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Comment on 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?parent

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I'm not sure if I'm following this example. A 500M Yacht concretely uses a large amount of materials/engineers/building expertise, right? It's not the exact same skills as building apartments but it is concrete "atoms" in terms of materials, engineering, sweat labor, fuel. Those resources could be used on apartments.

It's not like there's a fixed number of naturally occurring megayachts around and the $500m price is a fiction that isn't fungible to be used on other things

It doesn't seem related to the "you have a trillion dollars on paper but that's mostly fiction" topic. The $500m yacht has been materialized to "atoms" and isn't on paper anymore.

Yep but if you take all that paper wealth and distribute it you aint getting much physical shit out of it. The yacht example is relevant for ratio of how even physically manifested rich people toys convert to real world things people care about. 250M NYC apartment only consumed physical resources enough to build 15 regular size homes and so on.

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