Rendered at 01:28:56 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
fillmore 26 minutes ago [-]
I'll confess I haven't read the OP but I find the discussion of money interesting and want to share two great books I read recently that might be of interest:
The first one especially. Every night I read a chapter, and every time I'd remark to my wife how entertaining this book was.
The second was very interesting as well. I thought the author took an appropriately critical look without overdoing it, and offers a history of big business in the past ~200 years.
skybrian 7 hours ago [-]
This is a book excerpt. I didn’t find any in-depth reviews, but one of the authors posted a summary of the book here:
I found a newer blog post based on a speech the author gave with some ideas from their book. It's very long because he's talking about multiple related ideas, but I excerpted some quotes here:
> We can find this same principle down through the history of the corporation. When in the beginning of the 20th century we see the generalization of the corporate form, it’s not a process where large-scale investment required raising more funds. The problem that the corporation is solving is that you have large-scale enterprises with long-lived specialized fixed assets, on the one hand, and wealth owners, on the other hand, with claims on those enterprises — often the owners of smaller enterprises that merge into one larger one, or the heirs of the founder — who don’t want an interest in this particular company. They want money. And so the function of the corporate form is to allow the conversion of ownership rights into money — to enable payments that will satisfy these claimants, so that their authority over the production process can be pooled, their smaller interests can be assembled into a larger whole.
> This is not a system for raising funds for investment. It’s a system for consolidating authority. It’s a system for reconciling the need for large-scale, long-lived organizational production, on the one hand, with the desire of the wealthy to hold their wealth in a more money-like form, on the other. As William Lazonick says, the corporation is not a vehicle for raising funds for investment, it’s a vehicle for distributing money to the wealthy. The origin of the corporation as we know it is as a vehicle for moving funds out of productive enterprises to asset-owners.
I would put it differently: sometimes it's about raising funds, but the more important part (he claims) is being able to cash out.
Bratmon 4 hours ago [-]
> The origin of the corporation as we know it is as a vehicle for moving funds out of productive enterprises to asset-owners.
It doesn't fill me with confidence that they got this completely backwards. The advantage of the corporate form is that the wealthy owners can cash out without moving any wealth out of the productive enterprises. The whole point of a corporation as opposed to a partnership or joint-stock venture is that wealthy corporate owners can sell their stock to other wealthy people without interfering with the productive enterprise at all!
justonceokay 6 hours ago [-]
A friend of mine uses the term “coin sickness“ to describe somebody who would rather have money than material wealth. Someone who sees the brand of clothing but couldn’t identify quality fabrics or stitching.
whytaka 6 hours ago [-]
While financialized society is still standing, I'd much rather have money than material wealth.
Security and freedom, time, and well-being. Worth much more than another luxury t-shirt.
WhatsTheBigIdea 4 hours ago [-]
I think the point was that the poorly made luxury t-shirt has less intrinsic value than the well made generic t-shirt and the difference in the market values of the two is "coin sickness"?
cfgeorge 5 hours ago [-]
The "money vs things" framing gets sharper if you split "things" into two buckets: consumption goods (the luxury t-shirt) and productive assets (land, tools, an income stream, a paid-off house).
What you are defending isn't money as an end, it is the optionality a functioning financial system gives you: time, mobility, ability to redirect capital quickly. That dominates a closet full of brand-name clothing for almost everyone.
But it collapses in two scenarios most readers haven't lived through:
1. Currency stress, where the optionality is denominated in a unit losing real value faster than wages adjust. Hyperinflations (Weimar, Zimbabwe, more recently Venezuela and Argentina) compressed the trade to weeks; people who held land, working businesses, hard commodities, foreign currency kept their wealth.
2. Counterparty failure, where deposits, money-market shares, and bond claims turn out to be promises from someone who defaults. 2008 was a near miss; the bank failures of the 1930s were the actual outcome.
Steady state: you are right. Tail state: the opposite. Most US household-finance advice assumes the steady state holds forever, which is a strong assumption.
3 hours ago [-]
Hnrobert42 6 hours ago [-]
Why do people write like this? So much preamble. Unnecessary metaphors. Just make your point and be done with it.
kristianc 5 hours ago [-]
Because "money and physical things are conflated in our thinking" is simple enough to sound trite.
Rury 30 minutes ago [-]
It's as if the author doesn't understand why various forms of money came to exist, and why there are disagreements over monetary ideas/matters.
8note 1 hours ago [-]
it isnt really though
a ton of countries have been selling real stuff for basically nothing to the states to get some dollars back.
i think canada is better off keeping potash and oil and copper and so on than sending it down south, and the chinese are better off using the manufactured goods than selling them for usd
kristianc 1 hours ago [-]
trading their goods and services for money brought nearly a billion Chinese out of extreme poverty so I'm not sure they'd agree
toasty228 5 hours ago [-]
Why do people even write, just so us pictures am I right ?
subw00f 2 hours ago [-]
Why waste time say lot word, if few word do trick
SilasX 5 hours ago [-]
Haha agreed, but remember, it's posted on lit[erature]hub, not tech[nical]hub.
