This got written following a conversation this morning, and came out as a series of tweets. Just read them in order, going down the page:
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Many of the people who believe money has intrinsic value hanker for a return to metal, or metal-backed currencies which they think of as ‘real’ money.
How they can rationally hold the idea that gold (particularly) is intrinsically valuable defeats me. It is one of the oldest con tricks known to mankind.
Money is a means of exchange. A particular currency must be trusted for it to have any ‘value’ as a means of exchange.
Billionaires know that money has no value other than as a means of exchange, so as soon as they acquire any amount of money, they exchange it for things that do have value – food/water/energy supplies, property, land etc.
They use their real wealth to control the rest of us.
They may be greedy, but they’re not stupid.
@W Brown, I’d go one step further and say that *things don’t have inherent vale*, it’s people that assign value to things. Money is value liquified.
If you are talking metaphysics then people should be the priority.
If, on the other hand, you are talking how this Government sees things then I think the following jumble of facts implies the alternative.
As of two days ago there were 8,939,336 cases of Covid worldwide
Of these 303,110 were in the UK (3.4%)
Total deaths 467,133
UK deaths 42,589 (9.11%)
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/?utm_campaign=homeAdvegas1?%22#countries
Only two countries have a higher death total than the UK, the USA and Brazil. The USA has a population 5 times that of the UK, Brazil 3 times. Deaths per million USA 369 Brazil 236 UK 627
Excess UK deaths (above the average number) were up 59% in week 14, 76% in week 15 and 113% in week 16. These are not given air time in the Government press conferences.
https://fullfact.org/health/covid-deaths/
Either Brits are exceptionally prone to severity of attack by Covid or something isn’t right and it isn’t being fixed. Why?
Possibly because Dominic Cummings is the senior policy advisor to Bojo and has some fellow travellers in support.
“Experts criticised Cummings’s theories about genetics, saying they were unworkable, unethical and amounted to eugenics, two days after Andrew Sabisky resigned as a No 10 contractor over his past claims that black Americans on average had lower IQs than white people.”
Guardian 19 Feb 2020
“Either Brits are exceptionally prone to severity of attack by Covid or something isn’t right and it isn’t being fixed. Why? Possibly because Dominic Cummings is the senior policy advisor to Bojo…..”
There’s a limit to how much two clowns can teach each other!
Given Einstein’s (alleged) quote “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about th’universe!”, as what they’re teaching each other is stupidity (and unfortunately they are human), there probably isn’t a limit…
There is another alternative which is never discussed, or even aired, in polite company – maybe the NHS is not as good at saving infected people as other health services? Standing back, an alternative picture:
We have this much higher death rate than other countries as outlined above and conversly, 4 huge empty Nightingale hospitals in England, half empty hospitals with little A & E activity and little diagnostic work etc. Cancer treatments postponed and so on. Highest Covid infection rate Is in hospitals & Care Homes where patients were discharged from hospitals without a test by NHS doctors.
ICUs have been ‘overwhelmed’ there’ been no shortage of ventilators and so on. What are we to conclude?
The general population, in particular those of us shielding, are terrified of going to GPs and hospitals and dentists etc, so we are not using the NHS.The 2million people shielding have definitely protected it from treating our existing conditions.
You are aware the NHS has half the ICU beds of most other countries in proportion to population and that’s not its fault: that’s because of government cuts.
What do you want? More cuts as punishment for the NHS as the Tories will demand? Why?
W Brown is right. Very few individuals hold money in cash. They seek to hedge against any loss in value by buying other assets. Money is a means to transact. We invariably hold just enough to buy the things we think we need. That presumably is why I am potless by the end of each month
What is wrong with holding a reserve of money in cash? What happens when the boiler breaks down or your children need new shoes? You could rely on insurance for the former or a payday loan for the latter but both at a greater marginal cost to yourself or just go without. Why not provide a society that creates a sufficiency of income that enables people to build adequate savings to absorb those costs rather than suffer the deleterious impact when they cannot?
