This gets right to the heart of the matter, I think. Despite our obvious ability to artificially assert money as a (somewhat) universal metric for value/quality _and_ despite the natural "inertia" provided by indexing the value of lots and lots of various commodities with money, it still all boils down to trust of some kind.
One of the benefits of neoliberalism (which I think is called neoconservatism by some folks) is the perspective that the more fluid the system, the better off we all are. I think this is why I've heard people claim that capitalism (I suspect the Austrian economics type you referred to earlier) does _not_ believe the economy is a zero sum game. Their idea seems to be based on an assumption of the open endedness of the universe. The idea that there is no "bottom turtle". As soon as we put some rules into place, "life will find a way" to circumvent those rules. It seems like there are, however, temporal or spatial scales of robust mechanisms of trust. So, while the young may not trust the old and the old may not trust the young, within each group, there is enough validation (the "other" behaves according to the behavior I induce from my samples) for local trust. The same is true of money. So, perhaps it's a case of local: zero-sum, non-local: non-zero-sum? Then again, it could be that I have a hammer and everything looks like a nail to me. ;-) Vladimyr Ivan Burachynsky wrote circa 10-09-10 03:04 PM: > Sometimes I suspect money is a loosely correlated concept to the degree of > trust people have for each other. That global trust is falling apart as we > speak and the economics will follow. There does not seem to be any way a > single government can reestablish basic trust on a global scale. In the 13th > century people were freaking out about counterfeiters. Dante reserved a > special place in the Inferno for such miscreants because he felt strongly > that they were undermining God's Order. Some of these counterfeiters were > basically making less than pure gold coins by small margins. The question > that was never answered was whether the States themselves were issuing less > than full measure and simply looking for scapegoats. Back then anyone with a > smattering of chemistry could be burned at the stake. Inflation is just a > less obvious way of devaluing currency. > > > > I doubt it is a zero sum game since there are many examples of people just > walking away from the table and starting new systems, the trick is to > convince everyone that it is the only game in town. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
