[mahogany]

It sounds to me like you're saying that all societal or economic value is directly linked to money.

As an example, do you think stay-at-home parents add no value to society (or if you want, let's say "the economy") because they are not paid directly for their services? Are charity workers or volunteers "merit-less"?

[ModernMech]

You don’t have to go back to the 40s for an example. Plenty of unpaid work that benefits society is done today by Americans, including raising children, caring for the elderly, volunteering at a soup kitchen, and even getting an education.

Honestly it always surprises me to hear this on HN, the idea that work isn’t being done unless it’s generating dollar value for someone. What is open source coding then? Not work because it’s not done under the purview of an employer for a salary? Not valuable because no one gave you a dollar for it?

[mahogany]

That's a great point. I've edited to re-word that reference, because obviously these roles still flourish today.

[imtringued]

That's obviously a foolish interpretation of money. The economy is a system that lets people trade their time for other people's time. Without an economy you would have to do everything yourself. However, an ideal economy doesn't give more back than you put in. Therefore what the economy offers is the ability to specialize. You get to decide how much work you want to do yourself and how much work you let others do.

From this perspective, the accumulation of money is merely the interruption of this specialization process. The idea of ascribing value to an interruption of a system that is otherwise trying to be balanced gives the impression that somebody is too lazy to figure out what they really want out of their life and they simply enjoy having the option even if it means that the other side is waiting for you to act.

It gets especially perverse during recessions where everyone is trying to acquire money for the sake of safety and security when all it really means is that you order people to stop working for the very reason that motivated you to save money, the fear of unemployment.

[fighterpilot]

Not all value add is compensated, that's the concept of positive externality, and it's a market failure.

If we want to get really precise, we can say that people give other people money for any number of subjective reasons, but the large majority of the time it's because the person wants something from the other party that the other party isn't willing to do without compensation. So money most of the time represents subjective value add that wouldn't otherwise have occurred without it. Cleaning services, manufacturing, specific engineering work, construction, etc.