Everything needs a performance index (whats life without scores!) . Money is a performance index for estimating the life-sustaining ability of a society. Of course, why life should be sustained is entirely questionable, for the moment lets assume that there is some meaning to life and that sustaining is worthwhile. That raises the natural question of how should money be defined.
In the current context, money is defined largely on the basis of non-renewable resources such as gold, oil. Historically, humans have had an obsession for gold and its sort of natural for gold to continue to play a crucial role in our notion of money (in today's context the role of gold is significantly diminished, except of course for Indian women :-)). A more recent important resource are fossil fuels, and the fact that it is scarce, and we have grown increasingly dependent on them to support our extravagances, increases its value rather inappropriately. So, the money index is then based on fuel resources a society has. As the society diversifies more, and evolves over time, different resources assume greater significance, and the resources used to define the index change over time. What is interesting however, is that traditionally the resources that have been used to define the index have had little or nothing to do with fundamental life-sustenance and knowledge growth.
As an alternative, assume that the total amount of useful resources in the world is X. I am punting on how X can be defined, but a general guideline is that X should be based on renewable sources that have direct impact on life-sustenance.
Why shouldnt these resources be distributed uniformly among all interested participants? Theres no obvious reason to not do a uniform distribution, modulo concerns that not all participants are honest/intelligent and may misuse/abuse/waste the resources allocated to them. If the distribution is uniform, then there is no need to define a performance index to decide how much of the resource belongs to a participant at any given point in time. Of course, most participants in the society are rational, and more importantly selfish and will never agree to the uniform distribution of life-sustaining resources.
Money, then is just a means of perpetuating iniquities in society. It ensures that there is an inequitable distribution of resources among different competing entities in the economy. And worse still its defined on indices that have little or no relevance in the long-term to life-sustenance and knowledge. SCARY!
P.S. Im not a commie!
3 comments:
"Why shouldnt these resources be distributed uniformly among all interested participants? "
Money - as a parameter of success and as a requirement for survival - acts as an incentive for people to perform the way the society wants them to. For a society to exist peacefully, concept of money is quite critical. Equitable distribution of money would only run counter to this spirit.
Humans "want" equity - that is how most of us define our moral values to an extent. But it isnt compatible with the incentive-system that we live by.
"money" the physical object i feel ought not to be anything useful or its "point" will be lost; its "point" being ready circulation. if its a worthless piece of paper, people will be readier to pass it from hand to hand easier than if it were something more valuable. on the other side of the equation, "money" ought to be indexed by something rare, considered valuable by unimportant people(those who dont have to or wont work work for it) and useless in everyday life because that makes people want to work for it, want to conserve it and at the same time, create enough people who will ask the basic question "why: or is there any point in life at all?"
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