Maybe our currency represents the wrong sort of value.

🔗 currency is an abstraction of value:

The capitalist system we live in does not allow us to fully express the value we hold for things, as any currency we dedicate to that task is currency we can’t spend on the essentials we need to live.

Our world values thrift and a willingness to make decisions for purely currency-driven reasons, rewarding whatever is the cheapest and with the least overhead. In practical terms, that works out to rewarding companies that pay the least to the people who work for them.

People have been trained to think of currency this way because we see currency exchange as primarily taking place between us and faceless corporations. No one cares if a faceless corporation makes less money because we decided to purchase from a competitor. Which is good; we shouldn’t be caring about corporations.

But we should be caring about people. They deserve our expressions of value. Or, if necessary, they deserve the abstraction of value that we label “currency”.

There is a lot to think about in this post.

The idea of currency as an attempt at abstraction representation of value for the purposes of more efficient exchange is a useful one, I think. What it points to is that if we are going to stick with this purpose for currency (which we probably should), then maybe we need to re-think 1) the value we want our currency to represent and 2) whether our currency as it is now conceived does a good job of that.