Stage 1: Most assets. Apples are valued for their taste and nutrition. Stocks of apple-farming companies are claims to profit which comes from providing apples, which are valued. Shares in prediction markets eventually cash out.
Stage 2: Assets held because the holder thinks others will, perhaps erroneously, think it has increased in stage 1 value. Includes Ponzi schemes and Enron stocks/options.
Stage 3: Manifold Market stocks and some memecoins, which are associated with a thing, person, or concept, which is used as a Schelling point to determine their value. One only expects their value to correlate with the associated concept because everyone else thinks it’ll correlate and buy and sell accordingly.
Stage 4: Cryptocurrency and assets of pure speculation, where the price rises only because everyone expects it will rise and buys accordingly, mutatis mutandis for lowering. Also includes fiat currency, which is valuable because everyone agrees to use it as a medium of exchange.
It’s not generally possible to cleanly separate assets into things valued for stage 1 reasons vs other reasons. You may claim these are edge cases but the world is full of edge cases:
Apples are primarily valued on taste; other foods even more so (nutrition is more efficiently achieved via bitter greens, rice, beans, and vitamins than a typical Western diet). You can tell because Honeycrisp apples are much higher priced than lower-quality apples despite being nutritionally equivalent. But taste is highly subjective so value is actually based on weighted population average taste
Fiat currency is valuable because the government demands taxes in fiat rather than apples, because this is vastly more efficient.
Luxury brands, and therefore stocks of luxury brands, are mostly valuable because their brand is a status symbol; companies transition between their value being from a status symbol, positive reputation, other IP, physical capital, or other things
Real estate in a city is valued because it’s near people and infrastructure, in turn because everyone has settled on it as a Schelling point, because it had a port 80 years ago or something
Mortgage-backed securities had higher value in 2007 because a credit rating agency’s mathematical formula said they would be worth a larger number of dollars. The credit rating agency had incentives to say this but they were not the holder, and the holder believed them
Many assets have higher value than others purely due to higher liquidity
I pretty much agree with this. I just posted this as a way of illustrating how simulacrum stages could be generalized to be more than just about signalling and language. In a way, even stocks are stage 4 since they cash out in currency, so that stuff can be one stage in one way but another stage in another way.
Simulacrum stages as various kinds of assets:
Stage 1: Most assets. Apples are valued for their taste and nutrition. Stocks of apple-farming companies are claims to profit which comes from providing apples, which are valued. Shares in prediction markets eventually cash out.
Stage 2: Assets held because the holder thinks others will, perhaps erroneously, think it has increased in stage 1 value. Includes Ponzi schemes and Enron stocks/options.
Stage 3: Manifold Market stocks and some memecoins, which are associated with a thing, person, or concept, which is used as a Schelling point to determine their value. One only expects their value to correlate with the associated concept because everyone else thinks it’ll correlate and buy and sell accordingly.
Stage 4: Cryptocurrency and assets of pure speculation, where the price rises only because everyone expects it will rise and buys accordingly, mutatis mutandis for lowering. Also includes fiat currency, which is valuable because everyone agrees to use it as a medium of exchange.
It’s not generally possible to cleanly separate assets into things valued for stage 1 reasons vs other reasons. You may claim these are edge cases but the world is full of edge cases:
Apples are primarily valued on taste; other foods even more so (nutrition is more efficiently achieved via bitter greens, rice, beans, and vitamins than a typical Western diet). You can tell because Honeycrisp apples are much higher priced than lower-quality apples despite being nutritionally equivalent. But taste is highly subjective so value is actually based on weighted population average taste
Fiat currency is valuable because the government demands taxes in fiat rather than apples, because this is vastly more efficient.
Luxury brands, and therefore stocks of luxury brands, are mostly valuable because their brand is a status symbol; companies transition between their value being from a status symbol, positive reputation, other IP, physical capital, or other things
Real estate in a city is valued because it’s near people and infrastructure, in turn because everyone has settled on it as a Schelling point, because it had a port 80 years ago or something
Mortgage-backed securities had higher value in 2007 because a credit rating agency’s mathematical formula said they would be worth a larger number of dollars. The credit rating agency had incentives to say this but they were not the holder, and the holder believed them
Many assets have higher value than others purely due to higher liquidity
I pretty much agree with this. I just posted this as a way of illustrating how simulacrum stages could be generalized to be more than just about signalling and language. In a way, even stocks are stage 4 since they cash out in currency, so that stuff can be one stage in one way but another stage in another way.