http://money.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and-markets-in-one-visualization/
This should only count liquid assets. I would not have included commercial real estate in the chart, since all other real estate isn't covered. But otherwise it is a good chart.
So what is money ... depends. And the GDP = money*velocity of money ... think of it as economic momentum. You have liquidity, if the availability of money and the number of times it changes hands each year ... is equal to or greater than your GDP (however you define GDP). Not enough money or not enough velocity ... and you have the crisis of 2008. The newest form of money, has only existed for 15 years, and is the largest factor, and is an on-going experiment. Who moved your cheese?
Obsolete is what.
About damn time we shifted over to an energy-based economy instead of fiat money.
Money is our way of keeping score.
Quote from: Sal1981 on December 18, 2015, 02:11:43 PM
Obsolete is what.
About damn time we shifted over to an energy-based economy instead of fiat money.
We have been on the Petro-Dollar since 1971. So already done. Now if we could just shift to solar power units ;-)
Quote from: Gawdzilla Sama on December 18, 2015, 02:46:39 PM
Money is our way of keeping score.
Also our way of cheating. Never trust the player running the bank, when playing Monopoly ;-)
Quote from: Baruch on December 18, 2015, 06:19:34 PM
Also our way of cheating. Never trust the player running the bank, when playing Monopoly ;-)
I'll just take the fifth on that one. (http://rationalia.com/z/read.gif)
Money is time. Plain and simple.
It's a more universal way of bartering. Sometimes people don't want 3 chickens for that gallon of milk you need.
Edit: To add, I'm saying you are bartering you time. The time it takes to raise chickens, the time it takes to get milk from a cow, the time it takes to make the things you want, etc.
It would be much too difficult to exchange and barter in such a huge world full of so many various products and services. Currency is the best way.
Except when I (government) can print money without backing it up (with chickens etc) then I am simply a crook. Don't want to take the time to raise your own chickens? Then get off my porch and go chew your belt while starving under the viaduct in your cardboard box. Or be a sociopath who gets people to give you their money and things ... in return for your overly charming manner. Works in both private and public sectors.
Quote from: Baruch on December 19, 2015, 09:07:52 AM
Except when I (government) can print money without backing it up (with chickens etc) then I am simply a crook. Don't want to take the time to raise your own chickens? Then get off my porch and go chew your belt while starving under the viaduct in your cardboard box. Or be a sociopath who gets people to give you their money and things ... in return for your overly charming manner. Works in both private and public sectors.
Yes. There are crooked people in the world, or at least people that simply could do a better job with the system we have.
The point is, we all have a service or product we provide. Sometimes it's running a farm, sometimes its running a computer company. Some people's time is "worth more"... but that's only because the consumer let it get that way.
It is a word denoting an artificial construct of barter. Humans evolved to cooperate and money is a symbol of that exchange. But it really is an illusion once you know the age of the universe and have listened to Sagan's Pale Blue Dot speech. Even Shakespeare knew all this was folly in the grand scope with Macbeth act 5 scene 5.
Rich and poor all die, and boarders come and go. And with all our current chase of things we are still far to stuck in the now, while science is ahead of the average layperson and average patriot and garden variety ideologue. Money has no use to a cockroach or bacteria and if the dinosaurs had been funded by Trump they still would have gone extinct.
Quote from: PickelledEggs on December 19, 2015, 02:12:19 PM
Yes. There are crooked people in the world, or at least people that simply could do a better job with the system we have.
The point is, we all have a service or product we provide. Sometimes it's running a farm, sometimes its running a computer company. Some people's time is "worth more"... but that's only because the consumer let it get that way.
There are no consumers. Just slave labor who is completely fooled. No market established what Mr Trump was worth ... it was inside trading all the way ... and a little help from Dad. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Just don't choose to be a sucker.
Quote from: Baruch on December 19, 2015, 05:27:59 PM
There are no consumers. Just slave labor who is completely fooled. No market established what Mr Trump was worth ... it was inside trading all the way ... and a little help from Dad. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Just don't choose to be a sucker.
You've watched too much of the Zeitgeist Movement videos, haven't you?
