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Whenever I see sentiments like this, or when I hear people with comfortable jobs in the tech industry talk about how money is imaginary, etc., it just comes acr

Whenever I see sentiments like this, or when I hear people with comfortable jobs in the tech industry talk about how money is imaginary, etc., it just comes across as being detached from reality to me. It's easy to fall into this trap when money is abstracted away to being just a number you see on your smartphone, but money is very real, and if you don't have it, you can't pay rent or for heat in winter.

salty_biscuits 4y ago
I think the nuance is that money is made up, not that it is imaginary. It is an abstraction that lets you live in a society that will let people be cold and hungry without feeling too bad about it.
- eru 4y ago
  Borders work even better for that 'abstraction'.
- mcv 4y ago
  Society is also made up. As are countries, corporations, laws, rights, and nearly everything that distinguishes a civilised society from barbarism. It's all made up, and yet it works. Before money, people were also cold and hungry. I think money makes it easier to do something about it.
  - salty_biscuits 4y ago
    Agree, I just think the modern version of money makes it easier to hold the two ideas in your head that "I'm a good humanitarian" and "they can't afford a house because they are bad with money". Back in the old days they just plain thought poor people were inferior so they deserved poor treatment because of that.
doubled112 4y ago
Coming at this another way, money is only valuable because society and the world says it has value. Money doesn’t do anything on its own. If I’m cold in the middle of nowhere, a pack of matches and block of wood have value to me at that moment, but my Canada plastic money doesn’t even make good kindling. If the world seriously falls apart, what are your dollars worth?
- duncan-donuts 4y ago
  This is nonsense. Money is very real because it’s an abstraction for materials, goods, services, etc. If governments fail and currencies collapse yeah sure that money can’t do anything for you, but idk about you but my USD is good just about anywhere and it does a lot for me. You might make arguments that when the world falls apart you’ll be glad you outsmarted us by buying gold or some other thing society decided has value. But if the world falls apart I wouldn’t bet on gold being the best thing to trade with. I’d rather have a stockpile of medicine, ammunition, livestock, and a seed bank. Those things are hard to store until you need them for an apocalypse. I can assure you that if you tried to give me gold for ammunition in this scenario you’d be leaving with gold. You could also argue that gold/silver would and is a good currency abstraction and I’d agree with you. In the absurd scenario that the world falls apart I wouldn’t count on merchants coming around that actually want gold/silver. So many useful things become useless in an end of the world scenario that it’s not worth worrying about.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    >This is nonsense. Money is very real because it’s an abstraction for materials, goods, services, etc. Abstractions are by definition not real. What's real about the money is the political and legal power (enforced by actual people) that allows you to exchange it with goods.
  - xwdv 4y ago
    If the world falls apart your net worth will be composed only of things you can actually protect and defend, because everything else will just be taken away from you. The rule of law isn’t around to save you. But that’s why if the world falls apart, the most valuable resource will be attention. If you have a lot of true followers, and they believe you know what you’re doing and that life could be better if they follow you rather than go it alone, then you will have many people to protect you and bring you resources, and in this way you can build your dominion in the post apocalyptic world. If you’re a true prepper, you should be hoarding influence and attention. This will give you the best life possible at the end of the world.
TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
Money is politics by other means. It's real to the extent that a certain kind of politics is real. If you don't have enough to pay your bills it's not because there isn't enough energy for you to heat your home. It's because making sure you can heat your home /pay rent/eat isn't a priority for the people with the political power to make those decisions.
- cdogl 4y ago
  Isn’t it? The vast majority of people in the developed world have enough money for food and housing, and the powers that be work fiercely - if ineptly - to protect that. I’m not writing off the influence of power and wealth, but this sentiment just doesn’t seem empirical to me.
  - bluecheese452 4y ago
    At my age my father supported a wife and two kids on one salary and was able to purchase a home. With 2 salaries and no kids my wife and I cannot purchase a home.
  - yunoo 4y ago
    Not in the UK it isn't. The government expect people to use food banks (run by charities, mostly churches) to make ends meet. They recently implemented a tax cut for the highest income decile in the country at a rate disproportionately larger than the tax relief for other income bands. The poorest barely got anything.
