• @[email protected]
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    691 month ago

    To be fair, Economics is half imagination and magic. It’s why something like bitcoin could even become a thing.

    • Banana
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      501 month ago

      One of the main things I learned during my economics degree is that money is fake.

        • @[email protected]
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          1 month ago

          Was not expecting to see Street-Fighter’s-Guile-as-a-magician quoted in this comment section… or at all really. He’s come a long way since Scam School, I guess.

        • @[email protected]
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          -31 month ago

          The reason that you and everyone else believe in it is primarily because you need it to pay taxes, so the belief is not arbitrary.

          • @[email protected]
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            71 month ago

            Thinking of how I got here, reductively speaking:

            be born
            see parents buy food
            they use money
            i grow up
            need food
            i use money

            • @[email protected]
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              01 month ago

              I agree, but that leads to an infinite regress of your parents observering their parents, etc. My argument is really about the start of this chain.

              • @[email protected]
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                21 month ago

                Ah I see!

                Convenience ought to have helped too! Though yes when the person with that monopoly on violence thing asks, you do.

            • @[email protected]
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              1 month ago

              That is true, but Bitcoin, like all other crypto"currencies", is a Ponzi scheme. Its value is driven purely by speculation, and the hope that it can be passed on to a “greater fool” for profit. This is true for a lot of financial assets, by the way.

            • @[email protected]
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              11 month ago

              True, but somene has to, and they will create a demand for the currency. If I hear that Joe the baker needs money to pay taxes, and I want to buy bread from him, I know he will accept the government currency as payment for his bread. This in turn makes me demand money to be able to buy the bread.

      • Cethin
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        1 month ago

        Money is made up, but it’s definitely real. Magic is made up and fake. If it actually exists and does something, it’s real. You can bring something from non-existence and make it real. It has no intrinsic value.

        • Banana
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          31 month ago

          Definitely a fun philosophical and semantic thought experiment!

        • @[email protected]
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          1 month ago

          A bit subjective depending on the circumstances though right? Say a man has a horse that you want. Well, today, there probably exists a monetary figure that the man would accept to sell you his horse, even if it’s absurdly high. But let’s say something cataclysmic happens and humanity is blown back to the dark ages. If there is no society available for the man to use the money, then it really doesn’t matter how much you offer him because at that point money isn’t real. You could offer to trade good or services, but not money. You might as well be offering leaves from the ground.

          • @[email protected]
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            21 month ago

            That’s what the guy said. Money isn’t “intrinsically” real - it doesn’t have something in-and-of itself. It’s extrinsically real - it represents something in the society we live in, a system of arbitrage and barterage that we use to represent an amount of work (Poorly, and with little benefit to a large number of people).

            So no - if the extrinsic reality changes, then the barter or arbitrage currency will change - bottle caps, for instance, take over. But for a large society to function, a commonly accepted means of representing “value” has to be agreed upon. I can’t just say, “Well, I’ve got the worth of x hours worth of time spent on projects to provide”, instead I’ll say “I’ve got x pounds to provide”.

            Originally, this was made more explicit, and it still exists on UK currency: “I promise to pay the bearer…” At that point, the notes had a (Bank-enfornced) intrinsic value. The words meant a promise to provide the currencies face-value in Gold. Now, we’ve done away with gold-backed currency, and the raw value is arbitrary, it has no intrinsic value but that set by extrinsic realities.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 month ago

        I’m proud to have properly digested how inflation works. But I still don’t understand it.

      • @[email protected]
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        01 month ago

        Ehhh, not sure I’d go that far. Money, no matter what backs it, is just what people value it as. Just that when backed by real goods, e.g. gold, that it gives people a better reason to value it because the goods are worth something.

        Mostly saying, money backed by a good have at least the value of the good itself. Which I would say makes money not fake.

        When it’s backed by belief, then it’s fake.

        • @[email protected]
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          61 month ago

          The value of those “real goods” is typically just as fake as the value of fiat currencies anyways. Trying to use things with actual usefulness as money has its own issues too.

        • @[email protected]
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          21 month ago

          But then said good only has as much value as we put on it. There’s a tacit acceptance of what a group of people decided that good is worth. Its value is as real as we collectively decide it is; it’s a construct

          • @[email protected]
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            11 month ago

            Yes, but things like gold have actual uses which give them at least some actual value. Fiat currency is backed 100% by belief.

            • @[email protected]
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              51 month ago

              Gold as a currency only has as much value as people assign to it. It’s really no different than a fiat currency.

            • @[email protected]
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              1 month ago

              Fiat currencies are actually backed by the tax liabilities denominated in them. If you are liable for one of my business cards, else a guy with a gun shows up at your door, you suddenly have demand for my business cards.

        • Banana
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          1 month ago

          To be fair i was being hyperbolic. Money has the power we give it. And we gave it too much.

          We print money through increasing interest rates, increasing divide between rich and poor requiring the working class to take out loan after loan after loan.

          Some may say interest is the cost of borrowing money, but it is money value that comes out of nothing, it’s made out of thin air and reduces the value of our dollar.

      • @[email protected]
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        -11 month ago

        And I suspect you might even suggest the only real aspect of economics boils down to supply vs demand regardless of what the thing in supply or demand is?

        • Banana
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          81 month ago

          Definitely not. The rules behind supply and demand hinge on some extremely flimsy assumptions, namely:

          • that people always act in their own best interest (they fucking don’t)
          • that people can actually choose not to buy the product

          For things like food, housing, medicine, etc. People don’t get the luxury of voting with their wallets, and this is why the free market cannot allocate resources effectively.

          Just because I went to school for economics does not mean I am a free market capitalist. I’m definitely not.

          • @[email protected]
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            31 month ago
            • that people always act in their own best interest (they fucking don’t)

            Totally agree

            • that people can actually choose not to buy the product

            This is actually pretty well deacrived by what’s called the price elasticity of demand in standard neoclassical models. For things like housing one might say that the demand is very inellastic: A change in price does not affect the quatity demanded.

            • Banana
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              11 month ago

              Yes exactly. This is why I find it funny when they use two different, yet contradictory reasons to justify the sin tax:

              • it prevents people from using it because they’ll choose not to use it (the thing they’re addicted to) if it gets too expensive; and,
              • the demand is very inelastic which means the government will make more revenue

              When really they’re primarily taxing the things poor people are addicted to.

              Idk, I’m generalizing, I’m just kind of pointing out how a lot of the supports capitalism rests on are weird little opaque excuses to convince the masses that exploitation is what’s best for us

              So many economists are stuck in a box of what our society has been, they can’t think past our current rules and regulations to what could be, because they think that the rules and trends they learn in school are the only possibility, or that profit must be king.

          • @[email protected]
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            21 month ago

            Ah ok, I see the flaw in my thinking.

            Things that are always in demand don’t drive a price solely based on supply, and since people don’t act in their own best interest the actual demand of something can’t be a useful way to determine the value of a thing.

            So that sort of says to me that with a truly free market economy, it would be just as impossible to model future prices because of the inherent unpredictability of humans.

    • @[email protected]
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      1 month ago

      Dave Ramsey is a Jesus freak but he did have some fun truisms, one of which is if you want to know where value comes from, try taking dollar bills and bottled water into an area devastated by a hurricane and see which one has more value.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 month ago

      Or there’s principles to economics that we just don’t understand yet. It’s gotten a lot more scientific since the 1970’s.