Since when did savings have to be under the mattress?
This has annoyed me. I will never argue that those who desire financial resilience should keep their money ‘under the mattress ‘ as there are quite obviously security issues and there are plenty of financial institutions will accept their deposits but it belittles those with little financial capacity to be able to create a reserve that enables them to accommodate life’s ups and downs. What I believe is that a government policy should enable that an individual within that society can provide for themselves, through work, to no detriment to those that cannot. A government deficit whereby that money, not taxed back, provides this. The trouble is it has not, and has instead, has been redirected to those who have enough already.
I picked up your comment on cash. If you did not mean cash and just generic saving I missed your point.
I have nothing against saving per se
I think interest rates need to be set for a greater good
Paul Mayor says:
“What I believe is that a government policy should enable that an individual within that society can provide for themselves, through work, to no detriment to those that cannot. A government deficit whereby that money, not taxed back, provides this. The trouble is it has not, and has instead, has been redirected to those who have enough already.”
I can see where you are coming from here, Paul. This is central to the traditional Tory philosophy of standing on one’s own two feet and it sounds great, but does have downsides. The biggest downside is estimating what is an adequate level of financial security to withstand whatever might be round the corner. How much do you actually need to see you through old age ? It’s not an easy calculation. Once you have decided that financial self-sufficiency is what you need for security the amount of cash savings you need to be secure is limitless……. this is a trap and a snare and the number of people who finally cannot bear to spend what they have saved for their third age crises are legion. If the surplus fortune goes to the donkey sanctuary to avoid tax what really was the point? This may well not be how you end-up, but many people do become too dependent on having money in the bank to be able to spend it when they need to.
Beveridge’s vision of a welfare state where individuals did not have to live in fear of old age and illness like this was truly…er…. ….visionary, but we’ve lost that vision.
We have indeed
We live in fear
I do not understand the response today. What I am simply saying is that those who work should have a sufficiency of income from work that enables them to provide for themselves. No need to have to recourse to usurious interest rates in order to repay a debt, or to provide the basics of heat or eat, or to repair or replace the means that provide the very basics that lead to a sufficiency of quality of life.
On those who cannot, their should be a floor that they should never go below and Beveridge, quite obviously, addresses this but there has
been an ongoing policy to diminish and belittle those who have a genuine need that they cannot, however temporary, provide for themselves
On the subject of pensions, to which I did not refer, given the inadequacy of defined contribution pensions combined with the state pension to provide an adequate income in ‘old’ age then it is quite obvious that those who can will make additional provision through fear, as you say. A simple remedy is to have a nationalised pension scheme.
Self reliance is not and never should be an ideology of the right who wish to profit from its expression and then take a disproportionate ‘reward’. It is and should always be a vey basic of our human nature that inspires us to innovate and share our experiences to the betterment of all, or those who can benefit, with little or no reward to ourselves.
I am no tory.
You mention money’s ‘use value’ (tweet 2/n), where I guess you mean ‘exchange value’.
But I did once find a 2p coin had more use value in stopping a four legged coffee table wobbling than it had in exchange value.
Paul Overend says:
“But I did once find a 2p coin had more use value in stopping a four legged coffee table wobbling than it had in exchange value.”
If you can easily drill holes in them coins are cheaper than steel washers…….. 🙂
This a very interesting post.
The use value of money for the rich I suppose is:
– Power & influence to maintain favorable treatment from Government/legislators,
politicians
– Being able to out bid and compete against people for certain goods and services
– To grow their wealth not by product innovation or risk but through the simple
consumption of other’s existing productive capacity
– Enabling the wealthy to decouple from the rest of society and live more exclusively
– If wealthy from criminal activity, the opportunity to launder it and make it respectful
– Totemic displays of wealth – certain watches, vehicles, property locations/size.
I wonder if there have been any studies done on the effects of money on human psychology?
