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taelor 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.
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.)