"You don't know what money Is." So began an article which recently ran in ODE Magazine, a thought-provoking interview with former banker Bernard Lietar. Lietar was surprisingly vocal in his criticism of the modern monetary system, particularly how it is set up to promote competition and short-term thinking. But it was that first line which stuck with me the most. So I decided to do a little bit of research into this phantom thing called money. The Complete Idiot's Guide to Economics left me feeling worse than a complete idiot, and anything on the history of money was lost on me once we got to 1976 and the abolishment of the gold standard. (My father is a history buff and, presumably, knows far more about money than I do. So I told him about my confusion in this area, and asked, "So what is our money based on now?" He replied, "The promise that the United States will be around forever." I thought for a moment, and thanked him. He had just given fuel to my hypothesis that money doesn't really mean anything.)
The etymology at least turned out to be fairly interesting, namely that money and admonish stem from the same Latin root monere (to advise or to warn). Surely there had to be some implications to that.
But after page upon page of notes on capital, GDP, NAFTA, and exchange rate, it dawned on me that it wasn't so much that I didn't understand it (I did, at least in theory), so much as I found it immensely boring... in some ways, even irrelevant. Soon it became apparent that I was going at this from completely the wrong angle. Rather than wasting time trying to understand what money is, it was time to "think outside the buck," and instead take a look at what money does.
In and of itself, money is nothing to get particularly excited about (coin collectors notwithstanding). It's just paper, bits of metal, plastic cards, or, increasingly in this digital age, blips on a computer screen. Maybe Henry Ford was right; it's not so much money, as that of which what money is the symbol. Calling money "the root of all evil," of course, gives a lot of power to something so abstract. Then again, Derrick Jensen points out in Welcome to the Machine that in our culture, money usually stands for power. "And the urge for power over others is the source of much evil." (He also adds that "the delusion that money is worth anything, combined with this homicidal and suicidal urge for power, is strangling life on this planet." I can't find much to disagree with him on that one.) In a society where money is the chief means of exchange, accumulation of money equals accumulation of power, because money increases our power to spend and exchange. And in this scenario, of course, it is the wealthy who would yield power over the poor. But that's a separate tangent right there.
We've given money so much power, in fact, that we've begun to define our very selves by it. Take "identity theft," one of the big hot topics these days. What does it say when we reduce our entire "identity" to our financial transactions? Who said that we had to base our sense of self on our account balance and our credit score? I guess this goes along with the numerification of identity -- where we "become" our account numbers or our social security numbers or whatever other identification number is assigned to us. Numerification, at least as I see it, ties in with objectification. Some people literally do not see the forest for the trees, or rather, the trees as they objectify them as a "resource" from which they can produce lumber, and ergo money. It comes from the same mentality that sees cattle as "meat on the hoof" women as sex objects, children as property, et cetera. Of course, I could go on a whole other tangent about objectification, so we'll save that rant for another day.
In his book What Money Really Means, Thomas Kostigen observes, "Price is a far thing from worth, and worth may be a far thing from value." I've heard it said that purchasing organic produce is like buying futures in the environment. If only the little stickers on the items we buy reflected all of the true costs of production. Neoclassical economists occasionally mention "externalities," factors which aren't reflected in the costs of the goods or services provided. "Fair trade" and organic items, for example, are fairly expensive when compared with their conventional counterparts, if all we are looking at is the face value. But what about the hidden costs, the factors you are hard-pressed to put a monetary value on?
Children in sweat shops manufacturing cheap clothing. The unspeakable suffering of laying hens in battery cages so you can get eggs at 69 cents a dozen. The rainforest destroyed to make room for cattle ranches to make cheap beef for your fast food hamburger. Huge government subsidies --- paid for by your tax dollars --- to artificially and deceptively make the face value of milk and meat seem low. Depletion of topsoil. Habitat destruction. Loss of family farms. These are pesky little details that don't fit into the neat little equations of conventional economists and politicians. Simply because you can't put a price tag on clean air or potable water or biodiversity, corporations and governments generally don't take that into consideration --- or pay far less attention to them than to the bottom line --- when they decide how to do business or manage natural resources. As Eric Davidson points out in You Can't Eat GNP (one of the few books on economics I could actually relate to), without ecosystems, there couldn't be economics systems! And I would add that we tend to forget that so-called natural "resources" have existences and purposes independent of human desires.
But that's a whole other issue, perhaps for a future entry. Say, part 2?
Coming soon to a journal near you.
"Money is nothing more than an agreement to use something as a means of exchange. Money is not a thing. It is an agreement, like a marriage or a business contract. And that means you can always make a new and different agreement." Bernard Lietaer