There has been lots of research on the effects of money on psychology.
I recall one study which compared the response of different cars to someone waiting to cross a pedestrian crossing. The researchers correlated the value of the car with likelihood of the driver stopping. What they found was that the more expensive the car the less likely it was that the driver would stop. These findings are consistent with ideas of entitlement and the influence of privilege upon the sense someone has of entitlement.
Other studies have found that wealth is inversely related to the capacity for empathy, and its well-documented that, as a proportion of income, those with the least donate much more than those with the most – again empathy and a sense of belonging play a role in this. There’s a book called the Spirit Level, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, that trawls through the available research and concludes in favour of equality. The authors also found that wealth inequality also hurts the wealthy. In social psychology there’s lots of research looking at how paying people (or not) for their involvement in research changes how they relate to it (e.g. often those paid are left feeling that they “did it for the money”, whereas those not paid experience a sense of contribution to science and knowledge and the importance and value of that – money seems to have an alienating effect from the possibility of different meanings and interpretations that people might otherwise prefer).
I’ve read The Spirit Level – it’s very interesting and personally I have always believed that money changes people for the worst – it can have a desensitising quality to it.
Thank you.
Even just hearing words associated with money, earning etc. makes people less likely to react in a helpful, mildly altruistic way when put in a situation which calls for them to do this.
This is from Kahneman’s wonderful book: “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, along with many other brilliant and challenging insights into why our minds work in the way they do.
Pilgrim Slight Return says:
“The use value of money for the rich I suppose is:
— Enabling the wealthy to decouple from the rest of society and live more exclusively”
This kicks in at relatively low levels of wealth. The urge to live a ‘better’ area is basic to the middle class aspiration isn’t it?
Andy
I don’t see what you highlighted in lower income communities frankly.
They might want a yacht like a rich person, but their real concern for them (and me) day to day is do I have enough money to feed the kids, pay the rent/mortgage and keep us off the streets and also will I have a job in six months time? Those are some of my aspirations and many others I know at this level of ‘real’ income.
What do the rich think about? How to keep their money and its value (that which they don’t spend) and what asset classes to spend the rest of it on. I’m sure they do not have to worry about mortgages, food bills, utilities school uniforms like the rest of us have to.
Talking of valuing other people most don’t even understand what kind of species they are. No clear understanding their species is not just biological and somatic but cultural and ideological and this leads to a need for parents to help their children to have “situated social fitness” (an ability to relate to and cooperate with others for the purposes of well-being both for self and others). Those individuals who don’t value others obviously had poor parenting (often for a variety of reasons or causes) and never had human sociality properly embedded. This creates most human problems.
I agree about culture and ideology, and I think they’re what induce people to see themselves solely in biological, somatic terms. Very succinct. You can see it in the turn to pills for every ailment, the current illness narrative around sadness and fear, in the attempt to explain everything in generic terms, eugenics, biological psychiatry, and how all the solutions are individual and body-focused: massage, pampering, gym membership, entertainment. Seeing wellbeing in terms of social and political connection, solidarity, mutual support, co-operation and so on, has been replaced by the commodification of feeling bad alongside a range of individual retail options. I’m not sure how parents can compete against an overwhelming culture, or how many try, these forces are powerful and pervasive, the world is polluted by billboards, there’s a will to deceive that’s heavily financed.
Very clearly stated. I guess money when it equals a small number of people wielding absolute power over everyone is more valuable to those people.
They will fight to make sure as few people as possible understand that money could be valuable as a tool for creating an equitable and sustainable society where power is always beholden to the public good.
Your second paragraph pretty much nails it for me. The vested interest in keeping people misunderstanding. I’m writing as someone who believed the narrative that govt taxed to spend. Not that I ever believed they taxed the right income streams to the right degree. It’s only the last few years I’ve really begun to learn about how economies actually function. I think the general ignorance about govt and economy tells us a lot about the purpose of education.