Money Wisdom #38

"In the Metaphysics of Quality 'causation' is a metaphysical term that can be replaced by 'value'. To say that 'A causes B' or to say that 'B values the precondition A' is to say the same thing. The difference is one of words only. Instead of saying 'A magnet causes iron filings to move towards it', you can say 'Iron filings value movement towards a magnet'. Scientifically speaking neither statement is more true than the other."

Robert Pirsig Lila 2006 (1991) p.112

Money Wisdom #37

"A coin, like a human being, is the material embodiment of an invisible essence (value, the soul) present also in other coins or human beings. And just as the individual unitary human soul may seem self enclosed, separate from the social process by which it is in fact formed, so the coin may seem to enclose within itself the unitary invisible value that in fact depends entirely on circulation."

Richard Seaford Money and the Early Greek Mind 2004 p.298

Money Wisdom #36

"Monetisation is the centralisation of social power in a single, abstract, impersonal entity."

Richard Seaford Money and the Early Greek Mind 2004 p.293

Money Wisdom #35

"Money (especially as coinage) tends to promote an indefinite network of indiscriminate exchange that transcends the defined personal relationships to be found within in the family, within various social groupings, or within networks of gift-giving and barter. Whereas the Homeric gift is invested with the personality of its heroic donor, the only kind of person that money resembles is the prostitute. For Shakespeare it is 'the common whore of mankind'. The prostitute, like money, is impersonally promiscuous, transcending the restricted sexual relations required for the reproduction of the household."

Richard Seaford Money and the Early Greek Mind 2004 p.156

Money Wisdom #34

"Whence the presocratic inversion of reality? The idea of abstract unitary reality underlying the appearence of multiplicity derives in part from the fundamentality of unitary abstract value to all else. But unitary abstract value is, despite its fundamentality, in a sense unreal, real by convention only. The cosmological inversion of reality reflects the paradox that monetary value is both fundamental and in a sense unreal....... The presocratic cosmos is, in its various forms, a projection of human institutions (especially money) onto the cosmos..."

Richard Seaford Money and the Early Greek Mind 2004 p.284

Money Wisdom #33

"Thought is not a path to reality. It sets obstacles in that path because when you use thought to try to approach something that is prior to thought your thinking does not carry you towards that something. It carries you away from it. To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding."

Robert Pirsig Lila 2006 (1991) p.68

Note: this quote's relationship to Money may not be immediately apparent. It has to do with the very strong relationship between Money & abstract thought that recent posts and quotes have explored.

Money Wisdom #32

"...with the invention of coinage, there is disparity between the material value and the conventional value of the coins; what is perceptible is worth less than the actual (conventional) value of the coin, and this implies something radically new - the paradox of an imperceptible embodiment of value. In other words the coin embodies ideal value, mysterious, powerful and imperceptible.

(Bold highlighting is my own - Jon )

Richard Seaford Money and the Early Greek Mind 2004 p.254

Note: I believe that Value does not exist without Mind (see the earlier quote from Nietzsche), but I think this phrase - 'the paradox of an imperceptible embodiment of value' - accords both with Seaford's reasoning and a Nietzscherian view of Value.

A Few Notes on L Randall Wray's New Paper

I came across L Randall Wray's new paper "Introduction to an Alternative History of Money" on Lord Keynes' blog.

Whether or not I agree with, or find some enlightenment, in my reading I am always very happy to see writing on the origin of money appear. Unsurprisingly Wray knocks a few more bricks out of the ruin that is the 'barter myth'. Thankfully though he doesn't just waste energy grinding that particular origin story into dust, but bravely attempts to build a new heaven, with new bricks. Unfortunately, I think that the new heaven he builds will not lead to a new earth.

Here's why.

1. The paper fails to place money within psychological context. He talks about 'existential uncertainty' but this is not really a meaty enough ingredient with which to create a truly palatable story about the nature of money.

2. Leading on from above, he fails to get to grips with the significance of 'property'. He describes it as a pre-requisite to the development as money as a unit of account, but doesn't really get into how or why the idea of property entered human conciousness at an individual or group level.

3. His assertion that money is endogenous may serve the purpose of exposing the silliness of seeing money as exclusively exogenous and neutral thus emphasising the need to discuss current economic modelling. However, it doesn't really explain the nature of money. In each of our relationships with money we experience it as exogenous and endogenous - as personal and impersonal. Creating a story that leads to the conclusion that money is wholly endogenous means it is likely that your story is wrong.

Wray claims that with the paper he seeks 'to offer a vision of the nature of money, banks and the monetary system' [his emphasis]. This is a noble and worthy thing. I think at the moment though his vision is too bounded by past economic stories and economics itself. Invariably the best books I've read about money have been either general histories, or cross-disciplinary. I understand that for academics a cross-disciplinary approach is just asking for trouble. And Wray should be commended for giving anthropological explanations and evidence good weight in his story. It is however, not enough. Money touches all things. Its nature will need a broad understanding.

Finally, - and this is no way directed at Wray himself and there is no evidence of this in the paper - the creation of a new heaven, and in its image a new earth, is troublesome for me. Not because of the striving to a new understanding of money, but because of the political exigency it can engender. I am wary. The stakes in understanding money are the highest and most immediate imaginable. If a theory of money's origins became accepted as scientific fact - or just generally accepted as true - that would have huge policy implications.

I have the feeling that there is a morality underlying (what I'll describe here as) the MMT project* - a feeling that social justice is being negated in economic policy as a direct result of misunderstandings about the nature of money. And that if the nature of money can be understood economic policy could be better effected to eliminate poverty. Which makes it all the more important to *really* understand money. And to answer that question 'What is Money?'.  To answer it honestly we need to be vigilant to the danger of political exigency creating a new earth based on an illusion of what we want heaven to be.


*there is also of course the same morality underlying the libertarian project.


(New Heaven, New Earth is an anthropological text by Kenelm Burridge which suggest that money is the most frequent axis for millenarian movements)

Money Wisdom #31

"For Caldwell the order of Chaos, Earth, Tartarus [the lowest region of the world - Jon], Eros is psychoanalytically significant. Just as the earliest psychic state of the child is symbiotic, of 'undifferentiation, fusion with the mother', so the mythical world begins with undifferentiated oneness. And just as the infantile sense of self then develops by a separation (from the mother) which is also a loss, so in the myth the undifferentiated state is ended by the perception of the mother (Gaia) as separate; but she is only known at the price of being lost. And it on the basis of loss that desire (Eros) comes into being."

(Bold highlighting is my own - Jon )

Caldwell 1989 p.132-142

quoted in Richard Seaford Money and the Early Greek Mind 2004 p.220

Money Wisdom #30

"A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry: but money answereth all things"

Ecclesiastes 10.19 (of the early Greek period - late fourth to early third century BC)

quoted in Richard Seaford Money and the Early Greek Mind 2004 p.165