This is an excellent defense. Having a $4.5 million dollar wedding may be jerky, but better he spend the money than hoard it; unemployment is high. Sounds like a badly maintained and forgotten site is going to end up improved due to a billionaire's urge to create a magical fairy garden for a day.
Hope this gets upvoted enough to salvage people's views on this incident.
The "hoarding" argument has no economic basis. Money that is saved in stocks, bonds, or bank accounts is immediately put to use by companies, banks, or governments.
> Money that is saved in stocks, bonds, or bank accounts is immediately put to use by companies, banks, or governments.
Oh is it? really?
In the real world (not the fantasy land of trickle-down economics), money that is saved in stocks, bonds and bank accounts is NOT immediately put to use by companies, banks or governments.
Banks have done a terrible job putting the money given to them by the government and the Federal Reserve to work. Small business lending dried up and has taken years to recover, despite all the efforts to convince banks to do otherwise.
The government did a notoriously bad job of putting the stimulus spending money to work.
As for businesses, hiring has been slow, wages stagnant and investment weak for years, despite an excess of cash (profits).
Almost nothing has been done to stimulate demand, much has been done to stimulate supply.
So, arguments about "hoarding" have not only economic basis, they have a basis in fact as well.
Granted, on those grounds, Sean Parker should be lauded for putting some of his money to work.
This is Say's Law, and was believed throughout the 19th century until being vigorously challenged by Keynes in his "General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money". The "General" in the title specifically refers to the fact that the theory goes beyond the "special" conditions in which Say's Law holds. There are still believers in Say's Law but the mainstream economic position is that it is false in general.
No, it certainly is not. Loans create deposits when creditworthy borrowers show up and ask for them, and required reserves are obtained afterwards from the cheapest source available.
It doesn't have to be my business for me to think it's jerky. I'm sure I think things that you're doing in the privacy of your own home, that I will never hear about, are jerky, and vice-versa. Luckily, if it becomes public information, I don't have to ask your permission to either have, or express those feelings.
Of course, you're entitled to your own opinion, just the same as I'm entitled to have an acerbic reaction to your value judgement of how people should use their money.
There's nothing wrong with judging people based on how they spend their money. There are admirable ways of spending money (such as Parker's "conservation buying") and less admirable ways of spending money. Spend your money as you want, but your spending shows your values.
The interesting thing in this case is that Parker himself admits it: "Finally, you mention that what we did was
'extravagant' yet none of the usual tasteless crap that rich people do at their weddings was present here — no ice sculptures, no caviar, no pop stars hired to sing their hits songs, etc. This is why your article and so many other articles have been so deeply offensive."
The reason people would find spending $4.5 million on ice sculptures (for example) offensive or tasteless is that a huge amount of human time and effort would be expended on something completely temporary, with nothing to show for it. The opportunity cost is that all that effort could have been spent on something with lasting value. Parker's spending is therefore equally tasteless.
I should say that I am not judging Parker here. A wedding is a big deal, the amount of money we are talking about here is not all that huge, and Parker seems to have some consciousness about his spending. I am, though, defending the right of others to judge Parker. Mild social criticism---not tar-and-feathering---for extravagant spending, and social praise for positive spending, is good for society as a whole.
Can you define 'completely temporary?' A chef paid to create a once in a life time meal for something like this is honing their craft. An Ice Sculptor is probably creating their masterwork. The biologists he used may have never had a chance to work on conserving an area this large.
An architect builds houses that the wind will erode away over the next 500 years.
How permanent does something need to be to make the creation of it worthwhile?
> All that effort could have been spent on something with lasting value.
How much of the money we spend day-to-day actually fits this criteria?
I buy food that I pass a day later, I watch TV that benefits nobody, and I type on a keyboard to make software, that, while valued by others, isn't exactly art or anything (like the bridge in Sean Parker's wedding, it is useful for a time, and will eventually be discarded when it is no longer wanted).
And I bet his guests drove on public roads to get there. Some of them may have even have had public educations!
Taking advantage of government services available to everyone does not preclude one from expecting the usual degree of privacy and respect we accord to our fellow citizens.
I think it was actually private land, which was simply made accessible to the public under certain conditions. Parker's position is that the campground was temporarily closed anyway, and that his wedding did not deny anybody access who would otherwise have had it.
According to what Sean Parker wrote, it's somewhat inaccurate to call it a $4.5 million wedding:
"I will say, against my better instinct to tell you, that we
spent roughly $4.5 million on prepping the site and big part of
that was restoring the forest floor (I should say, covering the
forest floor with plants) since it had been paved over in black
asphalt or cleared by bulldozers before we ever laid eyes on the
campground."
Taking what he wrote at face value, perhaps $3M or more of that remains behind as an improvement to the forest itself. If he spent that $4.5M renovating a dilapidated church and then had a potluck wedding where he spent nothing, would that still be a $4.5M wedding given that all the value accrues to the church itself?
Anyone who's ever gotten married will tell you that weddings are very expensive. $4.5MM is a couple of orders of magnitude above average, but not out of line - what else should they spend their money on if not a declaration of their mutual love?
Snort! My wedding cost less than $100 US. (Now if we had "fuck you money" like the individual in the article, my wife could have possibly spent 6 figures on the honeymoon instead of road tripping and budgeting.)
Two of the most expensive weddings, ($200K+), I've been invite to or a groomsman in, both ended in divorce within 2 years.
Hope this gets upvoted enough to salvage people's views on this incident.