the desire for money brings us less money

[miriam_e]

I love counterintuitive things -- that have the opposite result expected. I especially enjoy things that at first give the expected result, but then reverse on further use, to give the opposite.

It looks like money turns out to work that way. Our culture, by focussing so heavily upon money, the economy, and wealth, is making us all poorer.

It works this way. Money is an extremely useful tool for trading. Before money was invented the awfully hit-or-miss barter trading system let two people trade, but only if they both had something the other wanted. Money freed up trade so that anybody could trade with anybody else. Of course it always had problems, but on the whole it was a great improvement. However we have collectively forgotten what money really is; that it is simply trading tokens. We have come to treat it as an end in itself. And so science, technology and teaching professions are all suffering now because they can't attract people into their ranks. People are instead becoming accountants and enter other fields where their lives are consumed with the purpose of simply moving money around. Moving money around doesn't actually create wealth. Science, technology, and teaching are the well-springs of wealth, and in our greed we are destroying the very things that make us richer.

Comments

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

I think Douglas Adams had this covered ...
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

He was talking about happiness, and I agree that excessive pursuit of money does make society more unhappy. But I was talking about money itself. When, as a society, we chase money too much we paradoxically get less of it.

Douglas Adams. What a wonderful mind! I was just thinking of him tonight as I listened to an mp3 in which a couple of speakers were talking about how nicely the constants of the universe fit to make a goldilocks universe in which life can flourish. I love the way Douglas Adams dismissed the Anthropic Principle with the analogy of an intelligent puddle who is amazed at how miraculously the hole fits it. In fact there is an mp3 where he talks about that... searching...
here:
http://www.biota.org/podcast/biota_adams.mp3

Enjoy!

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I've edited to clarify the title of my post now after realising that my whole post needed to be read carefully to see what I really meant. Thanks for bringing that to light.

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

I see your intention, but both are tightly interconnected for most people. If people weren't unhappy with the amount they had, they wouldn't be so obsessed with getting more. It's really similar to when any of us are running late, misjudge or forget something as a result, and hence become later. If we hadn't put ourselves in a position to be worried about the time, we wouldn't have made it worse.

To muddy the waters, people don't even have to take up a different skill, such as accounting instead of teaching, to be involved in the movement of money, they just apply it in a different way. There is a lot of interesting technology, mathmatics, science and psychology in the way stock markets work.