[bovermyer]

"Money is the measure of usefulness?"

Good lord. There's so much wrong with this statement that I doubt I can meaningfully respond to it. I'll try, though.

If we have to reduce measures of usefulness to a single metric, then why not percentage of users who respond favorably?

I daresay that people find air quite useful, and for the most part, air is free.

[deepsun]

Easy -- users often don't respond favorably about MAJOR spending categories that are absolutely required. For example -- there's big negative sentiment about healthcare and its costs, but I rarely hear favorable responses like "thank you the country for we have healthcare". Or "thank you military that we haven't got invaded yet" (we are all users of the military). That doesn't depend on the country/region.

"Users" are too short-sighted to invest in major spending categories. Only the countries who can reasonably push their population towards long-term investments still exist.

[bovermyer]

Your obsession with framing everything in terms of money is quite remarkable.

[deepsun]

Money is a bad measure of usefulness, but it's better than any other working measure.

[bovermyer]

Fascinating.

I disagree completely, of course. I imagine our backgrounds are wildly different.

[deepsun]

Yes, seems like it. I grew up in USSR, and now appreciate capitalism a lot.

Same thing with democracy by the way: yes it's a bad and stupid system, but I've seen the alternative. Many people expect democracy to make ideal and fair decisions, while I see it as just a protection against the most egregious and blatant violations. E.g. the US has "Deficient democracy" rating (only two parties), but it's still infinitely better than any dictatorship.

[bovermyer]

I grew up in a combination of the USA and New Zealand, so I was raised in democracy of multiple varieties. The US's version is nowhere near as good as NZ's.

Political systems don't define my worldview, though; they largely exist in the background for me. This is probably because I've never had to worry about a political system killing me before. Trump's ascendancy may change that, but for the time being, it's still just noise.

Capitalism and whatever variation of communism that the USSR had are not the only ways to organize society. Even the USA doesn't have pure capitalism; if it did, there would be no government regulations whatsoever.

Given that, I'm curious about why you focus on currency as such a central driving metric for everything. I don't believe it's just because of political background. What else might make money so important for you?