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Comments (29)

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  skybrian
  This is a book excerpt. I didn’t find any in-depth reviews, but one of the authors posted a summary of the book here:https://jwmason.org/slackwire/against-money/
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  justonceokay
  A friend of mine uses the term “coin sickness“ to describe somebody who would rather have money than material wealth. Someone who sees the brand of clothing but couldn’t identify quality fabrics or stitching.
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  Hnrobert42
  Why do people write like this? So much preamble. Unnecessary metaphors. Just make your point and be done with it.
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  Bratmon
  This article is a reminder to all of us programmers that there is a belief that is common among non-programmer intellectuals (especially the above-average-intelligence-but-not-genius types) but completely non-existent among skilled software engineers:Abstraction is inherently dishonest.If you're a good software engineer, you quickly build an understanding that abstractions are vital for detailed understanding of complex systems, but can leak or even fail entirely. Less quickly, software engineers build very good instincts at how to tell when an abstraction is leaking/failing (that's what debugging is, after all).Outside software engineering, this is not a skill that is consistently practiced. As a result, you end up getting takes like this one, in which the authors figure out that "money" is an abstraction over "all productive work and assets" and that this abstraction sometimes leaks.But because the authors aren't used to dealing with abstractions, they assume that the fact that the abstraction "money" leaks sometimes means that it's worthless and should be removed. In fact, the opposite is true: the abstraction "money" does leak (which can cause real serious problems), but in the cases it doesn't, it's essential to human flourishing in any economy more complex than "exchange bread for pelts"
• mikewarot
  Real money is a thing, usually made of some mix of metals in fungible tokens with composition set by law. It serves as a flux, to make commerce easier to conduct by serving as a trusted neutral item of barter.With the loss of this once common resource, and the imposition of a system designed to prevent savings and force investment into stock markets and other ponzi schemes, there are very few honest and reliable ways to save at the personal level.The collective effects of generations conditioned to accept a gradual erosion of "money" have lead to a well engineered blind-spot that is preyed upon by the top 0.01%.Real prices should be stable across years, even decades, and there should be negligible inflation, instead of a 2% target rate that is pushed on the public as "natural", "stable" and "safe". When real packages continue to shrink, and actual prices are notably higher than the official numbers, it greatly erodes the collective trust of society.
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  SteveDavis88
  So many popups.
• underlipton
  Selected notes: Excuse me everyone, I have an announcement to make. *ahem* Barter is back, Alan Greenspan was the devil, and the government is lying to you about inflation. Thank you, for your time. It's crazy to me that the period TFA is talking about took place a generation AFTER the Volcker Shock and a decade after the initiation of Japan's Lost Decade(s).>And yet, in many contexts, money payments are treated as equivalent to the thing they give claim to, both by economic theory and in our day-to-day language.Huh. Swaps.>If money quantities do not refer to some underlying physical quantity or value, what do they refer to?Capacity to coerce (mind control).>If these payments and values and balance sheet entries don’t describe any of the concrete objects around us, why are our lives organized as if they do?Why, indeed.
• hacker_mar
  [dead]