Way beyond that. I have the the whole Weltanschauung ;-)
There are two kinds of people; those who get hit, and those who get it.
Congress has generously allowed itself to repeal the very temporary ban on insider trading by Congress-critters. Lobbyists call voters ... road kill.
"the system we have" ... what is that? Not some theoretical free market. Study George Carlin.
Some questions:
1: What do you use during your day? (Services, production of products, entertainment, etc)
2: How do you go about giving credit to the people that supply those services and items?
3: What do you do during your day to contribute to the community? (Services, production of products, entertainment, etc)
4: How do you receive credit for those things?
For instance, I bought new pants today. My other pants are so worn out that my wallet falls out of the back pocket.
I produce artwork and can teach drawing. But I doubt that would be of use to the people supplying the pants I needed to get today, so I shelled out some cash. The people that run the store probably don't want to trade an india ink sketch for a couple pairs of pants.
Currency is the middle ground. It's something we all have to involuntarily agree on... even though it can be horribly flawed with inflation and whatnot.
After people have read the original chart, and talked a bit about it ... we can get down to definitions ;-)
Currency isn't the same as money. No nation uses money today, they all use currency. And currency is not a bad thing ... but the fault doesn't lie in the tools (currency is a tool to do exactly what PickelleEggs said), but in the people using the tools.
Money is currency with one additional characteristic ... it is a store of value. Currency allows different people to trade, without barter. Otherwise we would all have to go to a flee market once a week (where there are lots of people with different goods/services ... think mall) and trade (without money as a tool). A modern society with money/currency ... something we have had for 2500 years ... is much more efficient. Now a form of intermediary barter, that is also a store of value ... is unnecessary, if you aren't keeping the intermediary in your pocket very long. Commercial and consumer banking, with a small interest payment to the depositor, was the solution to the problem of currency not being a store of value. But this has been failing since 1971. We are now in a 44 year old banking crisis brought on by President Nixon.
So as stated before, the GDP is the product of the money supply and the velocity of money. Relative to the pre-money system, both the money supply (there was pre-money) and the velocity is much greater. Of course average prosperity is the GDP divided by the number of people involved. From a financial POV ... the average prosperity is constantly going down, because there are more and more people. If we represent the number of goods and services abstractly ... as the money supply ... and the leverage this money supply has ... as the velocity of money ... then prosperity above subsistence is only possible in a money economy ... and only if either the money supply is increasing or the velocity of money is increasing ro both ... at a rate greater than the population growth. The problems the Roman Empire had ... was an inability to increase the money supply at a certain point, and the frequent crashes in the velocity of money (people hoarding money to protect against disasters and barbarians). And aside from plagues ... the population was constantly increasing ... until the whole system collapsed. This is a dialectical tension that the Roman economy ran under. This could have been ameliorated with the widespread usage of paper money. Romans did have bills of credit, but only on the commercial and governmental level, not on the consumer level. In places like China ... which invented modern paper and modern printing ... this same problem caused the Chinese to have the first widespread use of paper money (at least at the local merchant level). Coins were still available for the common people, most of the time. This is not to ... denigrate the Main Street Economy aka what is happening outside of finance.
With an energy based economy there would still be an intermediary, a kind of currency, in the form of personalized certificates, based entirely on energy production.
Quote from: PickelledEggs on December 20, 2015, 04:03:49 AM
1: What do you use during your day? (Services, production of products, entertainment, etc)
With certificates, you would "expend" energy by turning these in for services, products, entertainment and so on. There is no currency-to-currency trade-off because of personalized certificates.
Quote from: PickelledEggs on December 20, 2015, 04:03:49 AM
2: How do you go about giving credit to the people that supply those services and items?
Government mandates, on a yearly basis. Basically certificates would be given on a yearly basis on how much you produced the previous year. But it doesn't have to be a yearly basis.
Quote from: PickelledEggs on December 20, 2015, 04:03:49 AM
3: What do you do during your day to contribute to the community? (Services, production of products, entertainment, etc)
Either a service, production, entertainment or government.
