7 Answers

  1. The category “asked a good question – got a good answer” continues.

    Let's start with the simplest one. From the economic point of view, money is exactly the same commodity as any other material product of human labor. They have a cost price, they contain effort, and they can be exchanged. The first money worked due to the fact that they were in a certain deficit. No wonder the prototype of money was valuable shells, furs. Later, money began to be made from precious metals – they are low-melting, not subject to corrosion and are valuable because they are in short supply.�

    Money was created as a result of the development of society. Primitive man did not need them, because he exchanged goods for goods (skin for apples). However, the intensification of barter, the complexity of production, and the division of labor led to the fact that it was difficult to exchange 20 meters of cloth for grain or dishes on the conditional market, since the exchange chain could reach a long length. Imagine that you are a farmer and exchange the result of your labor (grain) for dishes, but the potter does not need dishes now, but needs horseshoes, etc. Money, therefore, is a means of circulation, a universal measure.�

    Before the invention of paper money, we were quite satisfied with the value of gold, but it works exactly as it does now. The influx of gold from the New World to Spain or the opening of silver mines in the Czech Republic affected the price and value of the metal. Plus, the shortage of this metal on the planet could not meet the growing population and production. Paper money has long been based on the gold component, in other words, each banknote had a certain amount of gold and the issue of new money reduced its amount. Then a hard exchange rate of gold and currencies was introduced. It seems logical, but the Bretton Woods system introduced after the war showed some inconsistency of the fixed exchange rate and prices. In parallel, it develops a free market and it ceases to satisfy the participants. Now we live in a free course system. It can be affected by the usual market mechanisms: rising and falling demand or supply, growing volume, fears on the stock exchange. For example, this year you have an unprecedented harvest of apples and they fall in price, because everyone has them, the demand for them falls, the price falls after the demand, because no one buys, etc. It also works with dollars.

    From the point of view of philosophy, money is a very controversial concept. Fernand Braudel studied money and trading society. He considered the early monetary systems, pre-capitalist and capitalist barter trade. He likens money and credit to language: “They form one and the same language, which every society speaks in its own way, which every individual must understand.” This seems to me a valuable point. Thanks to money, dialogue and cultural exchange are preserved and developed. Like English now, money, even before the dominance of Greek or Latin, became a universal means of communication and circulation.�

    The cultural and philosophical aspect of money during the heyday of bourgeois culture was consecrated by G. Simmel. He noted that in the philosophical view, money is nothing but a thing, and like any thing, people have a special relationship to it: “Money … is only a means, material or example of depicting those relations that exist between the most external, realistic, random phenomena and ideal potentials of being, the deepest currents of individual life and history. The meaning and purpose of the whole consists only in drawing a line from the surface of economic phenomena that points to the ultimate values and significance of all that is human.” In other words, the flow of money can speak about the development and state of society. Where they go, what they invest in. After the Dutch revolution, after the establishment of the republic, money flows for the first time after a long time went to the development of art, science, publishing and even floriculture (famous tulips).�

    Baudrillard noted that money is transformed from signs into symbols without content-simulacra. He made it clear that in postmodernism, the problem of freedom and restrictions is removed: the coloring of money becomes more and more “transparent”, presenting it more and more as a universal code that exists outside the socio-cultural context. To put it in a shorter and more interesting way, money is the universal matrix in which we live. And the matrix in the literal and figurative sense (remember the movie).�

    In principle, for anthropology and sociology, money is a stratification factor. We divide society into upper, middle and lower strata, including by income level. Money, or rather its quantity, is a universal indicator of status and success. In Protestant societies, for example, your success, including in money matters, served as an indicator that God loves you and you are basically doing everything right.

    I tried to briefly outline the field here, but it is clear that this is only the top.

  2. Just make a reservation. Good question, good answer by Sergey Vasilkovsky. But there is some understatement and the connections are not clearly delineated.�

    Money is the” backbone ” needed for the development and existence of various economic models of people's relationships. Money is the “gears” of a huge mechanism that drives our civilization. Money, for several thousand years of its existence, was able to “accelerate” from the speed of a pedestrian to the speed of light. Money could become the “most powerful” force, a symbol of power, and even a means of acquiring it. Money is not an “equivalent”, since the value of “money” is different, the exchange rate is unstable, and “world money” is a conditional concept. Money is a universal belief- “collective intelligence”, part of mythology ,religion, benefits, prosperity, satisfaction, and so on. You can continue indefinitely…..

    From the” universal “point of view, money is a myth that almost all” earthlings ” believe in, miraculously helping to spin the flywheel of the current Earth civilization.

  3. I will present you with an image of an economy in which, of course, there is money.

    So it will be easier to understand what they are and what they are not, or let's just say-they should not be.

    Let's imagine our body.