Bratmon 5 hours ago [-]
This article is a reminder to all of us programmers that there is a belief that is common among non-programmer intellectuals (especially the above-average-intelligence-but-not-genius types) but completely non-existent among skilled software engineers:
Abstraction is inherently dishonest.
If you're a good software engineer, you quickly build an understanding that abstractions are vital for detailed understanding of complex systems, but can leak or even fail entirely. Less quickly, software engineers build very good instincts at how to tell when an abstraction is leaking/failing (that's what debugging is, after all).
Outside software engineering, this is not a skill that is consistently practiced. As a result, you end up getting takes like this one, in which the authors figure out that "money" is an abstraction over "all productive work and assets" and that this abstraction sometimes leaks.
But because the authors aren't used to dealing with abstractions, they assume that the fact that the abstraction "money" leaks sometimes means that it's worthless and should be removed. In fact, the opposite is true: the abstraction "money" does leak (which can cause real serious problems), but in the cases it doesn't, it's essential to human flourishing in any economy more complex than "exchange bread for pelts"
skybrian 4 hours ago [-]
The first author is a professor of economics who seems to be some kind of socialist, but they readily admit that money is very useful. They're trying to get to grips with the nature of it. They're saying that some abstractions about money are better than others.
To come up with better abstractions, sometimes you need to strip away the abstractions and study what's being abstracted.
ChuckMcM 4 hours ago [-]
Apparently both authors would develop a better way to explaining and separating these things if they took some Systems Dynamics[1] courses. Everyone who has taken college level economics was taught that money isn't real (I mean the first money was owning a very large rock on a ledger where that rock might be at the bottom of the ocean. [2]) But what is absolutely real is a contract of labor or materials. Using numbers to allow you to trade contracts for wood and carpenters for a house and using tokens to represent those numbers is sufficient to create a more flexible market than just straight up barter.
Are you trying to tell me that the the book titled "Against Money" is not against money?
SteveDavis88 9 hours ago [-]
So many popups.
kspacewalk2 8 hours ago [-]
I love reading articles in Firefox. uBlock Origin takes care of most annoyances, immediately using Reader View on load makes it them look the same.
9 hours ago [-]
dnnddidiej 8 hours ago [-]
That popups has an annoying article. I think.
deanputney 8 hours ago [-]
My mobile browser gave up it was so bad. Shame, it seemed like it could have been an interesting read.
rationalist 8 hours ago [-]
It looks good on Firefox For Android with the uBlock Origin add-on.
card_zero 8 hours ago [-]
Works fine on Lynx (on Termux).
6 hours ago [-]
layer8 6 hours ago [-]
Didn’t see any in mobile Safari with ad blocker.
everdrive 8 hours ago [-]
Only if you run javascript
CraigJPerry 8 hours ago [-]
i turned off adguard on ios safari to see what you're talking about... oh wow! You really didn't overstate it.
In other news, my appreciation of the block lists i have configured in adguard just notched up a few more points!
paulpauper 7 hours ago [-]
lol 11 comments on this article and all but 1 are about the popups
kridsdale1 8 hours ago [-]
I use Chrome for iOS. On human-hostile sites like that, I take the human out of the loop. I press the “hey Gemini, what is this page about?” button and read a clean version in an overlay window.
mikewarot 3 hours ago [-]
Real money is a thing, usually made of some mix of metals in fungible tokens with composition set by law. It serves as a flux, to make commerce easier to conduct by serving as a trusted neutral item of barter.
With the loss of this once common resource, and the imposition of a system designed to prevent savings and force investment into stock markets and other ponzi schemes, there are very few honest and reliable ways to save at the personal level.
The collective effects of generations conditioned to accept a gradual erosion of "money" have lead to a well engineered blind-spot that is preyed upon by the top 0.01%.
Real prices should be stable across years, even decades, and there should be negligible inflation, instead of a 2% target rate that is pushed on the public as "natural", "stable" and "safe". When real packages continue to shrink, and actual prices are notably higher than the official numbers, it greatly erodes the collective trust of society.
underlipton 4 hours ago [-]
Selected notes:
Excuse me everyone, I have an announcement to make.
*ahem*
Barter is back, Alan Greenspan was the devil, and the government is lying to you about inflation. Thank you, for your time.
It's crazy to me that the period TFA is talking about took place a generation AFTER the Volcker Shock and a decade after the initiation of Japan's Lost Decade(s).
>And yet, in many contexts, money payments are treated as equivalent to the thing they give claim to, both by economic theory and in our day-to-day language.
Huh. Swaps.
>If money quantities do not refer to some underlying physical quantity or value, what do they refer to?
Capacity to coerce (mind control).
>If these payments and values and balance sheet entries don’t describe any of the concrete objects around us, why are our lives organized as if they do?
Money: a story of humanity https://www.davidmcwilliams.ie/money
The corporation in the 21st century https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300280197/the-corporatio...