Quote from: PickelledEggs on December 20, 2015, 04:03:49 AM
4: How do you receive credit for those things?
Sorta same as in 2. You get it from an overseeing certificate-giving and regulatory body of the government.
This is very superficial, and there are a whole literature about an energy-based economy as part and parcel of Technocracy.
Correct in the present tense. Money today is backed by more goods/services than gold. There simply isn't enough gold or velocity to produce the GDP necessary for our large population .. for various reasons. This is why the dollar (and indirectly all other currencies) was moved from a gold basis to a petroleum basis ... and why US Presidents must dance to the tune being played by Saudi princes. He who has the petroleum, makes the rules ... not he who has the gold. Of course that is how things work now, not how they worked in the past ... and this current system might not recover from the next crisis.
But that's scarcity-based economy, aka valuables.
It's pretty simple for me. It is something I don't have much of.
Quote from: Sal1981 on December 20, 2015, 11:27:24 AM
But that's scarcity-based economy, aka valuables.
Un-packing ...
scarcity-based economy = we have a service that is wanted/needed ... but not everyone can or is willing to provide it
scarcity-based economy = we have a raw material or product that is wanted/needed ... but not everyone can or is willing to provide it
Only on S Pacific islands, with though resources relative to population (not Easter Island) prior to the visits of the Europeans ... did we have a non-scarcity-based economy. All the tarot, coconut and pig you can eat. Clothing optional ;-)
All attempts outside that, to provide egalitarian economy, have failed. Also I think that primitive democracy is implied as the political component.
Quote from: Mike Cl on December 20, 2015, 11:28:31 AM
It's pretty simple for me. It is something I don't have much of.
The solution is to get someone (private sector) to voluntarily give you more (work or begging) or have the government give you more. The difference being that, the private sector has a limited amount of money to distribute, because they can't print money and the government can.
Quote from: Sal1981 on December 20, 2015, 11:11:25 AM
With an energy based economy there would still be an intermediary, a kind of currency, in the form of personalized certificates, based entirely on energy production.
With certificates, you would "expend" energy by turning these in for services, products, entertainment and so on. There is no currency-to-currency trade-off because of personalized certificates.
Government mandates, on a yearly basis. Basically certificates would be given on a yearly basis on how much you produced the previous year. But it doesn't have to be a yearly basis.
Either a service, production, entertainment or government.
Sorta same as in 2. You get it from an overseeing certificate-giving and regulatory body of the government.
This is very superficial, and there are a whole literature about an energy-based economy as part and parcel of Technocracy.
I'm not sure you understand my post...
Try answering specifically with a personal answer. Not generalized.
For instance, I'll give another example from my own life: I went to get lunch from the corner store the other day. By trade, I am an artist, so I produce drawings and paintings and can provide a service of teaching how to draw and paint. The guy that owns the corner store provides all types of foods that are pre-packaged and some that is cooked and prepared on the spot as well as a bunch of other misc. items such as deodorant, soap, pre-pay phones, cigarettes, etc. (I got a burger)
How do I reimburse him for my burger?
-I can't just give him artwork or teach him to draw. Similarly, if I was a mechanic, I can't give his car an oil change or fix it if the car doesn't need it... or if I was a computer tech, I can't just fix his computer if it doesn't need to be fixed.
What I can do is take a credit/certificates/whatever-you-want-to-call-it that other people give me for my time that I put in that want my services and products that I can transfer to the things I need.
Also similarly, If someone wanted to have a drawing or painting of mine, or have me teach them how to make their own artwork, I don't want them fixing my car if I don't need my car fixed. I want and need food/shelter.
Quote from: Mike Cl on December 20, 2015, 11:28:31 AM
It's pretty simple for me. It is something I don't have much of.
I forget which comedian said this, but:
"I need a girlfriend that likes me for my money, but doesn't understand math"
An energy-based economy is simply based on the energy used and produced. It's an entirely different category than oil, gold, whathaveyou. @Baruch.
In an energy based economy, we could walk around with cans of petrol/gasoline ... but I think government approved chits are less flammable ;-)
Quote from: Sal1981 on December 20, 2015, 11:52:48 AM
An energy-based economy is simply based on the energy used and produced. It's an entirely different category than oil, gold, whathaveyou. @Baruch.
