Money as Debt

[trufflesniffer]

I almost forgot to post a link to this 47-minute animated film on the principles, concept, and 'ontology' of money.It's by far the most interesting and insightful thing I saw last year. It does a good job of bringing financial and economic theory back to everyday practice [1]. Most importantly, it suggests how "one thing can lead to another", "how

Comments

[spider88]

I'm pretty astonished to see how fiat money actually comes to be. I wish I had intelligent commentary.

[trufflesniffer]

I think this is the sort of issue where it's very easy to 'know too much', get bogged down in the details and forget that, at core, there are some very odd and interesting principles at work.

Payback's well worth reading, as it links the concept of debt to the biological/psychological concept of reciprocation, looks at religious narratives from this perspective and vice-versa (original sin = debt oweing to Jesus; Lord's Prayer originally included the verse "Forgive us our debts", rather than "Forgive us our sins", and so on), as well as gives much needed sense of perspective to these issues.

[spider88]

There's a popular money management guy who gives advice on Christian talk radio who says that Jesus said more about money than any other topic, and over 800 scriptures deal with money.

I understand the bio/psycho concept of debt and reciprocation -- what upsets me is that it seems that banks are exploiting the crap out of that concept to a very unfair degree. We assume that bankers are rich because at some point their labor or their ancestor's labor produced enough money to lend. So we pay them back with our labor.

I have to say that the hardest thing for me in getting out of a working class family and navigating the corporate world was accepting that the richest people do the littlest work, and that includes brain work (Ayn Rand be damned) and every time I find out just how far that concept really goes I'm astonished.