I like re-inventing wheels, and doing research a little less. Re-Inventing wheels gives someone the possibility to look at a certain concept from his personal view, without infecting himself too much with existing research. Besides that it’s quite educational and just plain fun. :)
After contemplating the idea arround money last time, I decided to do a little research into time-sharing systems and ideas (as some also referred me to). My sugestion of using time as a currency had, as I already hinted on, some complications.
My time as a someone with certain skills has different value for different people. For instance, one might not want to ‘hire’ me as a carpenter, since I’ll be a lot slower then anyone with experient or schooling. This results in that the value people have for someones time is related to their skills/experience and the task at hand. Now this might not be a big problem, as finding someone with the right skills might not be too hard. It’s a matter of matching up people with tasks.
A bigger problem though is, how I value my time for someone. I might love to help out a good friend of mine with some work, but I’d rather not spend much time for/with the anoying prick arround the corner. This results in me giving a certain value to the ‘credits’ I would get for my time. Which since they are personal and depending on complex variables (social groups, my mood, the weather, etc), become rather hard to predict.
Which brings us to a general problem with currency/money.
Unless you can find a currency which is based on something that has a static value for -anyone-, value is going to be personal and fluctuating. Even with food or nutrients this problem remains, we might -need- a minial set of specific basic nutrients to survive. But what we want is a lot more complex, I like food, I like to differentiate it, try different forms of it. This results in a complext carier for a currency. Just as bad/good as any other.
In a way our current monetary system is a religous one, we believe it has a -certain- value, and this is why it has one. Kind of like douglas adams ‘artifical god‘. We value items and services, and in a way this is what money represents. But how we value these, or how much value we accredit them, differs. It changes per subject, per person and over time. This makes it very hard to predict or define what the value of the currency is, kind of like predicting the future. And although people have tried this, I don’t think anyone succeeded yet.
It comes down to predicting what each individual wants, how much they want it, and how that is going to change. And this for everyone who is using the currency. Now one could create a ‘hack’ arround this by making a lot of assumptions. Taking into account some group dynamics, general marketing effects, one could asume their will be some big groups which would atleast somewhat agree on how much they would like a certain thing. And since things take time to move arround in large groups, with enough information of where things are flowing between what, one could even make some predictions on how it’s going to change.
So yeah, it gets pretty vague, but it’s something. Ofcourse respect for any individual in a scheme like this is out of the question, unless you start grouping individualists into sets with certain common trades. If you can’t dump down, or simplify the information, you’ve got nothing.
Now some would asume from this, ok so money is essentially worthless, if it has any value it’s highly irregular and unpredictable. So why not just get rid it?
Money does have certain important, or atleast very usefull trades or properties. Because it abstracts the values we have for things, it makes it possible to devide, share and save it. It becomes easier to calculate things on, to share resources or goals. Getting someone to make you a meal with exotic ingredients (like a nice curry), gets a lot easier with money. Or even just making it yourself. I’d need rice, which comes from asia, paprika, potatoes, other nice veggies and some spices. Ofcourse ecologically one would want ‘local food’, but rice doesn’t grow here very well, and I like curries. Money makes it easier to share the transport of rice and veggies with other people, without me knowing them (although I might not mind that). It makes it easier to calculate the transport costs, costs for people involved in producing the products and probably more things, into one price, one value. Even though this ‘value’ might be incorrect, it is a value, where else there would be none. It makes it more concrete for me on how to get a nice curry. I have an idea on what the value of my time is to atleast certain people, and I can have an idea what part of that value can be traded to get a nice curry.
The problem with this ofcourse is, that these ‘values’ can be hopelessly incorrect. The question then is, does that matter?
I think it would depends on someones goal. If your goal is getting efficient trade systems for specific groups of people, probably not. If you want want a fair world, it would matter a lot. Then you want to value people’s work and lives correctly. And that is what it comes down to.
The problem with fairness though, is that money is a highly inadequate tool, which is most likely to express the value incorrectly. The ‘problem’ then is, that trade becomes a highly personal ordeal. Which becomes impossible to abstract. Any abstraction would actually de-personalise the transaction, making the value-judgement less precise. And any transaction would represent a social properties, afterall, personal relations gets highly mixed up in value assesments.
Now the final question that remains for me is, how do I get myself a ‘fair’ curry? I supose one not all that horrible solution would be befriending myself with a captain who would take me to india where I can befriend this chef who would be willing to make me a nice curry. Maybe not very ‘time efficient’, but I don’t think I would mind. :)
