taelor comments on Things I Wish They'd Taught Me When I Was Younger: Why Money Is Awesome - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (234)
This assumes that a) there is a fixed supply of original paintings, and b) the demand for original painings is income inelastic. Admittedly, I'm not an expert on the art market, but my intuition is that the opposite is the case on both counts: as incomes rise, I would expect people to spend a larger percentage of their income on luxary goods such as art. If this is the case, then, yes, everyone having more money would indeed cause the price of original paintings to go up, but they would rise at a faster rate than less elastic goods, which would cause production of said paintings to go up, which would drive prices back down; the net effect is that more people have more paintings.
I decided to not elaborate on that because the second-order effects depend on why everyone has more money. If it's because everyone is more productive, then there's also lots more art floating around, because the artists are also more productive. I do agree that people who are richer spend more money on luxuries like art, but it's not clear to me that all ways of giving people more money actually make more rich people.
But even if there's a bunch more art floating around, there is a fixed supply of the best original paintings, and those will still go to whoever wants to spend the most money at art auctions. (Of course, best is subjective, and so on, but that's part of the point of using auctions.)