    - eru 4y ago
      The tax rate on higher earners is higher (not to mention their absolute tax payment). The poorest people already don't pay any taxes. You can't cut the taxes of the poor as much as for the rich, because there's not as much to cut for the former. I have no idea whether the UK policy is any good or not. But your complaint is a weird one to make.
      - 4y ago
swayvil 4y ago
Money is basically software. Meaningless without a machine to run it.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  It is the opposite. Money is confidence in an idea, go back and evolving over millennium with massive buy in. Working hard for pieces of paper or digits on a HDD would otherwise make no sense! Money is a more successful religion than the big religions.
  - raydiatian 4y ago
    > Money is confidence in an idea Specifically the idea that the issuing government either won’t default on its debts any time soon, or that it’s big enough to dominate the world order enough that it can run up its debts without somebody taking a shot at the king. It sounds less religious and more like a game of king of the hill from this perspective. I know Yuval Harari’s perspective is that money is the “first religion of man”, and I think it’s useful in the context of discussing how mankind evolved, but considering the modern world I prefer Ray Dalio’s perspective: “money is (are?) the house chips in the casino of whoever dominates the current world order.” At the end of the day, it’s weapons and businesses that give value to money.
throwyawayyyy 4y ago
Yup. There _is_ a bottom line. I remember a few years ago taking Ubers and thinking: "so cheap! But, well, this can't possibly last". And it didn't.
- CSSer 4y ago
  I wish more web developers felt that way about VC-backed tech startups. If they did, we might have less churn.
RC_ITR 4y ago
This is just people not understanding databases (see: crypto as an extreme example) Money is very real, it's just abstract in the sense that it's a unit in a database more than it's an object (it used to be both). So sure, there are other units in databases that can be converted into money at a predictable exchange rate (often via code written by thousands of people sitting in information silos), but that doesn't mean that those units replace money in any holistic sense. It's like saying money doesn't matter for TV networks, commercials viewership does (when ofc commercials matter b/c they lead to money).
sebastianconcpt 4y ago
Both are right. Currency is a real relatively stable shared imagination. Guess one thing that menaces that stability? Inflation!
thrown_22 4y ago
Spoken like someone who has never seen hyper inflation.
andirk 4y ago
Reminds me of how my friend, who has a mogul of a father, and his now wife, who has a mogul of a father, are looking to buy a house. The moguls put a cap on the amount the house can cost, and my friend said to me about how the ones they want are out of that range, "I don't care about money, man. You know that." I don't think he understands exactly what the sentiment behind "I don't care about money" is.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  When we were young in our marriage, my wife and I would argue constructively about money things, and when I would tell her that we can't afford something (I am the accountant in the relationship) and try to talk to her about being content within our means, she would take offense saying something like, "I feel like you're trying to say I'm greedy, but it's not about the money to me!" And I wasn't trying to imply that she was greedy, and I very much believe it wasn't about the money. The thing was she just grew up the youngest child (and a daughter at that) in an upper-middle-class family and she was pretty sheltered from cost, while I grew up in a working class family where money was tight. It was an odd disconnect.
  - idontwantthis 4y ago
    The opposite is also weird when one person in the relationship came from nothing, and now you share comfortable finances: Conversations like "yes plane tickets will cost $500 more than bus tickets but we'll also have two more days of vacation", or "we don't have to shop around for the very best deal".
    - throwaway894345 4y ago
      Yep, we've been there too. It's taken me a while to come around to spending more on things now that we have comfortable finances. That said, I'm pretty proud that we rigorously optimize our spending for the things that make us the happiest, and we save a lot for early retirement.
  - mcv 4y ago
lawrenceyan 4y ago
It’s not real in the sense that you shouldn’t need to have to worry about paying for heat in the winter. Our rate of technological improvement has outpaced the ability of our existing economic paradigm to keep up, which is why we’ve ended up in this strange late stage pre post-scarcity landscape.
- leto_ii 4y ago
  While I agree that we could probably support the entire human species comfortably given our current level of tech development, I don't think that can happen without a revolutionary change of the economic/social system, away from capitalism. The problem is that that won't happen in a nice way, if at all. Systemic changes come about after cataclysms, not incrementally. Alas, cataclysms may be due soon...

