In theory they should make us richer, but there are a lot of asterisks with that narrative.
Economics is not all about material goods being made. The standard economic argument for entertainment is that the people purchasing the entertainment gain a subjective income value that they chose for purchasing the entertainment and that would be a value in the economy. Also the money that goes to the producers of the entertainment then is used by them often for much more concrete purposes such as housing or investments. In theory there is no reason why to think that this would not be the case for virtual goods as well.
Essentially, resources are redistributed to a materially better form while the person who they are redistributed from is completely happy with the arrangement.
The most underappreciated argument for this is that, especially and oftentimes, the producers of the digital goods are not terminally online Westerners. They are people in developing countries who may get significantly higher economic benefit from the money for its value and this may contribute significantly to the local economies.
However, there are a very large amount of caveats that make this very questionable.
The producer of the digital goods, particularly if they are a westerner, might not have a good grasp of their actual productive abilities and be applying them in a sub-optimal way.
I would argue that this is a very common thing that occurs for anybody producing art. Buying the digital goods may misunderstand the degree they are actually benefiting from the digital goods, and it might be preying on their psychological vulnerabilities or giving short-term dopamine rushes at the expense of long-term preferences. This is a commonly used idea in discourse, but I prefer not to use it because while I think it is completely true and I have in the past miscalculated my own preferences, there are a lot of moving parts and I don’t pretend to have better information about a person’s preferences than that person.
The platform that the digital goods are being sold on may be taking a very large percentage of the cut, and this would potentially cancel out a lot of the social benefits from redistribution to the producer.
Particularly in developed countries, producers might not be getting enough income to meaningfully change their economic position.
Externalities which the rest of the comment will cover
Externalities are the effects that somebody consuming a good or producing a good has on people that are not the producer or the consumer.
Pollution from manufacturing
Harmful behavior from someone consuming alcohol.
A person consuming education being less likely to commit crime
A restaurant that serves an invasive species in its meals, meaning that it is removing the invasive species from the environment
For a person consuming real-world goods and services, such as buying clothes or going to a coffee shop, there are many positive externalities. Somebody might make friends at a coffee shop, and the social benefit that the friend that they made gets is an externality. Somebody buying clothes for the real world might want to go outside to show them off and then meet people.
But I would argue that online, these things tend not to happen because people have established a culture of being very unwilling to use their real names online and distrusting people. So the chance of you forming a business partnership with a person that you met in VR chat is likely a lot lower than the person that you met at a local coffee shop.
So my conclusion would be that, yes, in theory, digital goods in virtual worlds do make us richer. But the issue is that it requires a very large amount of assumptions for the traditional economic model to actually hold.
Can anybody try to help me out with getting a bug in Ollama fixed?
I found a critical error 2 months ago https://latent-space.emmaleonhart.com/tokenization-error.html and a PR for a bug fix was started a week later https://github.com/ollama/ollama/pull/15627 however there has been absolutely no action on it. This issue causes serious silent failures for about half the world’s population so it is very disappointing that no action has been taken on it at all.