Today I passed a bird eating something. It occurred to me how nice the order provided by food is. Food is something you can be sure every animal is looking for: it's the constant variable, the X axis. It's a clean motivation atop which you can build other motivations.
This is the role money plays in capitalism. In order to "replace capitalism," or whatever the goal is, you need to replace money with another X axis. A liquid desire. Something people are going to want in any event, that will motivate them.
I also just heard a Slate Money podcast where Felix Salmon said that people in Germany simply don't spend that much money. It made me wonder, what if that's some sort of solution? Why not just create a system where money doesn't get you that much, and the need for it goes down? Is that even possible?
The one thing I know is that even if you did that, you'd need to replace the ordering role of money in order to do away with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment