Do you ever get a weird feeling when you reflect that money isn't actually 'real'?

[iloveeverykindofcat]

Okay, I know its 'real' in the sense of how it functions, but do you ever reflect how strange it is that we do all this work, make all these exchanges, do all this saving of something that doesn't actually exist? People I've mentioned this to IRL don't seem to share this feeling that its actually a very strange system - maybe I'm not explaining myself very well. But the money in my bank account, for example. Its just a number. I go to work in order to make the number go up, and almost everything else I do makes it go down. If someone went into the system and added a few zeros to it, my life would change beyond recognition...yet it doesn't actually exist? What is it?

Not any more.

The pound isnt underpinned by gold

Yes. Technically speaking it is a promissory note. In theory, you can go to the Bank of England and cash it in for gold to that value. Because everyone knows that the bearer can do that if they want to, the note itself can be used as a form of payment, should the person you are paying choose to accept it.

If soclety as we know it crumbled, but there were still people around, there would be barter and exchange. If your hens lay eggs and somebody wants them, they will swap them for whatever they have that you want. That's how currency started in the first place. I have this lovely shiny object but I'm hungry, will you swap it for your apple?

Randomly listened to a podcast this morning on Steven barletts diary of a CEO with Mo Gawdat who says this exact thing…. Money is just an illusion

Money is real. It exists. It’s simply intangible & artificial. Lots of things exist that are intangible and artificial. Language is another one.

@dodobookends well yes, money needs a stable society and trust in statr meachonaisma to work.

If the world went to shit and everyone was scrabbling to survive - what would you rather have - four cans of tomatoes or a million worthless numbers in a bank account back?

Yes. Technically speaking it is a promissory note. In theory, you can go to the Bank of England and cash it in for gold to that value. Because everyone knows that the bearer can do that if they want to, the note itself can be used as a form of payment, should the person you are paying choose to accept it.

Very true, but if everybody took £1,000 in notes to the BoE and asked for their grand-worth of gold in exchange for it, they'd be absolutely stuffed!

Banknotes are kind of circular, in that, if you take a banknote (current or out-of-circulation) - i.e. a promissory note - to the bank to exchange it for money, all they would really have to swap it for would be another promissory note.

The pound hasn’t been on the gold standard since 1931.

Bitcoin is based on something, first it's possible to trace all the transactions which the coin has been used for (so it's verifiable) and second the numbers are fixed. Problem is it's used both as a means of exchange and an speculative good (so you get bubbles)

It's a very abstract concept in some ways.

Many years ago ago I worked at the head office of a building society during my school and uni holidays. One of my tasks, as it was before the advent of electronic money transfer, I think BACS was just becoming a thing, was to type out cheques for the daily transfers to investment banks. So I7 year old me would sit down at one of those big old golf ball electric typewriters, tear a cheque out of account no.1 cheque book, then type out a cheque for £6 million pounds to Goldmann Sachs, another for £10 million to Deutsche bank, the same again to Lehman brothers. I would then go upstairs to have these checked and signed by two of the top managers.

It didn't seem real getting into the lift with cheques for £50 million clutched in my hand, at a time when I probably made £60 a week! And this happened every working day!

Surely value is arbitrary as well? A shared concept that gold is worth more than horse manure... but I can't fertilise my garden with gold!
I agree with the poster who pointed out that it's very culturally bound - the Incans thought gold was pretty but didn't ascribe the same value to it that we do.

I also think this way about the 'morality' of work - a shared concept that 'working is good' - but why? I get that if no one worked, nothing would get done, and in jobs which have huge impact on huge numbers in the immediate term (medical services, rubbish collection, water treatment, agriculture), fine. Why is it 'moral' to work as, say, a marketing executive? What impact do you actually HAVE? Are you adding more to society than someone who cares for a family member (but isn't paying tax as no 'job')? I don't see why we have this delusion!

If we just agreed that working is inherently morality-neutral, and that those who can do certain things should be thanked and those who can't should be helped... oh wait! I think I just turned into a Communist!
Sorry, long day, rambling.

Yes, I think of this often.

And it's why I refused to buy expensive engagement and wedding rings when I get married. Owning something valuable purely because somebody says "this is valuable" makes no sense to me.

Yep, this is exactly what blows my mind!
Like gem stones - who decided that rubies and sapphires are less valuable than diamonds?
They are all pretty sparkling rocks!
Why isn't food the most valuable thing out there when we quite literally need it to survive- surely a pork joint would have more value than a diamond.
Society is weird!

I certainly do when I think about how society/economy functions on massive debt - I didn't really understand the depth of it until I started working for a real estate organisation but it's totally crazy that economies and property markets are just built on people owing one another/a lender billions and billions of $/£. 😱

@HereBeFuckery I think the cocnept of "work" as a good goes deeper than modern or indeed human society. The concept of freeriders (able bodied people/animals who do not contribute to the group) exisits in animal social groupings and often those are not seen to be contributing get violently driven out. It is an observable behaviour in monkey societies.

@GoldilocksIsALittleSod scarcity! plus humans like shiny things.

I guess if you take it back to when people first started trading with each other it makes more sense and I find it easier to get my head round. The first people made/hunted/grew everything they needed. If they needed something different and when they started to be able to travel (down rivers or to the next settlement) they would swap their goods for someone else’s. What you swapped it for depended on what value you put on that item/how rare it was. As time has gone on and our demands and needs have increased, we can’t get everything we want in person so we have money as sort of trading tokens. We earn them or sell things to get them and exchange them for something else we need. It sort of doesn’t matter if those tokens are solid or not.

What about art? I learned a while ago that fine art is used in money laundering, precisely because an artwork functions like a sort of 'blank cheque' - it has no expected value. Its worth whatever the valuer says its worth.

Yep, it is becoming a major problem. A fiat currency run in good faith is one thing, but ours is one that has become completely uncoupled to any sense of reality. Who determines how much a resource costs? How is the worth of work measured? At the moment, all we know is that we are all being ripped off in shoddy Britain, where we are repeatedly told by politicians and the mindless-but-impressed-by-statistics that few of us working for a living "contribute enough into the system": whatever that means and who measures it. What is this system and how legitimate is it?

Keep asking questions op.

I've just spent my day moving bits of information around on the internet, so that the organization I work for will increase the number in my banking app.

Maybe I'm having a career crisis. Maybe I need to quit and become a farmer or something.

Ha ha - most farmers trade in futures these days and their goods are just bits of money on an app.

Far too many people, particularly in the public sector, have been inveigled and gaslit into working for nothing more than feelz and the rather shifty status that comes with being a 'hero'.... meanwhile they can't afford food and housing because some fools in London declared it should be so. And so now we have the "enough is enough" movement, falling public sector recruitment, and a crisis in education and healthcare staff. There is still a reality that needs to be accounted for, and our politicians, backed by all those who inherit money, are refusing to acknowledge it.

I thought this podcast series helped understand ... a bit!

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001dwr0?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

I feel like this about the internet and wifi ect 😂

@Ginmonkeyagain ooooh that is fascinating! You've given me a Wikipedia wormhole to disappear into this evening!