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by snowwrestler
1018 days ago
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Money is a measure now. For most of human history, money was itself physical wealth, or constrained in proportion to physical wealth. Which in turn constrained the maximum value of any good or service it could buy. Now goods and services can grow as valuable as we ever want them to be. They can even be imaginary. That's how a few thousand smart people at Apple who produce nothing physical can be considered nearly 6x the value of ExxonMobil and the tremendous amounts of land and resources it controls. |
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There are commodity monies, where some underlying commodity serves as money. However that relationship is often symbolic rather than strict. One classic instance is in the 1945 paper "The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp" by R.A. Radford, which describes the goods-and-services economy which emerged largely around the "currency" of cigarette packs amongst Allied prisoners within Axis prisoner of war camps during World War II. The paper illustrates both the capabilities and limitations of currencies in effecting trade (a surplus of cigarettes with a surfeit of actual goods ... means there's no effective economy), as well as the dual role of cigarettes as having utility (at least to some prisoners) in addition to their exchange value. Highly worthwhile reading:
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/2550133>
I've addressed the nature of money as a commodity grounded in trust in this earlier comment: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37389020>
More generally, I've found it useful to think of money as the commodity of most universal demand. That is, whatever else it is you have, a sufficient quantity of money is preferable. Where fiat or coined money isn't available, this often becomes some commodity: grain, hides, shells, raw gold (or silver or copper), nails, cattle, etc.
William Stanley Jevons identified a properties of money as utility and value, portability, indestructability, homogeneity, divisibility, stability of value, and cognisability. Of those, I differ with him on utility and value, as we have fiat currencies and accounts notations of no intrinsic value themselves, rather utility and value are the inverse of trust in the money-issuing authority. "Seignorage" in specie is then a measure of trust, and fiat currency effectively has infinite trust.
William Stanley Jevons, Money and the Mechanism of Exchange Chapter 5: <https://archive.org/details/cu31924013816172>
In your Apple example: what Apple produces is a future stream of profits, and systems which provide utility to purchasers of those systems. Apple is actually a poor choice to illustrate your argument as contrasted with a pure-play software or information provider (say: Microsoft, Google, Facebook, or Disney) in that Apple is fundamentally a hardware producer, and their business model is actually predicated on physical products (iPhone, iPad, MacBook, iMac, Mac Pro, etc., and increasingly the chips which power those devices: <https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/>).
The notion that immaterial production is economic is far older than the modern Internet economy. Any service, starting with unskilled labour, is immaterial in a similar sense.
And the value of more abstract economic activity is actually grounded in primary productivity, a distinction that goes back to at least the Physiocrats and Quesnay's Tableau Économique. More recent variants include Clark & Kennessey's multi-sectoral classification:
- Primary Activities: Agriculture, forestry and fishing; Mining
- Secondary Activities: Construction; Manufacturing
- Tertiary Activities: Transportation, electric, gas and sanitary services; Wholesale trade; Retail trade
- Quatenary Activities: Finance, insurance, and real estate; Services; Public administration
Zoltan Kenessey "The Primary, Secondary, Tertiary and Quaternary Sectors of the Economy" (1987) DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4991.1987.tb00680.x. <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4991.1987....>
Every activity beyond primary is based on the consumer surplus value and energetic potential of the primary activities. Absent ag, forestry, fishing, and mining, you'll have no Apples.
More: <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612141005/https://old.reddi...>