In my last newsletter, I planted the idea that money has not really operated the way we are taught to believe it does for quite a long time. Money, yes, still goes some way to incentivising behaviour, and certainly helps to ease interactions among the population at-large.
But that’s a thin veneer.
The vast majority of the money in our economies now just goes around in digital circles – mutating into various debt structures and financial widgets, paying for pointless wage jobs and pointless entrepreneurial activities, paying the marginal premium for a Nike logo on a pair of trackpants, increasing the value of houses in inverse to their physical age and condition… And giving grubby right-wingers a way to rationalise society-restraining ideas like meritocracy and corporate responsibility.
The evidence of this is, of course, the things we actually need, and want – nurses and rubbish collectors and teachers and decent housing – aren’t worthy of nearly enough money apparently. Yet, gold-plated pizza still is.
Assuming you’re not a billionaire (and, if you are, please sign here), when was the last time you felt like serious money was being used for something you really wanted more of? Not something you’re advertising-ed or propagandised into wanting more of, but those “wouldn’t it actually be nice if…” kinds of things, like cheap doctor visits, and amazing school trips for your kids, and kick-ass firetrucks, and fewer starving people in the world.
Our world is absolutely bursting with choice, but it’s not like we’re narrowing it down by ‘voting with our wallet’. When you buy a T-shirt, do you really think the most profitable companies like H&M or Zara or whoever takes note and makes more just like it? They’re bringing out complete new product lines every 3 months. What they make has essentially nothing to do with what you bought – because they’re going to bundle up a bunch of brand new clothes at the end of each season and truck them off to the dump regardless; so why spend time doing real market research, when you can just keep rolling the Capitalism-Tank forward? All they really care about is, when you next walk into the store, there’s something different on display to catch your attention.
I wonder, do you think your money is fundamentally responsible for house price rises? Or is it just dragged into a fast-moving current of politically-advantageous house price inflation that you have no control over?
Do you think your “wallet’s vote” gives you any real control over which products Amazon recommends to you when you search for cat toys or whatever?
“But wait!” you cry “What about stuff that makes our lives better?” – like high-speed trains, contact lenses, touch-screens, the internet, or the Covid vaccination? Are they here because they were voted for with wallets?
(That was a rhetorical question but, just in case, the correct answer is “No”)
And what about advertising cookies, SUVs, and single-use plastic? Did we vote for those things?
The more power we have taken from diverse democratic and community institutions, and given to the ‘individual’, the more these decisions are – ironically – made outside the pay grade of individuals, and instead by a collective blob of politicians and bankers and venture capitalists and shareholders. To be fair, it’s not even possible to pin this stuff on a single person: Even with all his money, Jeff Bezos (or whoever runs Amazon.com these days) is under broadly the same fundamental influences as the rest of us. He needs to algorithm-the-profits-up, because that’s what shareholders expect, because that’s how growth is measured, because we actually haven’t thought hard enough about how to measure human prosperity another way.
We’ve known we’re floating towards shit creek without a paddle, because of climate change, for quite a long time. If you believe this is a bad thing, how many actual dollars would you spend trying to reverse it? Do you think your expensive electric car purchase is a vote for a better world? Do you think eating vegan is really going to result in less animal misery?
There’s a pessimistic way of putting this, which is to wonder aloud:
“knowing what we know, do you think the average person has the slightest influence over whether we, collectively, eat less meat or use less fossil fuels?”
To be clear, I don’t.
Let me go off on a little tangent… You might have heard of a guy called George Soros. He’s all into this thing called ‘Open Society’. I’m not going to chime in on whether he’s got the right idea or not here. But, I want to note he’s one of the richest people on the planet, and has spent the span of my entire life trying to change things via the application of money, and – as far as I can tell - is no closer to achieving his goal.
Fortunately, there is another way to ask this question, which is:
“knowing what we know, do you think we would, collectively, choose to eat less meat and use less fossil fuels, if we could?”
What fundamentally has happened is, money has stopped operating on a human scale. Money is a technology designed to facilitate interactions between people, but we have become alienated from that core purpose, by turning it from a measure of value into a measure of power. This happened when we stopped thinking about money as a social good, and starting thinking about it as an individual good. It started a long time ago, but it really planted its foot on the accelerator pedal when things like consumerism and financialisation were super-powered by the interconnections of the internet.
So now money is unrestrained: If it can’t grow locally, it grows domestically; If it can’t grow domestically, it grows internationally. And the result is it grows astonishingly rapidly – disconnected from any measurable analogy of value, and in places that are too opaque for us to value it regardless. When one person’s wealth increases at such a rate that, in the time it takes for them to drink a hot cuppa, they’ll earn more than an average wage earner takes home in a decade, money simply can’t be operating the way we believe it is: You can’t think of a sparrow and a space-shuttle as being on the same continuum, simply because they both “spend time in the sky”.
So, if money isn’t the dynamic democratic tool that we’ve always been led to believe it is. What the fuck is it? And what has it got to do with a UBI? We’re getting there…