The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy
I have a friend who opened a coffee shop a year ago. It&#x27;s gone really well, she&#x27;s been profitable beyond expectations, etc (this is not in the U.S. by the way, if it were I&#x27;d imagine there&#x27;s a good chance COVID lockdown would&#x27;ve killed the business, but I digress).<p>I said &quot;wow you&#x27;re doing really well, have you thought about opening a second location?&quot;<p>Her response? &quot;I thought about it, but it&#x27;s a lot of work. I actually wish that instead of opening this coffee shop, I had used that money instead to buy an apartment. I would&#x27;ve made more money on the price appreciation doing nothing than what I&#x27;ve made so far on this coffee shop.&quot;<p>I was so shocked and disappointed to hear this, but at the same time I couldn&#x27;t blame her. And to me this basically sums up the problem with modern capitalism.<p>The incentives are all wrong. Our top university graduates overwhelmingly want to work in finance and consulting. Living the &quot;dream&quot; is owning 15 rental properties and living off &quot;passive&quot; income. Nobody wants to do actual work, and even worse, there&#x27;s often even a negative stigma with doing real work, as if managers and executives are &quot;above&quot; labor.<p>When &quot;making money&quot; is equated to &quot;providing value&quot;, it incentives and morally rationalizes the vain pursuit of money, even if at society&#x27;s expense. I&#x27;m guessing this mental gymnastics rationalizing and even glorifying money making and price gouging is a big reason why in the U.S. we still haven&#x27;t fixed the skyrocketing cost of healthcare and higher education.<p>EDIT: Since apparently people are misconstruing the point of the story, my point is not that the world needs more coffee shops and worker bees doing busy work, my point is that our system incentivizes the wrong things - namely financial asset speculation and wealth extraction over real work (the whole point of the book in this thread). Flipping a condo contributes nothing to society.