4 ms·

Fundamental misunderstanding of what money is. It's an abstracted version of time and labour, allowing for transmission of from one person to another. Example.

Fundamental misunderstanding of what money is. It's an abstracted version of time and labour, allowing for transmission of from one person to another. Example. I work x hours and get paid y tokens. y tokens thus equals x hours of my work. I now go and buy a cutlery set. That was produced by n people over m hours, and is sold with p profit. My y tokens is equal to n * m + p, which is equal to x * y. Money exists to make the n * m + p = x * y things workable. It's an abstracted barter system, where rather than having to work in Sony's programming department to earn a new TV, I can write code for other people, get paid something, and then pay it to Sony, who can equate it to the cost of a TV. The doing all the things you talked about in the second paragraph is a management and distribution of labour issue, which is down to society and governance. There's many nations that manage those things fine, and have financial systems. The issue is with a society that isn't able to provide those things, because the values held and the outcomes desired are fundamentally opposed. If you want to fix something, get involved in local politics and make a difference.

linker3000 10y ago
I don't diagree with anything you said, but your rationalisation of why we have the current system is based on the premise that we have to have the current system. Overthrowing the system isn't on my bucket list, but it makes for an interesting debate - eg: https://medium.com/@RickWebb/the-economics-of-star-trek-29bab88d50 https://medium.com/@RickWebb/the-economics-of-star-trek-29ba...
- petewailes 10y ago
  I'm not saying we have to have it. Post-scarcity economics are great, once you've got effectively limitless production capacity. Without that, you've got to have a way for people to exchange goods and services.
  - gaius 10y ago
    Post scarcity isn't just about production, it's also about logistics, everyone forgets that.
    - petewailes 10y ago
      Sure, but if you've got essentially limitless production, you must have de facto solved logistics too. (I can't imagine a scenario where you get production without the infrastructure)
      - gaius 10y ago
        That doesn't follow. One can easily imagine a situation in which the US or Western Europe are post-scarcity but the rest of the world isn't.
      - zo1 10y ago
        If you don't have the ability to near-instantaneously "spike" your production to meet demand, then you have an opportunity for arbitrage. At least a time-based one. Additionally, if you do have over-abundant capacity to pre-manufacture well above that required "spike", then you need to a) use logistics to get it there and b) foresight of knowing where you need to get it to, and how much of it. Otherwise, you'd have to have the ability to produce any arbitrary amount of it at the desired location when the need requires. By it, I generally mean all products.
oarsinsync 10y ago
> If you want to fix something, get involved in local politics and make a difference. That's a massively oversimplified perspective on the completely broken political systems most of us in western psuedo-democratic nations live in, whereby resolving a lot of the systemic issues requires a lot more than a single individual getting involved in local politics.
- petewailes 10y ago
  Single individuals involved in local politics begins the process of change in a small group, which can beget change in a larger group. Better to be involved and work towards the change you want to see, than to throw your hands up and despair over the "broken political system of our western psuedo-democratic nations". That's the point of democracies - they only work when people effectively engage. Most people don't, but that's not a failure of democracy, it's a failure of society. History is rife with examples of single individuals and small groups who made massive change over time. The American civil rights movement, the Indian independence movement, the anti-Apartheid movement in South Afica... You can work to make change and then bemoan anything you want, but if you choose not to engage, your words lack authenticity and merit.
  - oarsinsync 10y ago
    Fair!
collyw 10y ago
"It's an abstracted version of time and labour, allowing for transmission of from one person to another." How does that translate to the billions that hedge fund managers "earn".
- petewailes 10y ago
  They spend their time engaging in an activity (labour), for which they're given financial reward. Just because you don't equate what they do with work, doesn't mean that it doesn't follow the same rules. They just get vastly more for their labour than other people.
bogomipz 10y ago
Money is a store of value, nothing more. It could be gold, a piece of paper, a coin, an apple, it doesn't matter. It does not represent time and labor. It could be equated with time and labor but that is not what defines money. I think you may have a fundamental misunderstanding.
- m-i-l 10y ago
  Money is a store of value, nothing more. Not quite: "Money's a matter of functions four, A Medium, a Measure, a Standard, a Store"
  - bogomipz 10y ago
    Well I think a medium and a measure are implicit in a store, otherwise you couldn't store them. A standard can be rather loose, when people were using wampum, beaver pelts or cowry shells as money those items weren't all of the exact same, size, shape or color but it was understood that they were a store of value.
neffy 10y ago
I would beg to differ. The monetary system might be described as something that is trying to abstract time and labour in the way you describe. But money itself is just a token of exchange. The monetary system, is an attempt to use money, and market price setting to solve the problem you describe - and that problem is essentially NP complete, so what markets and market price setting, in conjunction with an enormous number of local decisions made in response to those price signals are doing is trying to find a reasonably efficient approximate solution. It's an untested assumption that the monetary system can actually do that without any regulation. There are good reasons to think that it can't, especially over long periods. Completely agree about the involvement in local politics - it's easy to be an armchair economist, and ignore the reality that at the end of the day the single most important government function is that the garbage is collected regularly.