salty_biscuits 4y ago

I think the nuance is that money is made up, not that it is imaginary. It is an abstraction that lets you live in a society that will let people be cold and hungry without feeling too bad about it.

eru 4y ago
Borders work even better for that 'abstraction'.
mcv 4y ago
Society is also made up. As are countries, corporations, laws, rights, and nearly everything that distinguishes a civilised society from barbarism. It's all made up, and yet it works. Before money, people were also cold and hungry. I think money makes it easier to do something about it.
- salty_biscuits 4y ago
  Agree, I just think the modern version of money makes it easier to hold the two ideas in your head that "I'm a good humanitarian" and "they can't afford a house because they are bad with money". Back in the old days they just plain thought poor people were inferior so they deserved poor treatment because of that.

doubled112 4y ago

Coming at this another way, money is only valuable because society and the world says it has value. Money doesn’t do anything on its own. If I’m cold in the middle of nowhere, a pack of matches and block of wood have value to me at that moment, but my Canada plastic money doesn’t even make good kindling. If the world seriously falls apart, what are your dollars worth?

duncan-donuts 4y ago
This is nonsense. Money is very real because it’s an abstraction for materials, goods, services, etc. If governments fail and currencies collapse yeah sure that money can’t do anything for you, but idk about you but my USD is good just about anywhere and it does a lot for me. You might make arguments that when the world falls apart you’ll be glad you outsmarted us by buying gold or some other thing society decided has value. But if the world falls apart I wouldn’t bet on gold being the best thing to trade with. I’d rather have a stockpile of medicine, ammunition, livestock, and a seed bank. Those things are hard to store until you need them for an apocalypse. I can assure you that if you tried to give me gold for ammunition in this scenario you’d be leaving with gold. You could also argue that gold/silver would and is a good currency abstraction and I’d agree with you. In the absurd scenario that the world falls apart I wouldn’t count on merchants coming around that actually want gold/silver. So many useful things become useless in an end of the world scenario that it’s not worth worrying about.
- coldtea 4y ago
  >This is nonsense. Money is very real because it’s an abstraction for materials, goods, services, etc. Abstractions are by definition not real. What's real about the money is the political and legal power (enforced by actual people) that allows you to exchange it with goods.
- xwdv 4y ago
  If the world falls apart your net worth will be composed only of things you can actually protect and defend, because everything else will just be taken away from you. The rule of law isn’t around to save you. But that’s why if the world falls apart, the most valuable resource will be attention. If you have a lot of true followers, and they believe you know what you’re doing and that life could be better if they follow you rather than go it alone, then you will have many people to protect you and bring you resources, and in this way you can build your dominion in the post apocalyptic world. If you’re a true prepper, you should be hoarding influence and attention. This will give you the best life possible at the end of the world.

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago

Money is politics by other means. It's real to the extent that a certain kind of politics is real. If you don't have enough to pay your bills it's not because there isn't enough energy for you to heat your home. It's because making sure you can heat your home /pay rent/eat isn't a priority for the people with the political power to make those decisions.

cdogl 4y ago
Isn’t it? The vast majority of people in the developed world have enough money for food and housing, and the powers that be work fiercely - if ineptly - to protect that. I’m not writing off the influence of power and wealth, but this sentiment just doesn’t seem empirical to me.
- bluecheese452 4y ago
  At my age my father supported a wife and two kids on one salary and was able to purchase a home. With 2 salaries and no kids my wife and I cannot purchase a home.
- yunoo 4y ago
  Not in the UK it isn't. The government expect people to use food banks (run by charities, mostly churches) to make ends meet. They recently implemented a tax cut for the highest income decile in the country at a rate disproportionately larger than the tax relief for other income bands. The poorest barely got anything.
  - eru 4y ago
    The tax rate on higher earners is higher (not to mention their absolute tax payment). The poorest people already don't pay any taxes. You can't cut the taxes of the poor as much as for the rich, because there's not as much to cut for the former. I have no idea whether the UK policy is any good or not. But your complaint is a weird one to make.
    - 4y ago

swayvil 4y ago

Money is basically software. Meaningless without a machine to run it.

