When you get some money, it doesn't really matter whether you spend it or put it under your mattress or even burn it. If you remove it from circulation, your central bank will just print more money to hit their inflation targets.
(Of course, your central bank doesn't check in your garden whether you buried some money. They follow price and spending statistics in aggregate.)
If you dig up your money, the central bank will print less money or even remove money from circulation by selling assets from their balance sheet.
It does make some difference whether you consume or invest. But that's because of a difference in how resources are used.
If you burn your money in a big fire, that's approximately equivalent to a donation to your central bank. If you bury it, and dig it up ten years later, that's approximately equivalent to an interest free loan to your central bank.
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Production isn't useful by itself. Production is what we do to enable consumption. We don't need to worship production nor put it on a pedestal.
Both sports betting and producing the Titanic spends some resources to entertain people. If sports betting spends less resources for each unit of entertainment, that would be great. (In a competitive market, that would drive down the cost of sports betting, eg bookies would compete by offering tighter spreads or more exciting bets or whatever. Alas, I don't know enough about sports betting to tell what people find enticing about it.)
But the resources spend on both running the sports betting systems and on producing Titanic are gone. Those work hours of those thousands of professionals that worked on Titanic don't come back. They are a cost, not a benefit.
> But the resources spend on both running the sports betting systems and on producing Titanic are gone. Those work hours of those thousands of professionals that worked on Titanic don't come back. They are a cost, not a benefit.
Isn't velocity of money a question in this though? The spending on producing Titanic pours the money into pockets (workers and businesses) who will spend it faster into the larger economy (consumption/hiring others to do projects) than what the sports betting company will, the spending from the wages of those workers will, on average, be more diluted into other productive means which will support other businesses and workers. In my view this is a more beneficial way for society than the accumulation of the same capital into a sports betting company, while betting has many more negative impact to society (addiction, for example) than watching Titanic has.
> Isn't velocity of money a question in this though?
No, that's pretty much irrelevant. I was giving an example of someone digging a hole to dump their money in. That money's velocity would be pretty much zero. The central bank will just print more money to make up the shortfall.
It's the same, but less extreme, if velocity falls to eg half of what it was instead of zero: the central bank notices that inflation is below target, and prints more money.
The net result is that the overall nominal (!) spending in the economy is whatever the central bank wants it to be. For that total nominal (!) spending figure, decisions by individual economic actors are pretty much irrelevant; because there's a control system with a negative feedback loop.
But there is probably better ecosystem effects to filming the Titanic compared to increased sports betting. The derivative economies from the Titanic is probably bigger.
(Of course, your central bank doesn't check in your garden whether you buried some money. They follow price and spending statistics in aggregate.)
If you dig up your money, the central bank will print less money or even remove money from circulation by selling assets from their balance sheet.
It does make some difference whether you consume or invest. But that's because of a difference in how resources are used.
If you burn your money in a big fire, that's approximately equivalent to a donation to your central bank. If you bury it, and dig it up ten years later, that's approximately equivalent to an interest free loan to your central bank.
---
Production isn't useful by itself. Production is what we do to enable consumption. We don't need to worship production nor put it on a pedestal.
Both sports betting and producing the Titanic spends some resources to entertain people. If sports betting spends less resources for each unit of entertainment, that would be great. (In a competitive market, that would drive down the cost of sports betting, eg bookies would compete by offering tighter spreads or more exciting bets or whatever. Alas, I don't know enough about sports betting to tell what people find enticing about it.)
But the resources spend on both running the sports betting systems and on producing Titanic are gone. Those work hours of those thousands of professionals that worked on Titanic don't come back. They are a cost, not a benefit.