A cent does have a nonzero amount of purchasing power, but none of my victims have actually lost the ability to purchase anything
Assuming that none of them end up one cent short for something they would otherwise have been able to pay for, which out of a billion people is probably going to happen. It doesn’t have to be their next purchase.
But this is analogous to saying some tiny percentage of the people who got dust specks would be driving a car at that moment and lose control, resulting in an accident. That would be an entirely different ballgame, even if the percent of people this happened to was unimaginably tiny, because in an unimaginably vast population, lots of people are bound to die of gruesome dust-speck related accidents.
But Eliezer explicitly denied any externalities at all; in our hypothetical the chance of accidents, blindness, etc are literally zero. So the chances of not being able to afford a vital heart transplant or whatever for want of a penny must also be literally zero in the analogous hypothetical, no matter how ridiculously large the population gets.
Not being able to pay for something due to the loss of money isn’t an externality, it’s the only kind of direct consequence you’re going to get. If you took a hundred thousand dollars from an individual, they might still be able to make their next purchase, but the direct consequence would be their being unable to pay for things they could previously have afforded.
Assuming that none of them end up one cent short for something they would otherwise have been able to pay for, which out of a billion people is probably going to happen. It doesn’t have to be their next purchase.
But this is analogous to saying some tiny percentage of the people who got dust specks would be driving a car at that moment and lose control, resulting in an accident. That would be an entirely different ballgame, even if the percent of people this happened to was unimaginably tiny, because in an unimaginably vast population, lots of people are bound to die of gruesome dust-speck related accidents.
But Eliezer explicitly denied any externalities at all; in our hypothetical the chance of accidents, blindness, etc are literally zero. So the chances of not being able to afford a vital heart transplant or whatever for want of a penny must also be literally zero in the analogous hypothetical, no matter how ridiculously large the population gets.
Not being able to pay for something due to the loss of money isn’t an externality, it’s the only kind of direct consequence you’re going to get. If you took a hundred thousand dollars from an individual, they might still be able to make their next purchase, but the direct consequence would be their being unable to pay for things they could previously have afforded.