful. These are things that objectively lower the total wealth of the planet, because they increase entropy, which requires more energy to reverse.

But if I dig a giant hole... I don't see how the same applies. If nothing else, I paid for the wages of the workers. How is the world poorer after I spent a trillion dollars to keep a few million workers busy for a few years? To bring this conversation around, in what way does a player transfer make the world poorer?

>How is the world poorer after I spent a trillion dollars to keep a few million workers busy for a few years? To bring this conversation around, in what way does a player transfer make the world poorer?

It feels like I answered this many times already, and we keep beating the same dead horse. It's is like a DDOS for the economy, this hole metaphor. The world is poorer because the time, labour and money which went into hole could have been spent on something productive. Instead of a player transfer money could have went into something like a fusion reactor, which brings cheaper energy instead of a show-off. Of course, everyone is free to do what they want with their wealth, just as I am free to criticise their decisions, because I want my kids to live in a world of prosperity, not in a world of excavators.

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