So the DoEnergy supersedes the DoTreasury ... and I can see energy used or energy produced, but not both as credits.
If we go with energy produced (and this mostly means the electric power companies and the fossil fuel companies (fuels not provided for electrical power generation)) ... then how is this non-scarcity? All energy sources are scarce, even solar. Or perhaps you mean an electrical power cooperative, with consumers providing excess local solar and local wind power to a collectivist power grid.
If we go with energy consumed ... I assume you mean that this is a debit not a credit. The credit comes from the energy produced.
Quote from: Sal1981 on December 20, 2015, 11:52:48 AM
An energy-based economy is simply based on the energy used and produced. It's an entirely different category than oil, gold, whathaveyou. @Baruch.
If it works, it works. In theory a lot of things work, but in reality some of them don't.
Even in an energy-based economy, there will be some sort of currency that will be the thing we pay each other for our products and services.
Quote from: PickelledEggs on December 20, 2015, 11:58:19 AM
If it works, it works. In theory a lot of things work, but in reality some of them don't.
Even in an energy-based economy, there will be some sort of currency that will be the thing we pay each other for our products and services.
Right, but in his system ... the chits are produced according to energy production, not on political corruption.
Quote from: Baruch on December 20, 2015, 11:59:38 AM
Right, but in his system ... the chits are produced according to energy production, not on political corruption.
Where there's a will, there's a way. If you think anything is immune to corruption, it might be a good idea to rethink that stance.
Quote from: Baruch on December 20, 2015, 11:53:14 AM
In an energy based economy, we could walk around with cans of petrol/gasoline ... but I think government approved chits are less flammable ;-)
wat
We're fast approaching a post-scarcity economy, where scarcity won't even matter, where money will be pretty much useless, but power and influence will be the only deciding factor. That's why I think we should move to another economy, preferably one where what energy you use and produce will matter.
Quote from: PickelledEggs on December 20, 2015, 11:58:19 AM
If it works, it works. In theory a lot of things work, but in reality some of them don't.
Even in an energy-based economy, there will be some sort of currency that will be the thing we pay each other for our products and services.
Of course; energy-based currency.
Quote from: Sal1981 on December 20, 2015, 12:04:41 PM
Of course; energy-based currency.
That's my point. It doesn't matter what the money is. Money is just another word for currency. And we need money to pay for services. It doesn't matter if it's gold-based, energy-based, grain-based, etc.
Quote from: Sal1981 on December 20, 2015, 12:04:06 PM
wat
We're fast approaching a post-scarcity economy, where scarcity won't even matter, where money will be pretty much useless, but power and influence will be the only deciding factor. That's why I think we should move to another economy, preferably one where what energy you use and produce will matter.
Yes, the Singularity, where all people are replaced by robots? I will wait and see, before I give this credence. Basically this is where the Star Trek Next Gen society is placed ... no more scarcity, not more greed ... except does this mean everyone can have their own starship?
There has long been a unholy trinity of power, influence (fame) and money. Money is simply quantified power. So even if we reject Pythagoras and only see power in qualitative terms. things wouldn't be much different.
Getting back on topic ... after having visited a galaxy far away and long ago ...
One can use the entire GDP as the backing of the money supply, not just energy. Choosing one commodity over another is a policy choice, like tax law. Choosing winners based on campaign contributions. Solar/Wind farmers over others ... and penalizing consumers. Not irrational, but partisan. Why not moisture farmers like Luke's uncle and aunt?
One can used digital money now, don't need coins, don't need paper chits ... but it has to be government controlled, as it always has been. The government will not tolerate competition. This is why BitCoin has been rolled by the authorities (both official and criminal). So we have a government BitCoin ... but BitCoin is another limited resource. Let the government kind be called ShitCoin. The Treasury issues it, not some computer algorithm, in arbitrary amounts to balance the GDP. The problem is, this gives the government unlimited power to control trade. You shall not buy or sell without the PKI cert of the beast. And of course we have to have real identity on the Internet. This is also convenient for the government. If you are innocent, you have nothing to hide, am I right? All join me in loving our Leader/Fuhrer. In short ... we have converted a democratic money system into an authoritarian money system ... and the political end of political-economics still beckons.
