Saturday, July 22, 2017

Money as a social-proxy




How would people make social transitions, if we would live in a system without money? The idea of social transitions and inequality is pretty much associated with our capitalist system, but in fact, inequality would exist even if we would live in some kind of social-anarchy society. In fact, today, if we consider a system without distortions created by the government choosing winners, wealth accumulation is pretty much an accumulation of social capital, since someone will only accumulate money if he offer`s something that society considers to have some value. In fact, value by itself is a social construction, which gets`s clear if think about why golden is such an important metal in our society, even if we have other metal`s that as much rare, as gold is.  I would even allow myself to think in the simple facts, gold is beautiful and it`s hard to get, if someone wants to have something that is nice and beautiful this will have a small value in the first exchange involving a golden bar, this value will grow when the golden go through new hands, until the moment someone like a king gets interested in the bar, a since someone like king has already too much, he will be able to pay much, when he gets interested in something. If we consider in what happened in Spain when the country accumulated to much gold, this idea makes some sense.

We could argue about ˜why gold?˜, since if we ignore it`s chemical properties, it`s pretty much useless, but since the gold value it`s purely social at some point, people never get satiated as they would be with something that is useful.

Getting back to accumulation question, I would suggest that in a scenario without distortions we could in money as a social proxy.

Well, I ended-up by forgetting the social transition question, but it in a non-capitalist-extreme scenario has happened through the army, in old times, or even through the fame in our days.

I will be back to that theme in some moment.


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