The first one especially. Every night I read a chapter, and every time I'd remark to my wife how entertaining this book was.
The second was very interesting as well. I thought the author took an appropriately critical look without overdoing it, and offers a history of big business in the past ~200 years.
https://jwmason.org/slackwire/against-money/
https://skybrian-links.exe.xyz/post/765
Here's one quote:
> We can find this same principle down through the history of the corporation. When in the beginning of the 20th century we see the generalization of the corporate form, it’s not a process where large-scale investment required raising more funds. The problem that the corporation is solving is that you have large-scale enterprises with long-lived specialized fixed assets, on the one hand, and wealth owners, on the other hand, with claims on those enterprises — often the owners of smaller enterprises that merge into one larger one, or the heirs of the founder — who don’t want an interest in this particular company. They want money. And so the function of the corporate form is to allow the conversion of ownership rights into money — to enable payments that will satisfy these claimants, so that their authority over the production process can be pooled, their smaller interests can be assembled into a larger whole.
> This is not a system for raising funds for investment. It’s a system for consolidating authority. It’s a system for reconciling the need for large-scale, long-lived organizational production, on the one hand, with the desire of the wealthy to hold their wealth in a more money-like form, on the other. As William Lazonick says, the corporation is not a vehicle for raising funds for investment, it’s a vehicle for distributing money to the wealthy. The origin of the corporation as we know it is as a vehicle for moving funds out of productive enterprises to asset-owners.
I would put it differently: sometimes it's about raising funds, but the more important part (he claims) is being able to cash out.
It doesn't fill me with confidence that they got this completely backwards. The advantage of the corporate form is that the wealthy owners can cash out without moving any wealth out of the productive enterprises. The whole point of a corporation as opposed to a partnership or joint-stock venture is that wealthy corporate owners can sell their stock to other wealthy people without interfering with the productive enterprise at all!
Security and freedom, time, and well-being. Worth much more than another luxury t-shirt.
What you are defending isn't money as an end, it is the optionality a functioning financial system gives you: time, mobility, ability to redirect capital quickly. That dominates a closet full of brand-name clothing for almost everyone.
But it collapses in two scenarios most readers haven't lived through:
1. Currency stress, where the optionality is denominated in a unit losing real value faster than wages adjust. Hyperinflations (Weimar, Zimbabwe, more recently Venezuela and Argentina) compressed the trade to weeks; people who held land, working businesses, hard commodities, foreign currency kept their wealth.
2. Counterparty failure, where deposits, money-market shares, and bond claims turn out to be promises from someone who defaults. 2008 was a near miss; the bank failures of the 1930s were the actual outcome.
Steady state: you are right. Tail state: the opposite. Most US household-finance advice assumes the steady state holds forever, which is a strong assumption.
a ton of countries have been selling real stuff for basically nothing to the states to get some dollars back.
i think canada is better off keeping potash and oil and copper and so on than sending it down south, and the chinese are better off using the manufactured goods than selling them for usd
Abstraction is inherently dishonest.
If you're a good software engineer, you quickly build an understanding that abstractions are vital for detailed understanding of complex systems, but can leak or even fail entirely. Less quickly, software engineers build very good instincts at how to tell when an abstraction is leaking/failing (that's what debugging is, after all).
Outside software engineering, this is not a skill that is consistently practiced. As a result, you end up getting takes like this one, in which the authors figure out that "money" is an abstraction over "all productive work and assets" and that this abstraction sometimes leaks.
But because the authors aren't used to dealing with abstractions, they assume that the fact that the abstraction "money" leaks sometimes means that it's worthless and should be removed. In fact, the opposite is true: the abstraction "money" does leak (which can cause real serious problems), but in the cases it doesn't, it's essential to human flourishing in any economy more complex than "exchange bread for pelts"
To come up with better abstractions, sometimes you need to strip away the abstractions and study what's being abstracted.
[1] https://systemdynamics.org/
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/02/15/131934618/the-...
In other news, my appreciation of the block lists i have configured in adguard just notched up a few more points!
With the loss of this once common resource, and the imposition of a system designed to prevent savings and force investment into stock markets and other ponzi schemes, there are very few honest and reliable ways to save at the personal level.
The collective effects of generations conditioned to accept a gradual erosion of "money" have lead to a well engineered blind-spot that is preyed upon by the top 0.01%.
Real prices should be stable across years, even decades, and there should be negligible inflation, instead of a 2% target rate that is pushed on the public as "natural", "stable" and "safe". When real packages continue to shrink, and actual prices are notably higher than the official numbers, it greatly erodes the collective trust of society.
>And yet, in many contexts, money payments are treated as equivalent to the thing they give claim to, both by economic theory and in our day-to-day language.
Huh. Swaps.
>If money quantities do not refer to some underlying physical quantity or value, what do they refer to?
Capacity to coerce (mind control).
>If these payments and values and balance sheet entries don’t describe any of the concrete objects around us, why are our lives organized as if they do?
Why, indeed.