Democratic money? The original US Constitution, money was gold or silver, privately owned (not in Ft Knox), brought to the US Mint to be coined into official coinage for a small fee. But we don't want democracy, we want Darth Vader. Or at least Captain Picard (EU in Space). We don't want to be Farengi, right? More umax ;-)
Here is a problem for next time. What happens when we count finance as part of the GDP, not just main street economy?
Here is the low-down on what happens in high finance ....
http://nautil.us/issue/31/stress/what-i-learned-from-losing-200-million
I don't know if this guy learned anything or not. But he did have fun while gambling with other people's money, in a casino that makes Casino Royale look like a piggy bank.
According to the Old Testament: money is the answer for everything.
According to the New Testament: the love of money is the root of all evil.
According to Pink Floyd: money, it's a hit, don't give me that do-goody-good bullshit.
:confuse:
Money in today's America is slavery legitimized (not to trivialize actual slavery). It is a method of ensuring servitude to the corporations. In many places in America you can actually be arrested for not having enough money (last I heard about vagrancy laws, anyway, but my information may (hopefully) be out of date).
It doesn't matter what you've done with your life or what you've contributed to society. If you wish to live your life without money there is only ONE way to do that legally (and not legally everywhere) and that's living on the street or in a homeless shelter. You could work your entire life, pay all your bills, owe nothing, own you own home in the country with solar power, its own well, a large garden and a waste treatment pond so that you could be completely and utterly self-sufficient, but you STILL need money to pay the taxes on the land each and every year or everything you own becomes property of some government or another and you're back to the single option for living without money, living on the street or in a homeless shelter. You could work your entire life for what you have and it can and will be taken in as little as a year from the last date you had money. There is no other commodity, no other currency than money. If you trade goods rather than buy and sell the government will find a way to tax those trades. Hell, they're even trying to find a way to tax virtual assets in video games, something you often actually spend money on in the form of a monthly payment to play the game and have no intention of ever monetizing and could lose as soon as you stop making the payments, not to mention they often become worthless as new content is released, rendering said items obsolete and no longer desirable in an instant.
That is why I say money is slavery. We are all slaves to the dollar. The dollar is what ensures that we do not take 3 months off work when we feel the need, or change jobs frequently when we require more of a challenge or something more rewarding. Money is what keeps the corporate wheels turning and it only works if we not only want it, but outright need it. You should be able to work your entire life for the things you have earned and they should be simply yours at that point, with no chance that they can be taken from you. But that is not the case. The only thing which is actually yours is the money you have legally acquired, and although any new money you get is taxed, no adjustment is made for the decrease in its value over time. This means that if you have money sitting in the bank earning interest, the interest is taxed, but inflation may outpace your earnings, especially after taxes. So you could be paying taxes on "income" even as the actual value of your money decreases. Money sitting in your mattress fares even worse with no chance of outpacing inflation. So you CONSTANTLY have to earn more. No matter how much you have, you MUST keep getting more or what you have loses value.
That's what money is, in a nutshell. On the surface it's a way to make sure everybody contributes by having a centralized incentive for everyone to contribute. In reality it's a way to take labor from us for our entire lives.
The monetization of society, starting 2500 years ago ... is nearly complete. Initially very few people handled money, barter was the norm. Economic relations weren't without friction ... then as now ... there were people who refused to work ... there were people who ate too much or consumed too many resources ... there were people who were hard to follow and people who were hard to lead. Money has mechanized the previous system of obligations, like the factory mechanized craftsmanship.
So it is a different kind of wage slavery and debt slavery ... they existed before, but weren't so quantifiable. And chattel slavery hasn't stopped ... for young women in the sex trade and displaced poor people in sweat shops.
So the kind of freedom you speak of, was not a common thing ... rather rare except on a frontier. The US was one big frontier at one time, but not anymore. Every postage stamp is owned by someone already.