Money keeps the world spinning!

It`s true. How affects money or the lack of it your daily life? How important is money to you? I know, no one talks about money, but let`s talk about money. Is greed good? Do capitalism works? Or is economy just a pursuit for people who don`t have a clue about good things in life?

It's all folly.

It's an ugly game, for the most part, we're all required to play. Some revel in it, some acknowledge it, some are repulsed by it and all participate in it.

If it weren't for the pursuit of money where would our energies go? That is a more interesting question, I think.

Necessary evil I guess. But when I pick up the guitar in the morning, money is the farthest thing from my mind

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Money is just a measure; it measures the total value of our work, ingenuity, and -- to a lesser degree -- circumstances. It's always seemed odd to me that being proud of a job well done is considered admirable, but being proud of the money which symbolizes that same work is considered bad.

I think money looks a lot less sinister when you see it as a way to make a bartering system work. I will need the work of a baker at some point, but because of the concept of money I don't have to find one who needs any web development work done to make a trade. Money fills that gap and allows us to use the product of our work in any place at any time.

That said, people can love money for its own sake, and I don't think there's a major philosophy, ideology, or religion that doesn't consider this to be a very poor way to live.

Greed is not good, but its lesser form, selfishness, is not something that can be suppressed, either. Capitalism works because it allows for this fact. As to whether or not it works...well, we're all communicating easily despite the fact that we're spread out all over the world, and we're doing it with machines built in capitalistic societies. So I say yes.

Kanye West has a lot more money than your local baker or grocer but I know which I'd pick to have more valuable work (between Kanye and the grocer or baker).

I was being a little flip in my answer probably because while money makes sense in the workaday real world it all seems a little silly in the larger context of all that is the human condition.

Just my 2 pennies.

Due to inflation, two pennies are now two dollars.

"A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore." - Yogi Berra

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Aye, I do, too. Sadly, lots of other people who like blowhards more than bread disagree.

These things always kinda trip me up, until I remind myself that it's not what's more valuable, it's what's rarer. I find a baker to be far more valuable than Kanye West (only on this site would that sentence ever be uttered, by the way), but I think a lot more people could become the former than the latter.

Yeah, I can't really disagree. I do think envisioning it as a certificate of sorts helps. Every dollar you or I have is just a little certificate proving we worked X amount, which entitles us to barter that work in other places and times. I'm sure this is obvious to everyone, it's just a perspective I really like that helps me square the obvious importance of money with the frustrating abstractness of it.

"Greed" is a word thrown around so much that it has become almost meaningless. One man's "greed" is another man's "ambition." At what point does one fade into the other?

For my purposes, I see "greed" as basically the natural inclination to follow one's own best interest, which means we are all greedy. And in that sense, I trust greed because I can understand that at the heart of it all everyone is looking out for himself, so you know where everyone is coming from. Thing to keep in mind, however, is that greed extends well beyond money although most people only see it in that relationship. Greed (ambition if you will) also can encompass a certain life-style or fame as well as fortune or a better life for your kids or political power or sex, any number of things. Greed is not always evil--its a matter of subjective perception.

Does capitalism work? Yes, better than any other system I have seen. You have to recall when Karl Marx was lambasting capitalism as the ultimate cause of class warfare of the workers against the capitalists, he was looking at an economic system that was still in its infancy. He didn't anticipate the rise of unions and the use of collective bargaining to help level the playing field between workers and management. He didn't foresee government intervention into the employer-employee relationship through minimum wage laws, OSHA requirements, environmental regulations by the EPA, government inspection of meat and other foods and of drugs, etc. So the horrors of capitalism that Marx and Dickens wrote about in the early 19th century have since been resolved as capitalism and democracy matured.

As for the effect of money, there was a time in my youth when I was generally viewed as poor white trash without a pot to pee in or a window to throw it out of. I've experienced going without food and having bill collectors knock on my door and I sacrificed and worked hard to get out of that status, taking whatever job came along to make ends meet until I worked my way up from the stench of poverty. Now I make a good living without any real physical effort, but I've never been one to squirrel away money, other than a moderate nest egg in case of emergencies. Otherwise, I pretty well spend what I want as I want. When it comes down to it, money itself is just the way we keep score. I just make sure I pay all my bills up front so no one will ever again knock on my door wanting money.

Truth to tell, my only real prejudice is against the poor. Oh, I'm not going to berate them or kick 'em out in the cold. But I worked my way up from being poor, so I've got no sympathy for anyone who isn't busting their butt to do the same. Poverty is for the people who don't have a clue about the good things in life or the will to do what they have to do to earn them.

