Atanu Dey: “We have to distinguish between three distinct measures related to material prosperity: wealth, income and consumption. Wealth is a stock while income and consumption are flows. They are generally correlated but not perfectly so. A person with immense wealth may choose a level of consumption similar to a person with a modest income. Warren Buffett’s wealth is massive compared to that of a successful lawyer’s but their consumption would be quite similar. Basic point: we should be concerned about the consumption of the poor, and should be less concerned about the wealth of the super-wealthy. I don’t care how much wealth Bezos has; what I care about is whether a child is malnourished.”
Ray Dalio: “History has repeatedly shown that people tend to have a strong bias to believe that the future will look like a modestly modified version of the past even when the evidence and common sense point toward big changes. I believe that’s what’s going on and that we are in the part of the cycle when most people’s psychology and actions are shifting from deeply imbued disinflationary ones to inflationary ones. For example, people are just beginning to transition from measuring how rich they are by how much “nominal” (i.e., not inflation-adjusted) money and wealth they have to realizing that how rich they are should be measured in “real” (i.e., inflation-adjusted) money and wealth. From studying history, and with a bit of common sense, we know that when people shift their perceptions in that way, they change their investment and non-investment behaviors in ways that produce more inflation and that make central banks’ difficulties in balancing inflation and growth harder.”
Are We Measuring Our Lives in All the Wrong Ways? The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen believes that to understand modern life, we need to understand how games work.
