Rich people don't predominately buy art from artists (for $100,000). They spend $100,000 on art from some art dealer, or other rich people; who paid $80,000 for it from someone else; that someone else paid $60,000 for it; and twenty steps down the line is either an actual artist who made pennies, or the artist is dead and no one involved had anything to do with its creation.

This is a similar phenomena as the stock market. "Why does the stock market exist" is an interesting question. The textbook answer would be: it allows companies to sell pieces of themselves to the public in order to raise capital. The caveat to this answer is, 99.99...9% of transactions on the stock market every day do not land money back in the company's checking account; the money lands with the person who owned the stock previously. Because of Federal Reserve Guaranteed Inflation, that person probably, usually, over long enough periods of time, paid less for it than the current buyer, and five million exchanges down the chain for this physical stock certificate is the company, during their IPO (or when they release more stock), who made just a bit of money.

There's nothing intrinsically negative in what I described above; its just "markets". In fact, here's the counter-argument to the point the article makes about it being negative: Why would I, as an Investor, purchase a slice of the pizza delivery app Sliceline at IPO if I cannot make a return on that investment? Framework, the company making fully upgradeable and repairable laptops, needs funding; why would I invest in them if not to see a return on investment? I'm a homeowner; maybe I shouldn't purchase a painting from a struggling local artist; after all, it probably won't see a return on investment.

I intentionally slid down the slope of examples there to prove a point. Imagine you Have Money; maybe a lot of money, let's call it N dollars. How you spend that N dollars communicates your morals, ethics, and values; it defines what your future looks like, and at large enough values of N, progressively starts defining what the future of our society looks like.

A recent tweet, which I haven't found but you can search for, paraphrased: "In ten years, my husband's salary has increased 90%, while mine has increased 18%. I've spent most of that time curing cancer; he's been optimizing ad click rates."

What we're talking about is a phenomena I'd label as The Assetization of Everything. The vast majority of the monetary expenses wealthy individuals and corporations make is viewed through the lens of return on investment. Its very rare to see a corporation, or even wealthy individuals, say "we believe in X, we believe X is good for our society, so we are giving X $10M". "Investors" would ask: Wait, are you getting stock? Is it a loan? Can you write it down on your taxes? What's going on? Yet, anyone is totally able to do this. Its not because of some law, though corporate fiduciary duty isn't helping. Federal Reserve policy did accelerate it, but its not the cause. The cause is Cultural. It can't be fixed.

We, the world, are approaching the endgame of this very quickly. It won't be pretty. We are not allocating even adjacent orders of magnitudes enough resources toward solving problems that represent existential threats to, at minimum, our way of life; maybe society as we know it; possibly civilization; unlikely, but, the human race. Its not going to start with any of the traditional culprits though; AI, global warming, killer virus, whatever. It'll start with something that seems rather inane: it'll get harder and harder to find investments which generate returns. Put another way: deflation; we had an era of ridiculous prosperity where we could have allocated resources to stave off the coming actual crisis, but we didn't, and now no one wants to invest in solving them.