Money Talks

From currency to earning, spending, and more

Hi Zan, Hi Pa

Volume #29

November 25th, 2024

HI, ZAN:  Like it or not, money plays an important role in the life of just about every adult.  So shall we talk about cash, bucks, greenbacks, moola, finnifs, sawbucks, C-notes, grands, PayPal, Venmo, Zelle, bitcoin, and all that?

HI, PA: Sure—after all, in many ways it’s what makes the world go round! (How sad is that?) 

PA:  It’s interesting to think about how payment has evolved, from the earliest days of bartering, through coins, paper bills, checks, credit cards, and now online transfers and bitcoin.  It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that currency is supposed to reflect, in a concrete way, our contribution to society.  I say ‘supposed to’ because clearly, under the current system, the amount of money someone has, or earns, usually isn’t proportionate to their societal contribution.  How did that happen?

ZAN: I think we’d have to ask a historian to get the most accurate answer, but here is my thought: once money evolved from a tool used to exchange goods to a symbol of power, it took on a life of its own. 

In some ways, it was a natural evolution from bartering to currency—if all you have to trade is apples and you need rice but the person selling rice doesn’t need apples, what are you supposed to do? Creating currency allowed us to get beyond that little hiccup, but it also meant that the objects we traded were something altogether separate from the work we did in the world. And that meant assigning a numerical value to people’s work, which over the years has been completely skewed by greed and the economic systems we’ve built.  

PA:  Painfully true.  I’m interested in the term ‘alienated labor’ which to me means a disconnect between your work and your life.  If, as was the case with the islanders in Micronesia, your work is catching fish and gathering fruit for you and your family, there’s no disconnect:  your efforts go directly to feeding the people you care about and keeping them alive.  If your work is adding up numbers in an office, then there’s a degree of alienation:  that work indirectly feeds you, and I think that ‘alienation’ has certain psychological effects, sucks away a little piece of a sense of meaning.

ZAN: Great point—what have we lost by not being directly connected to the processes we rely on to live? 

PA: Not only does money assign a numerical value to our work, it has morphed into a societal marker of our self-worth.  The size of your house, the make of your car, your bank account or investment portfolio, the neighborhood you live in–it’s all somehow come to be mixed up with self-esteem.  Not for everyone.  I know poor people who have high self-esteem and rich people who have low self-esteem, but for many the Eye of Society, the demon of comparison, plays an important role in their sense of self.  It’s really something imposed not inherent, something as artificial and skewed as the monetary value we place on different kinds of societal contributions.  The elementary school teacher makes $60,000, the venture capitalist $6,000,000.  And we just accept that as natural.

ZAN: I also wonder if this system we’ve built stops people from reaching their full potential or offering their gifts to the world. As an example, when I worked in restaurants, many of my coworkers were well-educated people who had studied subjects like education, data science, communications, history, and others. Some were brilliant artists, mathematicians, or teachers with a lot of leadership potential. But many of them had chosen to work in the restaurant industry because they could make more money waiting tables than they could in an entry-level or even mid-level job in their field while also having a generous amount of time off each week.

PA:  Sounds like Cuba, where doctors can make more money tending bar than healing people.

ZAN:  That’s not to say that working in restaurants isn’t a valuable contribution to society—I built a successful career in the industry between the ages 18-23 and learned a lot of valuable life lessons from it—but it’s not a fulfilling or healthy career path for a lot of people, just one that allows for decent earnings and quality of life. What would our society and world be like if the brilliant philosopher didn’t have to work in finance in order to make a secure living, or the kindergarten teacher didn’t choose to bartend instead in order to pay their mortgage, or the artist didn’t become a real estate agent so they could support their family? 

PA:  I like the word ‘calling’, as in so-and-so felt called to be, say, a landscape architect.  It seems to me that one of the pillars of happiness is figuring out your calling and then being able to practice it.  But where does talent come in?  What if someone feels called to be a musician but doesn’t have the talent to make money playing music in the competitive marketplace?  I guess money is designed to regulate that:  elevating the most talented in every field for the greater good of society.  But, as per your examples above, that doesn’t seem to quite work, does it.  And certainly money doesn’t often do a good job of encouraging a society’s greater good.

ZAN: I agree, but I also don’t know how we’d be able to come up with and implement a better system. Systems of all kinds are imperfect, so there will always be people who slip through the cracks. Knowing that, is our system the fairest possible? I doubt it. 

PA:  I doubt it, too.  We’ll save that for our ‘perfect world’ newsletter.  Want to talk about our personal relationships to money?