> That water bottle that an NGO was supposed to ship you for anything over a $20 donation?
"This NGO better be honest". It's not about the water bottle.
When I spend money, I expect something (to happen) in return. It doesn't have to benefit myself.
If you enjoy wasting money on books you are not going to read, I suggest you just set the money on fire instead. Or bury it and take the location to your grave. You'll do everyone else a favor by driving down the cost of goods, and nobody had to labor or waste resources on something you weren't planning to use. The economy will instead find something useful to do it with that labor and those resources.
Alternatively donate it as in your example - if you want to benefit someone specific. Maybe to the author whose book you weren't going to read?
>nobody had to labor or waste resources on something you weren't planning to use
If someone buys a collectible book with no intention of reading it, is it really a waste of resources?
Stuff is collectible because it's not being made any more and can't be. A signed first edition of something can't be sending an economic signal to produce more.
The money paid represents labor and resources forgone, and the more that the collectible costs, the more labor and resources is reserved for better purposes.
It is depriving someone else who would like to own it and possibly read it, but is that honestly a loss to society?
Here you are describing an edge case with collecting things because :
- You still need to manage / expose / dedicate space / maintain your collectibles to enjoy them
- It can be an investment so it’s really different than buying something to use it. It’s buying something hoping to resell it. Still, we could say you also pay with incertitude, maybe stress and responsibility if it’s something expensive.
>You still need to manage / expose / dedicate space / maintain your collectibles to enjoy them
This is true. A sense of proportion is always useful. Wouldn't you expect maintenance to be orders of magnitude smaller than creating things in the first place, very generally?
>It can be an investment so it’s really different than buying something to use it
I don't know what you are trying to say. Investment is inherently deferred consumption, and the higher the value, the more consumption is deferred. That leaves more resources for people who need them.
Imagine a stylized society with one rich person who has a billion dollars, and everybody else is poor.
If that person spends their billion dollars on a rare book, then the only thing that has been taken away from society is that book. And usually there is more than one copy of a book, so other people can still read the story, they just don't have the specific physical object.
But if they spend their billion dollars on, say, constructing a palace, then the resources could have been used to build thousands of homes for ordinary people.
"This NGO better be honest". It's not about the water bottle.
When I spend money, I expect something (to happen) in return. It doesn't have to benefit myself.
If you enjoy wasting money on books you are not going to read, I suggest you just set the money on fire instead. Or bury it and take the location to your grave. You'll do everyone else a favor by driving down the cost of goods, and nobody had to labor or waste resources on something you weren't planning to use. The economy will instead find something useful to do it with that labor and those resources.
Alternatively donate it as in your example - if you want to benefit someone specific. Maybe to the author whose book you weren't going to read?