I'm fairly sure I'm the only 24-year-old grad-student with a Roth IRA topped-up for 2012-2014, and this is because when I got extra money, it went into the retirement account rather than towards consumption, or even towards extra charity.

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.

If we want to talk about how money is awesome, we should also be talking about how to make sure that people who aren't like us actually get some of it. I mean it: no amount of Tumblry "checking our privilege" is actually going to make the people who work in, say, our favorite food trucks or hole-in-the-wall falafel joints, anywhere near as wealthy as us. We'll need to actually exercise our intelligence for that.

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.