Wealth & Money Quote by Neil Abercrombie

Money is the accelerant that turns polite indifference into sudden moral clarity. Abercrombie’s line is built on that bitter observation: people didn’t ignore the land because they misjudged it; they ignored it because there was no profit in paying attention. The blunt profanity of “nobody gave a damn” isn’t decorative. It’s a political tell, a way of stripping away the usual civic-sounding alibis and admitting how decisions actually get made when no one is watching.

The quote pivots on “supposedly worthless,” a phrase that exposes “worth” as a social verdict, not a natural fact. Land doesn’t become valuable because it changes; it becomes valuable because power reclassifies it. In places like Hawaii, where Abercrombie’s career played out amid fierce disputes over development, conservation, indigenous claims, and state resources, that reclassification isn’t neutral. It often arrives alongside outsiders’ capital, zoning changes, and a new vocabulary of “highest and best use” that can steamroll older meanings: subsistence, heritage, burial grounds, access.

“For all intents and purposes” adds another knife twist. It suggests a bureaucratic shrug: if institutions behave as if something doesn’t matter, that’s functionally the same as it not mattering at all. The subtext is an indictment of a system where attention is purchased, and where “seeing” the land “for what it really is” means seeing dollar signs first. Abercrombie isn’t just describing a market; he’s describing a politics of selective vision, where value is discovered only when someone can extract it.