the desire for money brings us less money
Jul. 18th, 2007 09:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eI 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.
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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-07-24 01:18 pm (UTC)Actually I wasn't saying that barter was much good. I meant that money was a great improvement over barter. Hmmm... maybe I shouldn't have mentioned barter at all in the post. It is just that when I talk about money having problems many people automatically assume I am totally against money (I've even been accused of being a communist! heheheh... I'm not -- money has its problems like everything else). So I tend to mention how money was a great improvement over the previous system, in order to pre-empt such reactions.
What I wanted to point out with this post was that even if one values money above all else then that actually gets in the way of getting more money -- a nice paradox.
War mongers are another thing I must make a post about in the future. As far as I can see they are about as close to an absolute waste as you can get without actually being a total waste. They create stuff that either doesn't ever get used (a waste), or blows up (a waste) destroying property and lives in the process (a waste). The only positive note is that it can be used to defend you against other wasteful war mongers.
I, like you, value abstract thoughts, teachers, science, and similar things over war and, to some extent, trade. The problem is that promoting those things to a person who doesn't value them requires leverage... hence my point about the desire for money getting in the way of making money -- it speaks to those who already value money highly.