    Attention! We consider the model (image) from the point of view of management, because the economy is a managed process.

    Each of our internal organs needs food.

    We eat a variety of foods, but it is delivered to the internal organs by a single route through the blood.

    Blood, as it brings food, and carries away the waste products of each internal organ.

    It is the blood in our body that can be compared to money.

    Money works in the same way in the process of commodity-money exchange between suppliers of raw materials, producers and consumers of finished goods.

    Now let's switch back to the image of our body.

    Each organ knows exactly how much and what nutrients it should consume in a certain period of time.

    Each of them reports its needs to the central distribution control center (we will not argue, since this is not important for us), which we will assume is the brain.

    After receiving the signal, it sends requests for the purchase and consumption of a certain amount of nutrients.

    Substances enter the body, are processed and carried by the blood to each internal organ.

    How much blood should there be in the body?

    Exactly as much as it is necessary to transfer nutrients to the internal organs and clean up the waste products of these organs.

    Do you need more blood?

    And for what, if the body receives full nutrition.

    And let's drive the blood to the deposit, let it lie down 🙂

    And let's give the blood at a percentage to another organism? Let her work there and bring with her additional food to our internal organs.

    Do we need extra nutrients? Where are we going to put them?

    And let's put them in the fat layer, let them lie until the time comes, and suddenly hard times will come…

    And let's make the blood reproduce the blood-let it work!

    And for what purpose? We have enough blood and more of it will not carry the nutrients that no one needs, and if there is a definite excess of blood, the body will simply die.

    Just as it can die from marketing, they say, and let's feed the liver more intensively, let's convince the liver of this…

    It seems to me that everything became clear because of the simplicity of the image not pumped up with wise words.

    I apologize to those who think this is nonsense and go back to normal, believing that the market determines everything itself, that marketing is a necessity, and banking activities benefit by increasing the money supply and withdrawing it from the real economy for the “growth” of the virtual one.

    It's Up To You.

  4. From the point of view of management theory, cash flow is an information manager. It carries information about debts and opportunities. It causes material flows. Now, when money is mostly immaterial, this has become very clear. But it's always been like this.

  5. As simple as possible: attention. It is a concentrated symbol of attention-directed controlled effort, producing and extracting a product. The idea that so much attention has been allocated. And speculation leads to their depreciation. When someone produces symbols that are not reflected in production in order to assign what is produced without providing anything in return.

  6. Money is reified debt. They appear in a person when he has already worked, but has not yet received anything useful for it. That is, the economic balance is not locally broken in its favor. The economy as a whole owes this person something. It is not yet known what exactly. Only the amount of this debt is known. Having decided what and from whom he would like to receive, a person can present a debt for repayment. And it is guaranteed by law that the debt can be presented for repayment at any time and to any person. Simply put, money is a legitimate means of payment. No one can refuse to accept money as payment.

    The mechanism for implementing this guarantee isn't really that obvious. If coercion were direct, people would not accept money voluntarily in situations where no one sees it. It would be necessary to put a supervisor near each of them, who would monitor compliance with this law. This is no good.

    In reality, the guarantee is implemented through a lending mechanism. In order to organize the production of goods or services, manufacturers take loans from the bank. These loans are denominated in a specific currency. This currency is called an investment currency. Money is given to producers under the obligation to return it in the future. Otherwise, they will either be taken away from some property, or even put in prison if there was some kind of fraudulent scheme. The guarantee is implemented in this place. The state strictly monitors that the loans taken are repaid, and if necessary uses force.�

    And so… After the borrowed investments are successfully invested by the manufacturer in some production, i.e. spent, he has an urgent need to find new money somewhere. Moreover, it is the currency in which the loan is denominated. Therefore, he is forced to offer the manufactured goods to consumers in exchange for money. They need to regularly repay part of their obligations to the bank. And the bank only accepts money.

    Thus, the more producers there are in the economy who once took out loans in a certain currency, and now they are spinning like squirrels in a wheel, trying to do something like that to get money for the bank, the more valuable this currency is. At the same time, more producers are competing for the currency in which more loans were issued. All of them compete with each other for limited consumer demand, trying to offer more favorable conditions for exchanging their goods for consumer money.

    Well, consumers can also take out loans. Every time someone in Russia harnesses a mortgage, it slightly strengthens the ruble. For the next few years, he will need a certain amount in rubles every month. That is, it enters into a general struggle for the rubles that are spinning in the economy. And how acute this struggle will be depends on oil prices and the monetary policy of the authorities.

  7. Money from the point of view of philosophy is an evolutionary and rationalistic agreement between people.

    From the point of view of anthropology, money is the most popular product in the region of residence of the studied person.

    Money from the point of view of the economy is the most popular asset that allows you to quickly complete transactions.

    Money is spent by virtue of the law, trust in the state authorities.

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