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Comment by judk | Hacker News Reader

Paying someone to do worthless work (lavishing luxury on someone) does not help society much. That's just gaming the numbers, like saying "going to war" helps the economy. Paying someone to alleviate basic needs does. Not all consumption is equal.

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But consumption has a tighter feedback loop that ensures money spent on consumption is never truly wasted. If something is useless you stop buying it, and there's a limit to how much one person can waste - you can only eat so many meals, wear so many nice suits, take so many private jet flights. People who lose fortunes don't do so through consumption, they do so through bad investments.

That would be true in practice were it not for the existence of marketing, job of which is to create random arbitrary needs to keep people buying, and planned obsolescence, which makes sure that needs don't stay fulfilled for long. The market found a way to increase the limit to how much one person can waste to the point that the waste keeps accelerating.

> Paying someone to do worthless work (lavishing luxury on someone) does not help society much.

Tell that to the people feeding their families by working at the resort, or in the vineyard, or the tannery.

There is a demand for luxury goods, and there always will be. A tax in the consumption of those goods cuts into the wages of the non-wealthy involved in their production.

Depends what you do with the taxes. If you use them to decrease the financial burden of just surviving for the non-wealthy population, that frees up their wealth for consumption of more reasonable items, which increases demand for those items, which creates more jobs supplying those items. So really, wouldn't this just be a matter of shifting jobs from supplying exclusive luxury items to supplying more common quality of life improving amenities?

Of course, I'm just a tech nerd with zero finance/economy training, so let me know if I'm missing something obvious.

Don't forget that those people are still going to be automated away from their jobs soon, so it's in everyone's best interest to figure out how to make society work without requiring people to slave away doing increasingly worthless and wasteful things. I.e. how to make those people feed their families without working on things that don't really need to be done.

Yes, but the tax money goes to the poor, which increases their consumption. So you should end up with fewer jobs in luxury resorts and more jobs in industries which produce necessities. The problem is that luxury goods and services tend to be labor-intensive, so you might end up with a net loss in jobs. Which is better? 10 people serving daiquiris to rich people, or 5 people producing socially beneficial things and 5 people out of a job?

> In these days, however, no one will deny that most enterprises fail. That means that a large amount of human labor, which might have been devoted to producing something that could be enjoyed, was expended on producing machines which, when produced, lay idle and did no good to anyone. The man who invests his savings in a concern that goes bankrupt is therefore injuring others as well as himself. If he spent his money, say, in giving parties for his friends, they (we may hope) would get pleasure, and so would all those upon whom he spent money, such as the butcher, the baker, and the bootlegger. But if he spends it (let us say) upon laying down rails for surface cars in some place where surface cars turn out not to be wanted, he has diverted a mass of labor into channels where it gives pleasure to no one. Nevertheless, when he becomes poor through failure of his investment he will be regarded as a victim of undeserved misfortune, whereas the gay spendthrift, who has spent his money philanthropically, will be despised as a fool and a frivolous person.

--Bertrand Russell, [In Praise of Idleness](http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html)

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