In response to my last post [1], commenter Mike had a few objections to the basic idea of working for the money:
Money is a place holder, it represents something else, namely your life.
There’s more to that, as I’ll explain below.
Mike continues:
You go to work and give up your freedom, trade your liberty, and do as you’re told in exchange for a wage. This wage is the value that you and your employer agree is closest to the value of the time you’ve spent at work, and your overall productivity.
The problem is: Life is beyond value. You can trade your life for money, but the reverse doesn’t work. You cannot trade money for more life.
Actually, money is a placeholder for everything. That’s what makes it money. Our economy works because we produce valuable goods and services and then we trade them with each other. But it would be hard to trade directly because we’d need to find people who produce something we want and want something we produce.
Personally, I’m pretty good at writing computer programs, and there are people that need computer programs, but most of them don’t have anything I want. Oh the other hand, people who have things I want — grocery stores, restaurants, appliance dealers, doctors, auto repair shops — don’t need me to program their computers. If I had to live by the barter system, I’d have trouble finding trading partners.
Money solves the problem of finding partners by allowing us to separate the buying and selling aspects of our trades. I can now sell something of value to people who don’t have anything I want, because they can give me money which I can use later to buy things I want from people who don’t need what I have to sell.
We talk about working for the money, and we measure our labor by how much money we earn, but the money is only an intermediate step. We work for the things that improve our lives. What could be better than that?
Scott Stein left a comment that gave a direct counterexample:
…in a real sense money does buy more time, more actual years, evidenced by the increase in average life span made possible by advanced medicine, made possible by wealth, made possible by productivity and the work people do in a society.
When you take an antibiotic that cures you of something that likely would have killed you a hundred years ago, it is work — your own that paid for the pill and the work of others in society, an overall work ethic and wealth that created the advances — that made your life being longer possible. People survive illnesses and injuries and surgeries they more often died from just a few decades ago. Those extra years are many more minutes added to lives, real minutes.
It’s not just about the time, either. Quality of life matters too. Consider that until fairly recently, homemaking was a full-time job. The woman of the house would spend all her time cleaning, cooking, washing clothes, and caring for the children. Now, just off the top of my head, look at all the ways our modern economy has changed housework:
- Indoor plumbing to simplify the tasks of getting clean water and disposing of dirty water.
- Non-stick surfaces on pots and pans to simplify cleaning.
- Dishwashers to reduce the labor of cleaning dishes, silverware, glasses, and cooking implements.
- Clothes washers and dryers and modern detergents to automate and simplify the laundering process.
- All the advanced modern fabrics that make clothes easier to clean.
- Refregeration to reduce the need to continually obtain fresh food from the market.
- Cars that can carry large amounts of groceries to fill the refrigerators.
- Indoor air filtration to reduce dust build-up.
- Advances in materials science that provide easy-to-clean surfaces.
- Vacuum cleaners and portable carpet cleaners.
- Television and mass-produced toys to occupy the children.
- Laundries and restaurants to which homemakers can outsource tasks.
All of these advances are available to any household that can pay for them, and most households buy all of these things as soon as they can afford them. Thus, by making housework take less time, all this technology has given women more time to do other things. If that’s not using money to buy life, it’s damned close.
We may not like working for the money, but we do it anyway, because we like spending the money to improve our lives.
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[4]Mark Draughn [5]
[4]Latest posts by Mark Draughn (Posts [7])
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