quickthrower2 4y ago
It is the opposite. Money is confidence in an idea, go back and evolving over millennium with massive buy in. Working hard for pieces of paper or digits on a HDD would otherwise make no sense! Money is a more successful religion than the big religions.
- raydiatian 4y ago
  > Money is confidence in an idea Specifically the idea that the issuing government either won’t default on its debts any time soon, or that it’s big enough to dominate the world order enough that it can run up its debts without somebody taking a shot at the king. It sounds less religious and more like a game of king of the hill from this perspective. I know Yuval Harari’s perspective is that money is the “first religion of man”, and I think it’s useful in the context of discussing how mankind evolved, but considering the modern world I prefer Ray Dalio’s perspective: “money is (are?) the house chips in the casino of whoever dominates the current world order.” At the end of the day, it’s weapons and businesses that give value to money.

throwyawayyyy 4y ago

Yup. There _is_ a bottom line. I remember a few years ago taking Ubers and thinking: "so cheap! But, well, this can't possibly last". And it didn't.

CSSer 4y ago
I wish more web developers felt that way about VC-backed tech startups. If they did, we might have less churn.

RC_ITR 4y ago

This is just people not understanding databases (see: crypto as an extreme example) Money is very real, it's just abstract in the sense that it's a unit in a database more than it's an object (it used to be both). So sure, there are other units in databases that can be converted into money at a predictable exchange rate (often via code written by thousands of people sitting in information silos), but that doesn't mean that those units replace money in any holistic sense. It's like saying money doesn't matter for TV networks, commercials viewership does (when ofc commercials matter b/c they lead to money).

sebastianconcpt 4y ago

Both are right. Currency is a real relatively stable shared imagination. Guess one thing that menaces that stability? Inflation!

thrown_22 4y ago

Spoken like someone who has never seen hyper inflation.

andirk 4y ago

Reminds me of how my friend, who has a mogul of a father, and his now wife, who has a mogul of a father, are looking to buy a house. The moguls put a cap on the amount the house can cost, and my friend said to me about how the ones they want are out of that range, "I don't care about money, man. You know that." I don't think he understands exactly what the sentiment behind "I don't care about money" is.

throwaway894345 4y ago
When we were young in our marriage, my wife and I would argue constructively about money things, and when I would tell her that we can't afford something (I am the accountant in the relationship) and try to talk to her about being content within our means, she would take offense saying something like, "I feel like you're trying to say I'm greedy, but it's not about the money to me!" And I wasn't trying to imply that she was greedy, and I very much believe it wasn't about the money. The thing was she just grew up the youngest child (and a daughter at that) in an upper-middle-class family and she was pretty sheltered from cost, while I grew up in a working class family where money was tight. It was an odd disconnect.
- idontwantthis 4y ago
  The opposite is also weird when one person in the relationship came from nothing, and now you share comfortable finances: Conversations like "yes plane tickets will cost $500 more than bus tickets but we'll also have two more days of vacation", or "we don't have to shop around for the very best deal".
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    Yep, we've been there too. It's taken me a while to come around to spending more on things now that we have comfortable finances. That said, I'm pretty proud that we rigorously optimize our spending for the things that make us the happiest, and we save a lot for early retirement.
- mcv 4y ago

lawrenceyan 4y ago

It’s not real in the sense that you shouldn’t need to have to worry about paying for heat in the winter. Our rate of technological improvement has outpaced the ability of our existing economic paradigm to keep up, which is why we’ve ended up in this strange late stage pre post-scarcity landscape.

leto_ii 4y ago
While I agree that we could probably support the entire human species comfortably given our current level of tech development, I don't think that can happen without a revolutionary change of the economic/social system, away from capitalism. The problem is that that won't happen in a nice way, if at all. Systemic changes come about after cataclysms, not incrementally. Alas, cataclysms may be due soon...