"Several of you have asked for the skinny on what money actually is. So, here’s the full fat take ...
"Answer: It’s a way of keeping score. Who has the right to call upon the resources of others in that same society? And that, other than a couple of footnotes which we’ll deal with overleaf, is pretty much it.
"It doesn’t matter, at this level of understanding, whether money is a commodity itself, something representing or exchangeable into a commodity like the gold standard, or just those pieces of paper of the current fiat money. It’s simply a way of recording who gets to ask for what.
"The average hourly wage in the UK is £13 or so. If you’ve £13 you can get an hour of average labour devoted to you. If you’ve £1.3m then you can get 100,000 hours of that average labour and what it can produce.
"Because increasing the number of things you can make claims with doesn’t increase the number of things you can make claims upon."~ Tim Worstall, summarising his post 'What is money? A rabid free marketeer puts his foot in lots of notes'
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Wednesday, 12 October 2022
What's money?
2 comments:
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I've never heard it explained that way, but it's an excellent and simple way of addressing both the "money is the root of all evil" claim, and the idea that printing money can produce wealth - in one fell swoop.
ReplyDeleteYes, it's very neatly done, isn't it.
ReplyDelete