I think you are slightly muddling your phrases.
You are richer if you can afford more goods and better goods. But not all goods will necessarily change price in the same direction. Its entirely possible that you can become richer, but that food prices grow faster than your new income. (For example, imagine that your income doubles, that food prices also double, but prices of other things drop so that inflation remains zero. You can afford more non-food stuff, and the same amount of food, so you are richer overall. This could happen even if food prices had gone up faster than your income.)
I think a (slightly cartoony) real life example is servants. Rich people today are richer than rich people in Victorian times, but fewer rich people today (in developed countries) can afford to have servants. This is because the price of hiring servants has gone up faster than the incomes of these rich people. So it is possible for people to get richer overall, while at the same time some specific goods or services become less accessible.
Maybe a more obvious example is rent (or housing in general). A modern computer programmer in Silicon valley could well be paying a larger percentage of their income on housing than a medieval peasant. But, they can afford more of other things than that peasant could.
would creating huge markets in the Metaverse for buying and selling digital goods make us actually richer?
Yes. If you measure "huge" by number of 2025 dollars spent in those markets, rather than number of items sold (copies of digital goods could have very low prices due to low marginal costs of production, after all).
An example to illustrate why: Suppose in year 0, with no metaverse, I am someone who is employed in a way that does not fully use my talents, but I am able to get by. To directly address your question about agrigultural production, let's say I'm a subsistence farmer.
In year 10, there is a thriving metaverse where I can perform various digital activities for money. More money than I could make as a subsistence farmer. So I start doing some of that, and my income goes up. And because of that, I'm able to access loans and credit that I was not able to before. So my ability to invest in productivity-enhancing equipment on my farming operation goes up. And I do so, and my farm income goes up, and more agricultural production has occurred.
Or, let's suppose I'm not a subsistence farmer. Let's suppose I'm unemployed, and I skill up in year 10 and do some digital thing for which I get paid. And my ability to access more and better quality food goes up. I spend some of my money on that. As a result, a mix of things happens. The demand for the food I buy goes up slightly, which means those who can produce it cheaply make a bigger profit, and invest more in producing more of that food, and to the extent that the demand can't immediately be met in this way the price spikes a little, which brings more production on line as new businesses decide they can make a profit at this higher price point. Exactly how much of my income goes to increased profit for existing producers who then shift more of their efforts towards that line of business, how much goes to a price spike that brings new producers into the market, and how much is other effects, is hard to answer, but in equilibrium under competition, price = marginal cost, so to a first approximation, enough extra production gets brought online to meet the demand my buying generates, and maybe the marginal cost goes up because some inputs to that production are scarce, or maybe marginal cost goes down because of economies of scale. But roughly, probably, price goes up a little and production goes up to meet the new demand.
Most likely an individual isn't going to make a noticeable difference, they'll just get served out of existing inventory. But scale that story up by 1000x and you start being able to see the effects.
The key here is I've been able to do a new, more valuable thing, which makes the people around me better off, and some of the benefit of this is captured in how much they are willing to pay me. Whether that's a physical thing like planting a seed or doing something in a digital virtual marketplace, if it's genuinely of value to the people paying money for it, that's what matters. Both I and they become richer than we would be if I didn't do the thing, and some of that enrichment will likely mean growth in the amount of physical stuff produced.
Depends whether you think the metaverse's primary output be entertainment or patents, whether you'll get communities of distraction or whether you'll get communities of care. We don't actually know, it's a question about human nature that has never been tested before.
The market for entertainment goods in the virtual world isn't as big as meta want you to believe. The best experiences you can (or could) have on the metaverse currently are (were) decidedly high in piracy, people wearing likenesses they don't own, watching movies together that weren't licensed for the platform. These experiences were and will remain very janky and rough. It's very difficult for copyright holders to adapt to a new world, if you look at say, Beatsaber, you can see a great example of licensing deals just failing to be made, so people mod their beatsaber to play unlicensed music, and meta permit this (ambiguously, it's pretty inconvenient to do it), and I expect that to continue.
And the potential to generate real value in the metaverse (eg, patents, education, computer-mediated engineering work, logistical labor, remote robot operation labor) is higher than you'd think. Virtual reality is more able to support social connection than prior online mediums, so there's more potential for people getting organised and caring about each other and doing real stuff together and learning from each other, but there's also more potential for people to feel more socially cut off from industrious people, to develop reduced interest in written content, to consummate in communities of entertainment. It's possible that increasing social health decreases distractive behaviours, Rat Park style, and once you have actual online community maybe the internet manifests its potential as a place of learning.
And if it does then the metaverse increases wealth by producing innovations that make primary goods cheaper, creating real jobs, and by increasing everyones' access to training.
So it's hard to call.
Yes! No! What does "richer" actually mean to you? For that matter, what does "we" mean to you (since the existing set of humans is changing hour to hour as people are born, come of age, and die, and even in a given set there's an extremely wide variance in what they have and in what's considered rich).
To the extent that GDP is your measure of a nation's richness, then it's tautological that increasing GDP makes the nation richer. The weaker argument that it (often) correlates (not necessarily causes) with well-being (in some averages and aggregates) is more defensible, but makes it unsuitable for answering your question.
I think my intuition is that GDP is the wrong tool for measuring how "rich" or "overall satisfied" people are, and simple sum or average is probably the wrong aggregation function. So I fall back on more personal and individual measures of "well-being". This, for most people I know, and as far as I can tell, the majority of neurotypical people, is about lack of worry for near- and medium-term future, access to pleasurable experiences, and social acceptance among accessible sub-groups (family, friends, neighbors, online communities small enough to care about, etc.).
For that kind of "general current human wants", a usable and cheap shared-but-excludable VR space seems to improve things for a lot of people, regardless of what happens to GDP. In fact, if consumption of difficult-to-manufacture-and-deliver luxuries gets partially replaced by consumption of patterns of bits, that likely reduces GDP while increasing satisfaction.
There will always be needs for non-virtual goods and experiences - it's not currently possible to virtualize food's nutrition OR pleasure, and this is true for many things. Which means a mixed economy for a long long time. I don't think anyone can tell you whether this makes those things cheaper or more expensive, relative to an hour spent working online or in the real world.
You’re basically talking about the software industry. Meta isn’t special. Considering how big the video game industry is, not to mention digital entertainment, and business software, I don’t think we have anything to worry about there.
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.
Externalities are the effects that somebody consuming a good or producing a good has on people that are not the producer or the consumer.
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.
Noah Smith, in this article, argues that the Metaverse could enable economic growth to increase a lot and sharply decouple itself from real-world resource usage. By creating markets in which we buy and sell immaterial things, world GDP would grow.
He also says, rightly, that GDP correlates with the well-being of a nation.
But there's a non-stated point: would creating huge markets in the Metaverse for buying and selling digital goods make us actually richer? What I mean is this: suppose that, thanks to the Metaverse, huge virtual economies get created and people get real money out of stuff they sell in these economies. But suppose that e.g., agricultural production output doesn't go up much. Does that mean that we're simply going to pay more for groceries, without being able to afford more of them? The more general question is: would real-world stuff simply get a lot more expensive, and so our well-being doesn't really increase besides us being able to afford digital goods and having richer virtual lives? (This must count for something, but I'm more interested in whether virtual economies somehow would trickle to the real economy and make us able to afford more physical stuff.)
This is not a leading question, I genuinely can't tell what's the right answer, because I don't feel confident enough in my knowledge of economics. Perhaps a way to rephrase is: what dominates here, inflation or virtual GDP growth? Is that even the right way of looking at the problem?