Money is Totally Made Up. So Why Not Do Better Things with It?

Friends, here is this week’s episode.

Sameer Sood is a very dangerous man to talk to. Within five minutes, he may have you thinking about fundamental things differently.

For example, when he said the rules around money and how we fund nonprofits in this country are pretty much just made up, it reminded me of one of my first economics classes, when the professor told us that money has no intrinsic value. It’s worth something for the most part because collectively we agree it’s worth something. And if, for some reason, enough of us just stopped believing that . . . That idea still excites and frightens me.

In honor of Sameer’s habit of walking around and gently shaking people out of long-entrenched beliefs, here are three ideas that messed me up a little bit.

Some People Try to Do Without Money Altogether

Sameer recommended this non-fiction book during our conversation, “The Man Who Quit Money” by Mark Sundeen. Here are the opening sentences.

In the fist year of the twenty-first century, a man standing by a highway in the middle of America pulled from his pocket his life savings—thirty dollars—laid it inside a phone booth, and walked away. He was thirty-nine years old, came from a good family, and had been to college. He was not mentally ill, nor an addict. His decision appears to have been an act of free will by a competent adult.

In the twelve years since, as the Dow Jones skyrocketed to its all-time high, Daniel Suelo has not earned, received, or spent a single dollar.

Is that cinematic, or what?

Not All Societies Have Experienced the Color Blue the Same Way. Some Didn’t Even Have a Word for It.

For example, the ancient epic poem The Odyssey is 12,000 lines long. It describes the sea and sky many times, but the hue it ascribes to those things is never anything like what we would classify as blue. In other civilizations, the colors black and white show up early, but blue is a real latecomer.

The first time I heard this idea was on Radiolab.

Apparently, A Lot of Physicists Don’t Think We Have Free Will

The idea is called “determinism.” The thinking goes, since each of us is an arrangement of particles, and every particle is subject to the physical laws of the universe, all of our actions, including those that feel like choices, were set in motion and entirely caused by whatever it is that set the universe in motion. There was the Big Bang 14 billion years ago and, eventually, your decision to borrow/steal your mom’s car when you were 17. There’s no part of you that can step outside of that rigid but unpredictable chain of cause and effect and do otherwise than what was, essentially, scheduled to happen.

I heard physicist Brian Greene share this idea on a podcast, and it was the only thing I thought and worried about for two months. Here is an interview with Greene.

At the level of theory, I think Greene is right. I can’t refute it. Yet in my daily life, I still behave as if I and everyone I encounter have some amount of choice in what we do. I can’t fully reconcile those things. At the margins, Greene’s thinking nudges me towards grace and mercy. Perhaps there are no good people or bad people, I am sometimes convinced—at least not in the way we typically mete out those labels. Maybe it’s all a matter of good luck and bad luck.

Thanks for listening.