Money

[poliphilo]

Money isn't real. It's a figment- a shared hallucination- which depends on us pretending that the bits of base metal in our pockets, the blocks of shiny metal in our vaults and the pixellated numbers on our screens have a real ,intrinsic value. Economics, like religion, is a game of lets pretend- and money, like God, a human invention to which worth is ascribed. So long as we keep up the pretence all will be well.  But let our belief waver, the faith be broken, and society shakes from top to bottom.

Maybe you already knew this. I don't think I did before yesterday. Not really. Maybe I knew it deep down, but I hadn't let the ideas come to the surface. I hadn't articulated them.

Money has always frightened me.  I haven't understood how it works and I've never had quite enough of it to feel secure. Ailz is very good with it, though. She performs conjuring tricks, keeping the numbers jigging away, so there's always some to hand  Left to myself, I'd live like a miser out of fear of the stuff.  She doesn't have that fear. She actually enjoys the presdigitation she perfoms to give us a quality of life. It's a game to her. The word she uses about it is "bracing".

Comments

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

Money is just the method we use to describe value. One chicken = 4 cabbages, one terraced house in Oldham = one small garage in Kensington. It's a useful concept and provides liquidity (if you have one chicken but you want to buy 2 cabbages and some apples, you can do it via money).

At a big picture level it is gobsmackingly complex with shares and options and derivatives and swaps and whatever. At a household level, it's Mr Micawber's famous quote...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I understand things at the chicken and cabbages level. Anything more sophisticated than that has me scratching my head and starting to panic.