david and i talked a while the other night about economic disparity (to summarize very poorly), and more specifically, about the completely different economies that emerge for people who have a lot of money. it started by talking about fancy restaurants, and i commented on how crazy it is that, once you pass a certain threshold, price really starts to be based on factors that have nothing to do with cost or quality – it simply costs an amount that only people with a certain amount of money will be able to afford, and part of what you are buying, by paying that much, is prestige.
i understand this in some ways and am totally baffled by it in others.
i understand the reasoning behind it, but as i said to david, i still just can’t get over the fact that the currency that forms the basis of these elite economies is still actually Real money. that, as much financial sense as it might make for a billionaire to spend $1,000 on dinner, that very same $1,000, in the hands of a poor family in Africa, would be a full year’s income for three or four adults.
this is bizarre to me, and as much as i know that the picture is much more complex, it strikes me as excessive. i don’t expect the gap to disappear, but i can’t help but think that it could be quite a bit smaller without even requiring the upper crust to tighten its belts.
anyway, we went back and forth about these things for a while, with david playing devil’s advocate for the complexity of the situation and for the rights of the wealthy to spend their money as they please.
it got a bit frustrating near the end because i felt like my argument was getting diverted into a “rich people should be more compassionate” speech, which wasn’t my point at all. i was really just saying that i was puzzled by the economics of extreme wealth. i think that it’s strange that the economy of wealth and the economy of subsistence are so incredibly far apart, and i don’t really get why the market doesn’t offer more choices for the “i want nice things but i’m not trying to prove anything so don’t jack around with the pricing” niche. why is it easy to get dinner on a scale between $10 and $100, and then easy again on a scale between $300 and $500, but much harder in between? i conjectured that maybe i should start a business with the goal of selling high quality goods for a small but sustainable profit and then marking them up to appeal to the “i pay this much because i can” crowd, but with the catch that i give the difference between my profit and the markup to charity.
that’s kind of an interesting idea, but it’s kind of an artificial workaround. what i was really grappling with was the question of why the gap exists in the first place.
david agreed that there’s something kind of funny about it, and then we had one of those “ok, um…. yeah, so what about [something else]?” kind of topic shifts.
so that’s fine. still more interesting stuff there, i guess, but what i am actually posting about is that i was thinking about it a little more after we hung up, and i started wondering, as i often do, about how the core of what lit me up in that discussion relates to what i want to do for a living. i asked myself what really bothered me about it, and what i thought should be done, and i hit on the idea that i might just be bothered by the nagging feeling that the market isn’t filling the gap because people don’t have enough information. i thought about things like the organic food/sweatshop-free/fair trade movements, and how i believe that more people really would consider those kinds of factors in their buying habits if it weren’t just too much to think about. this came up monday when i was shopping with tiffanie and we started talking about mcdonalds and walmart.
[still drafting…]