Comment on Concrete vs Contextual values

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 19:07:17 GMT

Your money example is a linguistic trick. It uses nominal wealth.

I would like to expand on this idea. Earning interest on a savings account is not a FOOM, but an attempt to participate in someone else's FOOM. The real economic FOOM comes from using one's resources to develop better resource producing capabilities, e.g. building a factory or tools (which may at some point be obsolete, the trick is to get a good return on the investment before that happens, and then move on to a new investment). A savings account, on the other hand, is able to collect interest by providing loans to people who have plans to make good investments. The interest rate they can collect will be low because there are more savings accounts than skilled investors (and the savings accounts compete with other loan providers, like central banks that can print money for loans, which incidentally also causes the inflation that negates the value of the interest earned).

Generally, it is not a problem that FOOMs may fail due to competition, as one of them will win the competition, just as the serious investors do better than those who use savings accounts.

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