toni magni - interoperability infrastructure actor
2011-W45-7 2011-11-13 Sunday
The concept of money has shifted around
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The money concept has shifted around. Money is nothing more than a certificate for certain amounts of hours of certain kind of work. For example, if i work for you for 1h, you give me 20EUR, nothing but a worthless note of work credit, aka an IOU. "I work for you, but you can't work back for me immediately to pay me back, so you give me an IOU". In other words, i do some work for you today, but i don't really need anything from you today in exchange, so you give me a note that says "here: whenever you need 1h of work, you can use this note". So its basically really a piece of paper, just an IOU, which has literally no value. The value starts to arise as both parties agree that work has been done and is owed.
So at this point, if the worker doesn't use this IOU, and keeps it under the mattress, then in the system, there is this virtual work that doesn't ever get translated to real work. It's undone work. But what happens is that normally the worker doesn't keep it under the mattress, but instead it ends up in banks, who invest it, and hopefully does go around and get translated back into work somehow. (This is a simple model, not taking into account other aspects such as inflation.)
The point is: let's look at society today. The above described simplistic model doesn't really seem to apply. The concept of money came into existence a long time ago. Back then, the above mentioned concept (that money is just an IOU) must have been clear for everyone. Now, however, i have the feeling this concept has gone mostly lost. It seems like people just care about the money, the IOUs! I feel like telling such people: "Hey dude, you really just want the IOU? What are you going to do with the IOU? The piece of paper? Don't you actually want the work?". So the concept seems to have revered: originally, the whole point of money, was to get work done. And now, the whole point of the work, is to get the money, which, compared to actual physical tangible work, is nothing but a worthless IOU!
This is another example of what happens to the mind when it's not connected with the present reality. And i must admit, am myself victim of this system.