linker3000 10y ago

I don't diagree with anything you said, but your rationalisation of why we have the current system is based on the premise that we have to have the current system. Overthrowing the system isn't on my bucket list, but it makes for an interesting debate - eg: https://medium.com/@RickWebb/the-economics-of-star-trek-29bab88d50 https://medium.com/@RickWebb/the-economics-of-star-trek-29ba...

petewailes 10y ago
I'm not saying we have to have it. Post-scarcity economics are great, once you've got effectively limitless production capacity. Without that, you've got to have a way for people to exchange goods and services.
- gaius 10y ago
  Post scarcity isn't just about production, it's also about logistics, everyone forgets that.
  - petewailes 10y ago
    Sure, but if you've got essentially limitless production, you must have de facto solved logistics too. (I can't imagine a scenario where you get production without the infrastructure)
    - gaius 10y ago
      That doesn't follow. One can easily imagine a situation in which the US or Western Europe are post-scarcity but the rest of the world isn't.
    - zo1 10y ago
      If you don't have the ability to near-instantaneously "spike" your production to meet demand, then you have an opportunity for arbitrage. At least a time-based one. Additionally, if you do have over-abundant capacity to pre-manufacture well above that required "spike", then you need to a) use logistics to get it there and b) foresight of knowing where you need to get it to, and how much of it. Otherwise, you'd have to have the ability to produce any arbitrary amount of it at the desired location when the need requires. By it, I generally mean all products.

oarsinsync 10y ago

> If you want to fix something, get involved in local politics and make a difference. That's a massively oversimplified perspective on the completely broken political systems most of us in western psuedo-democratic nations live in, whereby resolving a lot of the systemic issues requires a lot more than a single individual getting involved in local politics.

petewailes 10y ago
Single individuals involved in local politics begins the process of change in a small group, which can beget change in a larger group. Better to be involved and work towards the change you want to see, than to throw your hands up and despair over the "broken political system of our western psuedo-democratic nations". That's the point of democracies - they only work when people effectively engage. Most people don't, but that's not a failure of democracy, it's a failure of society. History is rife with examples of single individuals and small groups who made massive change over time. The American civil rights movement, the Indian independence movement, the anti-Apartheid movement in South Afica... You can work to make change and then bemoan anything you want, but if you choose not to engage, your words lack authenticity and merit.
- oarsinsync 10y ago
  Fair!

collyw 10y ago

"It's an abstracted version of time and labour, allowing for transmission of from one person to another." How does that translate to the billions that hedge fund managers "earn".

petewailes 10y ago
They spend their time engaging in an activity (labour), for which they're given financial reward. Just because you don't equate what they do with work, doesn't mean that it doesn't follow the same rules. They just get vastly more for their labour than other people.

bogomipz 10y ago

Money is a store of value, nothing more. It could be gold, a piece of paper, a coin, an apple, it doesn't matter. It does not represent time and labor. It could be equated with time and labor but that is not what defines money. I think you may have a fundamental misunderstanding.

m-i-l 10y ago
Money is a store of value, nothing more. Not quite: "Money's a matter of functions four, A Medium, a Measure, a Standard, a Store"
- bogomipz 10y ago
  Well I think a medium and a measure are implicit in a store, otherwise you couldn't store them. A standard can be rather loose, when people were using wampum, beaver pelts or cowry shells as money those items weren't all of the exact same, size, shape or color but it was understood that they were a store of value.

neffy 10y ago

I would beg to differ. The monetary system might be described as something that is trying to abstract time and labour in the way you describe. But money itself is just a token of exchange. The monetary system, is an attempt to use money, and market price setting to solve the problem you describe - and that problem is essentially NP complete, so what markets and market price setting, in conjunction with an enormous number of local decisions made in response to those price signals are doing is trying to find a reasonably efficient approximate solution. It's an untested assumption that the monetary system can actually do that without any regulation. There are good reasons to think that it can't, especially over long periods. Completely agree about the involvement in local politics - it's easy to be an armchair economist, and ignore the reality that at the end of the day the single most important government function is that the garbage is collected regularly.