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Those who believe they own an entirely imaginary thing called "money"

The fact that someone can write this is laughable to anyone that was ever poor in their life.

Money is not at all imaginary. It's quite real. The lack of money can ruin your day, your year, your life.

As for what money is - it is a productivity storage mechanism. Once you've been productive it allows you to store that productivity in a fungible form. It allows you to exchange that stored productivity for the productivity of others, give it away to someone else or basically do anything you want with it.

[juliangregorian]

The fact that anyone was ever poor should be an affront to anyone who believes that money is real. People of your ilk are fond of resorting to the old canard "everyone needs a roof over their head and food in their belly". Well, there quite simply is an astounding surplus of such. Those who really believe that the lottery system we currently use of assigning who gets what is truly effective and just will have to answer for that someday.

Money is only powerful because a quorum of people have mutually agreed to believe that it is. One of the things I enjoy pointing out is that the stock market is a wonderful example of the power of belief. When enough people believe it's going to crash, guess what happens?

[Drakim]

What I feel many people miss is that goods and money are not synonyms. If there was a huge influx of money into the world, that helps exactly nobody because the amount of food, shelter and other goods has not increased.

I find that people "get" this a lot easier when you start talking about coupons and IOU instead of gold and dollars. Nobody believes that the guy who is moving coupons back and forth between various piles with specific timing has truly earned the load of goods he gains. Instead, they rightly feel like he is cheating the system and taking without giving back.

But in the real world, tons of people do tricks with money and get filthy rich from it, and that's just them "working smart". Meanwhile, somebody had to grow that potato, the actual tangible good, that he ate for dinner. What did he give back in return?

[jfuhrman]

> Nobody believes that the guy who is moving coupons back and forth between various piles with specific timing has truly earned the load of goods he gains. Instead, they rightly feel like he is cheating the system and taking without giving back.

If you're talking about grocery store coupons, then that guy has absolutely earned the gains. Coupons are a form of price discrimination, i.e sell at a higher margin to people with a lot of money and less time but not lose the guy who has less money but more time on his hands. The stores do not sell below cost except for a few loss leaders, so the potato grower is still making a sale that might not have happened without the guy going coupon hunting.

[juliangregorian]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coupon_%28bond%29

[jfuhrman]

Thanks. In that case, isn't someone taking on risk by moving coupons around?

[juliangregorian]

It seems like they're talking about arbitrage, in which case there's essentially no risk involved, as the whole game is exploiting momentary differences in bid/ask price at different exchanges.

[juliangregorian]

Sure, and that reminds me of another great example for money's imaginary quality: The total amount of money in existence is many magnitudes more than it would theoretically take to end global poverty. However, no one dares attempt this, because it would knock the struts out that prop up the whole system (namely, debt).

[dragonwriter]

> The total amount of money in existence is many magnitudes more than it would theoretically take to end global poverty.

No quantity of money can end poverty, and no reasonable theory suggests that any amount of money can.

Systems of distributing goods and services (whether or not money is used as a proxy in those systems) might, but the quantity of money existing is pretty much irrelevant to that.

> However, no one dares attempt this, because it would knock the struts out that prop up the whole system (namely, debt).

Money is debt. Even commodity money -- as long as it is being traded not to be used for its intrinsic properties but for future exchange -- is essentially being used to separate the two sides of a barter transaction so that you don't need to exchange things of direct use such that the money then becomes, in effect, a marker of debt from the whole of the money-using society to the money holder.

So, yes, "debt" is the foundation on which the whole system of money is built because debt is what money is (modern fiat currency represents the abandonment of even the pretense that there is something else to it, as that pretense has always been costly to the function of money.) But if you think you can rearrange money to achieve some goal without maintaining its nature as debt, you don't understand money at all.

[juliangregorian]

> No quantity of money can end poverty

What definition of poverty are you using? Certainly studies have been done: https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2013-01-19/...

> the quantity of money existing is pretty much irrelevant to that.