Oddly, bread is a necessity in life (although relatively cheap) while rap music (or more specifically music by any one star) is neither.

Whatever his talents may be, Kanye West to completely worthless to me--I had to slip out to the Internet to find out who he is.

Aye, he's pretty worthless to me, too. But I could never duplicate what he does, whereas I can make bread if I must, or at least learn to with a modicum of effort and ability.

Cost = value * scarcity. Bread is valuable but plentiful. Internationally-appealing hip-hop music is less tangibly valuable (though valuable to someone), and much harder to produce.

Of course, there's no accounting for taste (literally or figuratively), so as much as I enjoy the fruits of capitalism, it still produces plenty of head-scratching success stories. I look at the Kanye Wests of the world as a small price to pay for iPods, DVDs, and cheap necessities.

That said, "Jesus Walks" is a fairly impressive song.

Yeah? Who's it by?

Your Bro Kanye.

Yep; though like several of his most popular songs, one of the best parts is sampled from a much older song.

Given the context, I kinda suspected that.

It's here, in case you're wondering:

Itīs not the same(!). Starting from a certain point, money is generating money and the developement of the society only speeds this process up. The richest don`t have to work. They can, some of them do it, but hey donīt have to do anything. The scissoir between rich and poor keeps opening up every year. It`s not about envy... okay it is... but it`s also about ticking timebombs. I can`t believe it`s getting even worser, while absolutely everyone should be aware of the situation. There is only one good explanation for this: Ignorance and greed. This is what keeping guys like me frustrated.

Okay, but thereīs is no final frontier no more. Only space and the oceans - and I don`t like the idea to exploit them like manhood had exploid and destroyed many landscapes. Greed is a basic human enmotion, I know. Feel it everytime, I touch bigger amounts of money. And I have to admit, this concept had worked out well in the past. But will this it works out in the futurw? I`m not an economy expert, but I have strong doubts about the brave new world. And Kanye West.

When this ambitious man detroys other lifes, just to make more money?

What`s the Google-slogan: "Don`t be evil?" I bet, this is not the
Exxon-slogan, just for example.

From the perspective of winners, greed is good. From the perspective of, say, ex-houseowners and ex-workers in the United States, or child-workers in asia, africa and arabia... but hey, at least they still having jobs, right?


Agreed. But I see no regulation. Who is the regulator? You talk about unions. They are weak right now - social is what generate jobs - that`s the new mainstream. Supa-boy Rupert Murdoch estimates that newspapers will be dead in about twenty years. And he likes the idea - `cause online.news.com are cheaper, more easy to control and there are no unions. Thatīs what he said. The same counts for other branches. That`s social degenaration at work - and I see the reasons: Hundred of millions of cheap working class heroes from china, india and other emerging countries are a strong argument. It looks like a world-wide-cash-party with really bad hangovers to me. Right now, it`s hangover time. But they are already back for more. And who has to pay for it? The bloated government state, enemy number one for venture capitalists. I acknowledge your personal way, you deserve your success. For myself, Iīm relatively young and I don`t have much money, which is partially because of my lack of self-discipline in the past, and partially because the german education system sucks (have you seen the PISA-results?). But not everyone is full healthy or relatively lucky, some people ( often means some innocent kids, grwomig up in projects ) are having really big emotional trouble, are heavily traumatized, whatever. This people are kicked out in the cold all the ****ing time - literally. No one cared, cause mainstream-agenda is: Everyone is on his own. I believe in darwinism, but not in social darwinism. `Cause it answers the why-question, but not the how-question. For the same reason I don`t like american liebertarians and this hyped Ron Paul-guy that much.

Yet most of them do work; a heck of a lot. And whether or not they have to now, they probably had to work their butts off to amass that fortune. There is, of course, the odd heir or heiress, but the overwhelming majority of wealthy people were not born that way.

Also, work comes in many forms. If someone is merely smart and recognizes a good investment opportunity, is that "work"? Did they "earn" the money that may result from a wise investment? The very idea of taking risks is valuable, because not everyone's willing to take these chances.

But the idea that there's a "ticking timebomb" is based on the idea that people are going to get fed up, right? Which is also about envy.

I think people just want someone to blame, and it's easy to blame the people who are well-off. Always has been.

This springs from what I think is a major misconception: that growth is created only by the exploration and exploitation of natural resources. This simply isn't true. We didn't have to discover a new wellspring of oil or a new unharvested forest to invent the personal computer, we just had to figure out how to do it.

The vast majority of wealth creation these days comes from technology and innovation, not the raw consumption of materials. Their abundance helps keep the material costs down, but increasingly the cost of the things we desire, and which help improve our lives, is the product of research.

