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Nornagest comments on Things I Wish They'd Taught Me When I Was Younger: Why Money Is Awesome - Less Wrong
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This is true for me as well (I'm slightly older), but I also have some sources of income that I expect most graduate students don't.
But one of the main reasons why money is awesome is because spending money is rivalrous. My primary expensive hobby is art collecting. I have the number of original paintings I have because I put up more money than the other people bidding on them, and if everyone had more money, then the primary effect would be that the prices increase.
When you say we need to exercise our intelligence, let me talk about Franklin Barbecue in Austin. It's quite possibly the best barbecue in the US, and they've sold out of brisket every day that they've been open. Officially, it opens at 11 AM, but generally people recommend that you show up at ~8 AM to wait in line.
To the economist in me, this is a terrible setup. They could spend their customers' extra money; they can't spend their customers' wasted time. They should auction off the barbecue, which will raise prices and lower wait times. But it'll also get rid of the communal experience of waiting in line, and less of their customers will be students and more of them will be engineers. The way to get more money to 'food trucks' is to embrace the inequality that makes engineers that will bid on barbecue.
It's not exactly bidding, but I happened to read an article this morning about the $4 artisan toast available in a certain San Francisco coffeeshop, which seems to largely fit the bill. Yet about half the article was taken up by tedious kvetching about how the Bay Area tech industry is driving up the standard of living.
One could argue (and indeed I largely agree) that this ignores the artisan toastmaster side of that economic equation, or raise any number of other objections, but that's not the point. The point is that this is a tough political sell.
(Statement of conflicting interest: I am in fact an exploitative Bay Area techie.)
The Marxist in me wishes to point out that if you're part of the tech salariat rather than the VC class or real-estate rentier class, you are not in fact exploitative. The fact that the Bay Area confuses "high productivity worker" with "exploitative capitalist" is one of its larger collective errors of thinking.
In the wage / rent / interest model, the skilled person's salary should probably be modelled as a mix of wage and rent.
The wage in its pure form is what a completely replaceable employee gets. The fact that the employee is completely replaceable will drive the wage down to the level where it barely covers the expenses to survive. Of course the expenses are different at different places, so the wages will reflect that, but that additional money just goes through you, and at the end you don't benefit from it.
The rent in its pure form is what you get for auctioning a use of a scarce resource (such as land). An intelligent person with mathematical skills good enough to work in IT is in some sense a scarce resource. They can be replaced (but you can also move from a piece of land to another piece of land), but it's difficult, and there are not enough skilled people for every employer's every whim. The employers are competing among themselves, and this creates the rent. -- If you could somehow separate your talent from your person, and send the talent to the work while you stay at home and have fun, that would be a rent in its pure form. But because it doesn't work this way, your wage and your rent are connected together.
And the interest in its pure form is money making another money. Which you can achieve by investing your rent in an index fund. So a techie can become an evil capitalist, too; it just doesn't happen automatically and requires some strategic thinking.
Ah, that was a pleasant bit of reminder. Thank you.
(Though I did mention I have a maxed-out Roth IRA. I very much am trying to become an evil capitalist, on grounds that within this system it is my only rational move, should I desire to do anything other than work for a minimum subsistence. I still want the system changed and overthrown.)
The toast is Josey Baker Bread (yes, that's actually his name; short documentary here) and it really is that good. By which I mean, as another exploitative Bay Area techie, I've paid that price at The Mill more than once and I felt it was worth it.
The toast only manages to be worth four dollars to you because four dollars is worth less to you than to poorer people. (At least in the sense of how much you would care if you lost four dollars and what you would be willing to do to get another four dollars).