[HN Gopher] The Milken Way - "The scarce resource in our society...
___________________________________________________________________
The Milken Way - "The scarce resource in our society is not money
but people."
Author : pavanyara
Score : 59 points
Date : 2021-09-28 11:13 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (neckar.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (neckar.substack.com)
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I'm no sympathetic to effort to rehabilitate people like this.
| Especially with "look what vacuous homilies they have to offer".
|
| Aside engaging in actual crime, Milken's career was part of a
| trajectory where corporate raiders forced a perspective of ultra-
| short-term-ism onto the corporate world, something we're still
| suffering from. And the association between this and actual law-
| breaking isn't coincidental.
| aeternum wrote:
| To me it's strange to think of money as a resource especially on
| the societal level. Money is just a unit of account. Creating
| more or less of it should not create more resources or products.
|
| People, natural resources, finished products, those things are
| finite and thus there's a need to allocate them. Money has turned
| out to be a good way of doing that.
| allemagne wrote:
| In what way is money not a resource at all levels?
|
| There's a finite supply of money that can be added to, taken
| away, allocated, or fluctuate in its price according to any
| other arbitrary unit (i.e. dollars in terms of euros, or in
| terms of baseball cards, or pounds of steel).
|
| Just like legal entities or "social liquidity", the supply and
| allocation of money is an ultimately imaginary thing that
| nonetheless exerts real world influence on how many other
| resources and products are created.
| [deleted]
| BBC-vs-neolibs wrote:
| Has it?
| merpnderp wrote:
| Creating more money steals value from everyone who has traded
| their work for money, and creating less of it adds value. So
| you are right, it doesn't create more or less resources or
| products, but it does change existing values of resources and
| labor.
| epistasis wrote:
| As wealth grows through greater prosperity, if we do not
| increase the money supply to match this growth in wealth, we
| start to value prior labor far more than new labor. This is
| incredibly unfair to people who were simply born later than
| others, particularly since it's far easier to accumulate more
| money if one already has a good amount of wealth.
| merpnderp wrote:
| Absolutely, which is why it is fair to err on the side of
| inflation instead of deflation when managing the money
| supply. But stability is more important than either
| inflation or deflation, as an erratic money supply
| increases uncertainty into the value of trades.
| epistasis wrote:
| Agreed, and IMHO inflation/deflation, for all the
| difficulty of measuring them, is probably the best way to
| know if the money supply is to high or low.
|
| This is also why I think Bitcoin rests on shaky
| foundations, and why I get tired of people who want a
| balanced federal government spending budget.
| simorley wrote:
| > Money is just a unit of account. Creating more or less of it
| should not create more resources or products.
|
| Actually creating money does create more resources and products
| and vice versa. It's pretty much the modern economic system.
| More money makes more investment possible which can make more
| resources accessible and therefore create more products. But
| there is a physical limit on the resource side. And if society
| fails to justify the money creation with more resources,
| products and services, then you have inflation and ultimately a
| currency collapse as everyone loses faith in the value of
| money.
|
| It's a balancing act between money and products - whether money
| has to catch up to more products or whether products have to
| catch up to more money.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Malthusians hardest hit.
| vc9999 wrote:
| Money has no intrinsic value
| handrous wrote:
| Trivially true, as value isn't intrinsic in the first place.
|
| Now do human lives.
| southerntofu wrote:
| I think the parent's point was that a complex society can
| exist without money without any obvious/unavoidable
| downsides. It's just a layer of abstraction that's useful for
| ensuring some people have more than others, but does not
| serve any function in a society of abundance where resources
| are more accessible to anyone regardless of "class" (monetary
| barriers or other forms of social status, disconnected from
| actual needs).
| allemagne wrote:
| "Actual needs", "serving a function" and
| "obvious/unavoidable downsides" are loaded concepts that
| humans disagree vehemently about, not any kind of objective
| formula that can tell you the intrinsic value of other
| concepts.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-29 23:02 UTC)