Think of it this way: every product we have, every thing we have...every bridge, computer, desk, house, etc., is made up of stuff that was just laying around the earth thousands of years ago. All we had to do was learn how to put these things together, to use the elements to create them. We had to, through trial and error and the occasional spark of genius, figure out how the world works. That's why we're more comfortable today than we were 10 years, and we were more comfortable 10 years ago than we were 100 years ago. Because we figure stuff out over time.

You're assuming that greed is what puts these people in these situations. Usually, it isn't. Self-interest is usually the reason an ex-worker had a job to begin with, or an ex-homeowner a home at one point.

I think a lot of people get tripped up here; they see the end result -- a company -- and assume that it just is, and anything done by it that involves eliminating jobs, scaling back, etc., is some kind of net loss. And, of course, they're angry with the owner.

But that company wasn't always there. The proper way to gauge these things would be to imagine the company as it is, versus the company as having never existed. It's only there because the big bad corporate owner took his own time and money and risked it on something that might not have worked (and, most of the time, doesn't!). People always seem to forget this. As soon as a company is established, they take its existence (and the jobs it provides) for granted very quickly.

Social programs never generate real jobs, they keep people busy. At best, it is a temporary diversion from real economic growth designed to placate the electorate.

Perhaps unions are weak where you are, but some of them are staggeringly powerful here in the U.S. Their philosophy and methods are often indistinguishable from large or moderately-sized corporations at this point. Like any company, they're basically just a group of people looking out for their own interests.

It's cheaper, but online news makes basically no money, so I doubt it's something guys like Murdoch love. But it's something they'll embrace because it's not just cheaper, but often better, and because it's going to happen either way. Entrepreneurs are very comfortable with adapting to change, or else they wouldn't be who they are in the first place, so it's no surprise that guys like Murdoch are saying and expecting such things.

Also, if the enterprise becomes successful, there'll be unions there, too. It's inevitable, at least under current law.

It's a fine line. Pretty much everyone agrees that we need to band together at certain times and in certain ways to ensure a public minimum of services or assistance. But we're well past this; the United States, at least, spends a tremendous amount of money on assistance. We literally give away billions upon billions of dollars, both internationally and domestically. Yet many problems persist, because money is rarely the answer to such things.

We can be as compassionate as we like, and spend as much as we want, but these kinds of problems can't always be fixed that way. Imagine a deadbeat Uncle...he drinks, does drugs, and has borrowed money from various members of the family time and time again without repaying it. At some point, I'll bet you'd draw a line. Not because you don't care about him, but because you can see through his personal history that the money doesn't do any good unless his personal affairs are in order first.

Government spending can be like that. There are people who just need a little help to get through a rough patch, but there are also people who won't benefit much from the money until they've come to think about money (and their life) in a much different way. It's like pushing a stalled car rather than trying to get it fixed; you can achieve some mediocre results through the sheer force of effort, but it's not ideal, and when you stop pushing, the car stops moving.

Econ growth doesn't spring solely from exploitation of resources, sure, but tech innovations do often bring their own ecological 'footprint'. Everything from cell phones to x-boxes require coltan for their capacitors, for example. Its primary concentration in the DRC, aside from influencing various local conflicts (with delightful slave labour side-effects etc), has also brought the familiar problems of water pollution and deforestation, key downsides of poorly regulated mining.

I think novelty frequently involves flux, and the physical growth of human populations (more so than the economic growth that stems from cunning use of the existing) will most often entail an increase in our impact on the planet (and potentially problematic feedback to our own communities).

And that's with out getting all Climate Changey on your argument

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You are, of course, correct, and I was thinking of some of this while I was posting it, but decided that it would just lead to a digression. But yes, technology still does use resources; I made a passing reference to this, but it's reasonable to go a bit deeper. I was just pointing out that our growth isn't really contingent on finding new lands to consume. The advances we're seeing in quality of life come largely from ingenuity rather than brute force production.

You make a good point about the novelty of technologies (assuming I'm understanding you correctly). It takes time for some of this to mature; when it's new, there can be a period where something is in strong demand before we've found a way to mine it in a responsible way. I'm not sure I see a way around this, and I tend to think of it as the product of the molasses-like pace of government (and the lack of open societies around the world).

As for the growth of populations; that's certainly going to become a concern one day (though the rampant fears of vast overpopulation not too long ago are looking sillier by the day). But of course this is going to be an issue either way; it's only really the result of technology in those cases in which technology helps us live longer.

Anyway, in summary: everything we make requires materials, but our standard of living can (and does) increase without having to pillage Pandora.