I mean, that's what I'm saying, but as it is now, if I had a billion dollars, I could build a few wells in Africa, yanno?

> Money is debt...

Clearly, but in addition to that, my point is that the system of money needs people to be in debt. There's no "neutral state" as it were, and indeed, many of the efforts of the IMF and World Bank are calculated to get poor countries further in debt.

[floppydisk]

The grandparent noted that while we can increase the amount of currency in people's pockets, that doesn't fundamentally change the number of goods and services available to the total population. If you define poverty as lack of money, then yes, we can fiat more than enough money into existence. However, if you define poverty as lack of access to goods and services, increasing the amount of money available won't work. Look at Germany in the wake of World War I. Money was flowing everywhere, but the amount of good and services available was minuscule in comparison causing rampant inflation to the point where it was more cost effective to burn the paper currency for heat rather than spend it.

[juliangregorian]

Let's break things down nice and simple. As you said, everyone needs a roof over their head and food in their belly. Well, there's plenty of that to go round. We don't need to fiat more money or otherwise increase the money supply, because as you astutely observed, that would potentially lead to a post-war Germany-type situation. If, however, the world's poorest were gifted adequate funds from the world's richest, they would be able to afford the biological necessities.

[jrs235]

This comment would be better if it wasn't inflammatory. Instead of

'People of your ilk are fond of resorting to the old canard "everyone needs a roof over their head and food in their belly"'

you could have written

'People are fond of resorting to the old canard "everyone needs a roof over their head and food in their belly"'

[icebraining]

The fact that anyone was ever poor should be an affront to anyone who believes that money is real.

Using "real" in this context is confusing; yes, money is a social construction - a real one. You can also have fictional social constructs (SF works often describe some).

Are you using "real" to mean "natural" (as in "natural rights")?

[kamaal]

Money is a medium to exchange effort/productivity and hence wealth. It is important because no one gives away their work for free. That is not because we are good/bad, that is because that is how we are by evolution. Our ancestors never climbed a tree unless there was a fruit to pluck or ran unless there was a deer to hunt. And given the effort involved in this, it made zero sense to share things for free.

We only have an organized form of that currently. Where you could do a lot of it and store it, and spend it later. Or opt to not earn it at all. Whatever the choice you must learn to live with it.

[thatcat]

>no one gives away their work for free >it made zero sense to share things for free >We only have an organized form of that currently

And yet much of the technology that power the internet that disseminates this idea you have run on GPL licensed software.

[juliangregorian]

Ludicrous. You can expend effort all your born days and not see a dime. People give things away all the time. And climb trees, even! Do you really live in a world so bereft of imagination?

[falcolas]

> Once you've been productive it allows you to store that productivity in a fungible form.

What is a trust fund then? Were the folks on the receiving end of trust funds productive? How about high frequency trading? Is the money made from computers intercepting and manipulating trade prices the result of someone's productivity?

Money has been divorced from productivity for quite some time.

[talmand]

Where did the funds in the trust come from? Was that being productive? Just because the person receiving the funds is not being productive doesn't mean the person who provided the funds in the first place wasn't productive.

As for high frequency trading, you may disagree with the means of production but that doesn't suddenly mean it isn't productive. Becoming efficient doesn't reduce productivity.

[ramblerman]

which hits the key point in Fuller's argument. In modern times thanks to scientific breakthroughs and the like, some people can be 100,000 times more productive than others with 1 invention.

Should they then possess 100,000 times the share?

[kamaal]

Yes, they should possess 100,000 the share or lets call that X for now.

They deserve X because of the productivity impact that cascades to the remainder of humanity.

[ramblerman]

What cascades exactly when we haven't quantified the invention.

ie. Curing cancer vs Curing Baldness vs Populating Mars

Surely they are not equal, but curing baldness may very well be the most profitable in this world.

[kamaal]

What's profitable is decided by what people want, and we are no one to impose our priorities onto the world.

Cancer isn't getting cured because it is not spreading virally. The day the threat level is same as Polio, Small Pox or such disease, the solution will be inevitable.