the distortion of "there is potential profit we did not earn" as "there is money we lost" is fascinating and disgusting to me. "megamediaconglomerate lost $1,000,000,000 to piracy this year" is a flat out lie. it is not true. they did not have a billion dollars, that they now do not have. they felt entitled to one billion dollars, that they did not have, and still do not have. it's an infuriating perversion of the truth
I had to take an economics course as a degree requirement, and turns out that this bullshit redefinition of “not profit” into “loss” isn’t just used in the context of whining about piracy, it’s actually the underpinning of modern economics as a whole.
All the calculations, all the decisions for what investments to make or not make, rely on the assumption that the maximum possible amount of money you hypothetically could be making is the amount you should assume you are making, and any less money than that is a loss. It is literally built into the equations mathematically.
It goes like this: any amount of money you have right now is assumed to grow as time passes, because you’ve ~invested~ it. So if you have $1,000 now, it’s worth more than $1,000 in the future, once you’ve made a profit off of it. So then, if someone says they will pay you $1,000 in the future, you treat it as if it were worth less than $1,000 right now, because it doesn’t include the extra money you could have made if they gave you the $1,000 now. Literally, you subtract from the real value an amount of money which is not yours and never was, because you assume it should have been yours.
It’s an incredibly bizarre, greedy, and self-centered perspective which completely detaches the value of money from it’s actual... value... in the sense of buying power. It’s painfully obvious that the people who conceived this don’t actually see money as a thing you use, like, to acquire groceries, but rather as a game to be won.
The weirdest thing is that economists don’t tell you that this is the assumption being made. They’ve gone so deep they don’t even recognize it for what it is. I kept asking the professor why this whole stupid thing about money growing over time was built in to every equation and she kept coming back with, “because it works like that” and “you have to keep up with the market rate of growth” and genuinely seemed not to understand that this model is completely divergent from how money works if you are actually spending it, like us plebeians do, rather than ~investing~ it.
Anyway, I find that I can make a horrible sort of sense out of the shit economists say, now that I see that they see the economy as a sort of video-game-like simulation, in which profit magically accrues over time, and anything which makes it fail to do so must be a glitch in the system. Meanwhile the people doing the labor that actually generates the profit are paid an amount that, if they’re lucky, breaks even with their cost of living; and if they do make enough to save up a bit of extra, the bank interest rate is probably about on par with inflation, so there’s certainly no magical long-term growth. So the economy exists as two very different systems overlapped: one in which money has a very real value and comes and goes in life-or-death ways, and one in which money is a video game that many people spend their whole day playing, as a job, which also coincidentally gives them enough of the real kind of money in their paycheck that they never even realize that money could be life or death. That is to say, The Economy exists as a parasite on the economy, and somehow, economists fail to notice this.
Apparently, this particular model of economics can be attributed to the Chicago School of Economics, it’s relatively recent, and within the memory of what we consider Modern Capitalism there were other paradigms that went a little less off the deep end about profit and infinite growth. Also, not all economists subscribe to this and some of you are probably mad at me for generalizing, but I don’t care, because a) fuck economists anyway and b) this is the dominant paradigm that’s eating all our lives. Don’t at me about the history of economics, I know as much about it as I care to and hate all of it.
