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Comment by vc9999 | Hacker News Reader

Money has no intrinsic value

Our money system is basically an accounting system. It's like a spreadsheet. Of course, nobody is silly enough to eat the spreadsheet. The point is that we track who owes us things and who we owe things.

We link it to valuable things by constructs like contracts. This way money acts like a thing of value. For most practical purposes money is more useful than specific physical things because usually you can always convert money into anything you need at the time and place you need it. Money loses its practical value if you cannot convert it anymore.

Trivially true, as value isn't intrinsic in the first place.

Now do human lives.

I think the parent's point was that a complex society can exist without money without any obvious/unavoidable downsides. It's just a layer of abstraction that's useful for ensuring some people have more than others, but does not serve any function in a society of abundance where resources are more accessible to anyone regardless of "class" (monetary barriers or other forms of social status, disconnected from actual needs).

"Actual needs", "serving a function" and "obvious/unavoidable downsides" are loaded concepts that humans disagree vehemently about, not any kind of objective formula that can tell you the intrinsic value of other concepts.

Human labor is a resource too and I fail to see how it could ever be abundant, especially qualified labor, unless we really develop a general AI. In every job, people who are actually good at it are valuable, and there must be some way of managing their priorities, so that their time isn't wasted.

Paying them is one such way, though I do not claim that the only possible way in the universe.

> In every job, people who are actually good at it are valuable, and there must be some way of managing their priorities

Agreed, but i'm strongly convinced an AI is not a good approach to the problem. What problem would it be solving, and with what criteria for the solution? An AI is just a really fast and really dumb computer looking at abstract numbers, and as such what numbers (weights) and why we feed it is what matters.

I would argue two things, with which you may or may not agree:

- capitalist competition drains "human labor" with little benefits for society: cooperation across organizations and fields could be incentivized ; we have an abundance of skilled people in many fields, but all of them are isolated working for a manager/boss (and their interest) not cooperating for the interest of society at large, and that's a waste of "human labor"

- "qualified labor" is as valuable for skillsharing as for actual problem solving; it enables more "qualified labor" to emerge (reducing the bus factor) ; companionship and other forms of crafts guilds and workers cooperatives have a lot to offer to society which no private company (with shareholders and managers) could ever offer

> Paying them is one such way, though I do not claim that the only possible way in the universe.

Yeah, that was exactly my point. Being born and raised in a capitalist economy, most of us fail to see what we could do without money entirely. But throughout most of history humanity has lived without any form of currency so ti's not the only way to think about incentives.

In my opinion the problem is the insistence that money should earn 0% interest. Yes it earns positive interest rates when there are borrowers willing to pay them, nothing wrong with that. However, when there are no borrowers promising 0% interest then that is just how it is. There is nothing special about 0% interest that turns it into a human right.

People work too much, then earn too much, then save too much money instead of saving in real assets and then they complain that their money is eroding in value, effectively admitting that they worked too much. Money has become a high score and its increasingly exclusive nature made it a status symbol.

It has lead to absurd situations where people "finance" their retirement by not having children. Who's going to work for them when they are old?

> Money has become a high score and its increasingly exclusive nature made it a status symbol.

Exactly. It's a mathematical abstraction for social status and privilege, not a tool that addresses human needs.

> not having children. Who's going to work for them when they are old?

This framing of the "aging" issue is based on our capitalist economies with the family as a foundational unit of society. In a cooperative economy, no one should have to worry about how to feed themselves when they grow old.

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