Hatarakanai Futari - Vol. 28 Ch. 1829 - What Is Money?

[123iamking]

Ewwww Karl Marx 🤢🤢🤮🤮 The evil of communist still haunts the world.

 

[Knighto]

i dunno, i was hoping mamoru will share his wisdom more than just asking the kid to study it himself

he kinda did and kinda didn't, if you notice he tells him there's been many wise people that have tried to understand (and that's a summary of what he told him), so it feels more like he actually gave him some pointers about the stuff, but as we could see, the boy didn't need a straight answer, but something to strive for. (we even get the close up the close up at his hand that was on the should to show how impactful was it for him)

 

[RexNemorensis]

 

[boyar]

"What is money? Well, in short, it's something that makes the world we live in possible. You see that building over there? A single, very dedicated human could possibly build that in its lifetime on its own. However, if everyone had to build their own houses that way, there would never be time for much else. So, for humans to be able to do such things easily, we had to specialize. Specialize means that you become good at a specific thing, like your parents have done with their jobs. Some people become fishermen, some people become chair-makers, and so on. If the fisherman needs a chair, he could provide the chair-maker with fish in exchange, that way the fisherman can get chairs without having to learn how to make them. However, the chair-maker doesn't always need fish. So what does the fisherman do if he needs a chair but can't get one for his fish? This is where money comes in. Money became an intermediary - a middle-man - for bartering. The fisherman could exchange his fish for money from someone who needed fish, and then exchange the money for a chair. Since money could be used to barter for, well, everything, it made it so much easier for people to specialize in a variety of things. However, for money to actually be considered a thing you could barter with, it had to be worth something in itself. So people had to agree on something that most saw as having worth, which is called being valuable. What gives something value has been discussed since the dawn of money, but many people settled on gold and silver - both metals which are rare, shiny, and easy to work with, physical properties that everyone could see and feel, which made it work as a store of value. This worked for thousands of years, then someone had the idea that carrying around all that gold and silver was extremely heavy, so they began making pieces of paper that promised the bearer a set amount of gold and silver - that way they could carry many tonnes worth of the metal all at once simply by having these slips of paper. This paper is called currency, and was used to represent a value of money. This worked for a while, until the paper makers began making more slips of paper than there were actual metal in their vaults. Then they began not even printing pieces of paper, but rather just push a button to make a number on a fancy computer somewhere increase. Nowadays, none of the currencies represents any gold or silver, but it used to represent oil for a while, which also worked to a degree. But we live in difficult times, so it's unsure if that's even the case anymore. The bottom line is that the pieces of paper and numbers on a screen that your parents stress about makes you able to eat, study, and sleep with a roof over your head, and if we didn't have them, this city that's around us would collapse after a while. You can study and philosophize about money if you want, just take care to not end up a smelly loser who has to beg his friends for rent money."

wrong and dumb. nobody was trading chairs for fish in pre-monetary societies. you fish to feed your family and if you need to build a house the village clubs together to help you, because they expect you to do the same for them. you only really get barter in situations where the monetary system has collapsed, maybe because of hyper-inflation or something, and people are already accustomed to transact for every little thing.

additionally, debt and credit precede coinage, not the other way around. the idea that wealth could be portable and anonymous is a relatively recent and radical innovation. it's irresponsible to tell children these kind of fairy tales when you don't know what you're talking about.