money as batteries

I find it almost impossible to discuss anything social (as in, anything that goes an inch beyond personalistic issues) with almost everyone because almost everyone holds an assumption that i think is not only wrong, but moronic wrong. So wrong it is stupid. The assumption is that money is the source of all things.

You can phrase it anyway you like, it still goes totally against any primary grade knowledge of economics. Money is a symbol. It is useless by definition, as in if it had a use the swings in that use would render it a bad means for exchange. So money is exchange, but it is also exchange in time, something you want to trade for something else at some other time. So, to be precise, money is savings.

Again, all of the above is the most basic economics. There’s nothing complicated or advanced there, simply because i know almost no economy at all. But the above leads to the obvious conclusion that money is not a source of anything, it is only a form of storage.

A descriptive metaphor would be: Money is like batteries, but the electric charge must come from somewhere else.

tragedy of the privates

[pre-edit: i'll be updating this post as soon as i go back home (or in a few weeks ;-) with links and references, but the gist of the argument should be clear.]

It is tragic how economy always begins with a brilliant display of how its issues are more complex than they appear, not only saying money isn’t everything but showing exactly how not, just to, few paragraphs in, grossly simplify everything into money. One of those mistakes is the so-called “Tragedy of the Commons”, whereby economists seem to prove that private property is needed for society to work. The detail always lacking is that this tragedy only happens when you mix private with non-private: The commons by themselves do just fine.

marketing

Thom Holwerda, from OSnews, wondering about whether Apple should lower it’s prices, happens to put the whole seller-buyer dynamics into very, let’s say, raw terms:

This brings us to the next question: is this actually a good idea? Well, for us customers, it’s of course a really good idea. The goal of a customer is to pay as little money for as many value as possible, while the goal of a company is to give you as little value for as much money as possible. As such, this rumoured moved would be a win for consumers.

I don’t want to pick on Thom, i am actually pretty sure he didn’t mean this as an accurate economic depiction, or even as an actual argument. But it strikes me that this view is so easily maintained. In this sense: it seems like common sense. Most people would actually expect that phrasing as being an accurate enough depiction of reality.

it’s totally ok if you don’t get rich

I have long been saying that money is not the tits — as in, not the main thing you have to focus on, which turns out to be an amusingly inappropriate metaphor in the context — so i would like to extend a big heartfelt THANK YOU for Sasha Pasulka‘s post called “Hey, Guys, it’s totally Okay if you don’t get rich“. She compares the expectation that men will get those impossible fortunes in their almost-30s to the expectations that women will be airbrush-skinny and beautiful.

Her point is that while our culture is terrible with women at least there is some awareness of the problem, but that the same culture is also unfair to men but in that case no one talks about it at all.