{"id":17029,"date":"2012-09-22T10:08:31","date_gmt":"2012-09-22T15:08:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=17029"},"modified":"2012-09-22T10:08:31","modified_gmt":"2012-09-22T15:08:31","slug":"charles-stross-on-the-diminishing-marginal-utility-of-just-about-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/09\/22\/charles-stross-on-the-diminishing-marginal-utility-of-just-about-everything\/","title":{"rendered":"Charles Stross on the diminishing marginal utility of just about everything"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A post <a href=\"http:\/\/www.antipope.org\/charlie\/blog-static\/2012\/09\/on-the-diminishing-marginal-ut.html\" target=\"_blank\">at his blog<\/a> looks at an economic concept that is becoming familiar to more of us than ever before (even in the middle of a long-term economic crisis):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>There&#8217;s a concept in economics called the diminishing marginal utility of money. Loosely put: if you give a \u00a320 bill to a homeless dude, it will make his day &mdash; it&#8217;s worth a bunch of hot meals or a hostel bed for a few nights. If you give \u00a320 to an average wage earner, it&#8217;s nice but not a game-changer: it&#8217;s worth a couple of cinema tickets or a round of drinks at the pub. And if you give \u00a320 to a billionaire they probably won&#8217;t know what to do with it &mdash; they have employees to carry the money around for them, and anyway, they earn more in the time it takes to open their wallet and stash the bill than the \u00a320 note is worth. They&#8217;re <em>losing<\/em> money by taking it!<\/p>\n<p>Money. The more of it you&#8217;ve got, the less useful any additional increment becomes. And you don&#8217;t have to be a millionaire to get a handle for this.<\/p>\n<p>These days, I&#8217;m in the weird position where almost all the stuff I would want to buy with any additional income is either stuff I can simply buy <em>right now<\/em> &#8230; or it isn&#8217;t available at any price.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A post at his blog looks at an economic concept that is becoming familiar to more of us than ever before (even in the middle of a long-term economic crisis): There&#8217;s a concept in economics called the diminishing marginal utility of money. Loosely put: if you give a \u00a320 bill to a homeless dude, it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[369,563,315],"class_list":["post-17029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-interesting","tag-money","tag-wealth"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4qF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17029"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17029\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17031,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17029\/revisions\/17031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}