Which of these statements is true? 1, there is enough wealth in the world for everyone, or 2, money isn’t real, it’s a figment of our imagination, a construct.
The answer? Both are true.
How can that be so? How can people be poor if money doesn’t exist? The answer is both fascinating and important. When you’ve figured it out you’re going to be a hero. You will solve world poverty and save the planet at the same time.
Money is a problem that needs fixing. On this, almost everyone agrees.
If money isn’t real, what is? Water is real and air and food. Warm blankets on a cold night, a roof over your head if it’s raining. Stuff that keeps us alive and makes us happy is real, medicine when we’re sick, a guitar when you want to make a song, paint to make a picture.
And if you don’t believe that money isn’t a real thing, remember, before we invented it, people ate, drank, sang and painted, without it.
Think of money as a token. Like a plastic disc you put in a shopping trolley. The trolley’s not yours but you use it and when you put it back you get your token back. The token represents something. In this case, one trip around the supermarket.
So let’s fly through the history of wealth, capitalism, that mysterious word ‘economics’ and look at what happens next. We’ll understand why we’ve ended up in the mess into which we appear to have stumbled, some would say thoughtlessly. We’ll understand how to change the world and how to feed ourselves in the future.
We will discover that the history of money is the history of inequality. So, here’s another conundrum: Inequality leads to war. War leads to inequality. Money and war are so intertwined that it will make your head spin.
You might step back at this point. It’s not guns that kill, it’s people? And, like guns and knives, money is just a tool. The thing about tools is that they are useful and wonderful things when they serve us. They are blunt, horrible objects when we serve them. Money should be our tool, not our weapon of torture.
And when people argue with you and say ‘You’re not living in the Real World’, you can tell them what real is and you can throw all the jargon at them. Because you’re going to own this knowledge.
For a more details, see the alphabetical lists on this site: Money Words and Ideas.
Let’s face the truth, too many people are poor and starving on this planet, whilst the people and the nations who aren’t poor are eating up all the resources so fast that there won’t be any left for our children. It can’t continue like this. But it’s fixable, that’s the good news, and you’re going to fix it.
Before we get started, try not to panic about money. It’s very scary when you haven’t got enough. Don’t worry, we’re going to sort it out and there is enough. There’s plenty to go around. People are starving but that’s not necessary. I know how much you worry about the planet and about resources. Trust me. THERE IS ENOUGH. We can do this.
The world is split into two types of people. The ones who say ‘That’s the way it is and there’s nothing I can do about it’ and the ones who say ‘It’s not right, we need to change it?’
You can choose which one you want to be.
The other interesting thing is that the story of money begins and ends in debt. Debt came before money. Yes, you read that right. We are taught that before money was ‘barter’. That’s, apparently, not true. Ever since Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations in 1776, anthropologists have been roaming the planet looking for examples of rural societies that use barter and haven’t found any, anywhere.
So debt is a sin, isn’t it? Well, maybe it isn’t. Maybe, debt, or favours, or ‘I owe you one’, is just the original form of human exchange of ‘stuff’. Indebtedness is about what we owe to each other to not see each other starve. A debt is a ‘promise’.
Next: The Story of Money