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Money


HousePriceMania

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HousePriceMania

My child asked me what money was at the weekend.

The birds and the bees get on fine without it so why don't we.

How would you describe money to a child ?

This is what I came up with.

image.thumb.png.b86a7ccace07f11cb6062e3ea1129993.png

 

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We are intensely social creatures, almost as much as bees and ants, but our interactions with each other are though mutual obligations: helping and expecting reciprocity, doing favours, and having favours done for us, in turn.

Money simply lets us transfer obligations from one person to another, from one thing to another, and to divide them into smaller obligations.

I think this covers both the "store of value" and "medium of exchange" functions of money.

I think money can sometimes arise naturally, like wampum in the Americas, but more often in history, it is forced on people as a mechanism for collecting real goods from a subject population without having to understand their economy. You do this by giving tokens to your soldiers, and demanding that taxes from the conquered people be paid in the same tokens. Then, automagically your soldiers get fed and housed with no further thought from you or the soldiers.

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VeryMeanReversion
5 hours ago, HousePriceMania said:

My child asked me what money was at the weekend.

...

How would you describe money to a child ?

 

A promise being broken.

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Wight Flight
6 hours ago, HousePriceMania said:

My child asked me what money was at the weekend.

The birds and the bees get on fine without it so why don't we.

How would you describe money to a child ?

This is what I came up with.

image.thumb.png.b86a7ccace07f11cb6062e3ea1129993.png

 

How fucked up do you want your child to be?

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"Money is something that lets us give people things in exchange for things we want at different times.  If I have an apple tree in the garden, and the man across the street has a lemon tree, I can give him an apple now and get a pound.  When his lemons are ready, he gives me a lemon and I give him a pound back."

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15 hours ago, HousePriceMania said:

My child asked me what money was at the weekend.

The birds and the bees get on fine without it so why don't we.

How would you describe money to a child ?

"Ask your mother, she has far more experience of handling it than I do, but she doesn't keep hold of it for very long!":-)

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  • 3 weeks later...
leonardratso
3 minutes ago, 23rdian said:

Have you ever heard the expression as "rotten as a pear"?

yes just then. first time ill admit,but youve broken the reluctance to use it now.

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leonardratso

im surprised its not a saying really, pears do tend to rot much faster and thoroughly than apples.

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5 hours ago, leonardratso said:

im surprised its not a saying really, pears do tend to rot much faster and thoroughly than apples.

the apple one is because apples will last a long long time if correctly stored, but a single rotten apple can quickly destroy the whole lot.  'rotten apple' therefore means one bad thing that will taint all the good things.

whereas pears don't store the same way, and will rot spontaneously much faster. 

 

see, makes sense.

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leonardratso
7 hours ago, wherebee said:

the apple one is because apples will last a long long time if correctly stored, but a single rotten apple can quickly destroy the whole lot.  'rotten apple' therefore means one bad thing that will taint all the good things.

whereas pears don't store the same way, and will rot spontaneously much faster. 

 

see, makes sense.

yes, i remembered that as soo as id written the comment, but i got distracted by pron.

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On 19/07/2021 at 22:10, feed said:

a claim on energy 

This. Money is a claim on energy and can be any medium (even apples, why not).

In the graphic the plebs use apples to pay someone to build them a house. What are they paying for; materials (that require energy to produce) and labour which in this case is - the energy needed to physically put those materials together in the form of a house. 

Money tranfers the ability to buy good and services through time, but goods and services don't exist without energy being used to make them real/accesible/avaliable. It is more accurate then to say that 'money transfers the ability to buy energy through time'. Some mediums are obviously better than others at this.

Think about having to make a house for yourself, it would take labour, your energy. Labour can be leveraged by tools and machines, a shovel leverages the ability to dig, same energy input, more output. Oil is also energy. An oil powered machine like a JCB can access and leverage the energy stored in oil, and with the labour of a single man do the work of hundreds of people. But energy is the thing that makes it happen and is what money is buying, whenever an exchange is made for anything. It is an energy exchange.

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On 20/07/2021 at 05:10, feed said:

a claim on energy 

... and gold and silver are a great way to store energy that you want to use in the future.

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4 hours ago, RickyBacker said:

... and gold and silver are a great way to store energy that you want to use in the future.

They're complicated by their utility as industrial metals and their scarcity.   

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