See? It's not just me!

[holly_evolving]

More than one person has told me that I was wrong for being angry at being forced to live as a slave to in a constructed, false economy. Or crazy for thinking it's constructed. To all of them, and everyone else: READ THIS. CAREFULLY.

From the article:
"Everyone seems to want to know about the economy these days, so we may as well go there. It's as great an example as any of a program that not only got out of control, but became so prevalent - so accepted - that we came to take it for granted. We think of the economy and its rules as given circumstances, when they are actually constructions."

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/23/what-went-wrong.html

Comments

[fatherdog.livejournal.com]

Wow, this guy has no idea how economics works.

"Meanwhile, local currencies had the opposite bias of centralized currency. Local currencies lost value over time. They were really just receipts on the amount of grain that farmer had brought to the grain store. Since some of that grain was lost to rats or water, and since the grain store had to be paid, money devalued each year. This meant the money was biased towards being spent. That's why reinvestment in infrastructure as a percent of total revenue was so high in the late Middle Ages. [...]

Unlike local currencies, centralized currencies were biased towards retaining their value over time."

This is completely and totally incorrect - it's actually the opposite of correct. Our centralized currency doesn't retain its value over time - that's why we have inflation, and why my father could buy a loaf of bread for a nickel when he was a kid.

Moreover, he's incorrect about local money as well - the vast majority of currency throughout history prior to the renaissance was commodity money, such as gold and silver. Gold and silver, again, do the opposite of what he's claiming local money does - it retains value over time, since its value is tied to scarcity. That's why we eventually got off the gold standard, because it produced periods of deflation.

I haven't really had time to look at his conclusions, but if he's this diametrically wrong in his first paragraph, I wouldn't give much credence to them.

[holly-evolving.livejournal.com]

I will admit, I didn't lend much credence to the concept of currency loss that he put forward. An asset-based economy makes a lot more sense to me than a credit-based one, but that may just be because I don't trust people. And, you know, there was coin way before the Renaissance.

It was just the idea of the economy as a malleable construct that really mattered to me. It's very hard to choose not to participate in the current format, because you lose out on so many amenities that feel like necessities. I doubt that I could make that choice. But it's important to me that people realize there IS a choice. This whole concept of time, and money, and hurry, is a social construct. It has a hardwired basis in our instinct to support the genes that we're biologically programmed to want to pass on...that's all the amassing of wealth really comes down to. But if you can choose not to pass on your genes, then you can choose not to amass more than you need. You can leave the rat race to the rats.