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Never learning to solve for money is one kind of tragedy. Never being able to stop solving for money is a different kind of tragedy. It’s not about when you have enough. It’s about when you’ve had enough.
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I’m mostly still a shameless neoliberal shill scheming to make cosmopolitan globalism great again, but one shift in cultural attitudes I vibe with strongly is general exhaustion with solving for money. It was insane for 4 decades.
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I think the wealthy still don’t viscerally appreciate why deep inequality is a problem. With enough persistent inequality people start checking out of the money game. Participate in the least effort way to meet a minimum and walk off the playing field.
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That’s why they trot out irrelevant arguments like material standards being better for all etc. An unequal economy is like a sports league where one team always wins because they get to rollover win margin from the last game. The game gets boring to play or watch.
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Hustle theater takes 2 sides — a preacher side selling winning formulas and a hungry audience itching to play. Feels like preachers are preaching hard as ever but the audience is kinda wandering off.
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It will be interesting to see how a world with weak money works. It’s like when religion got weak and people largely stopped solving for an afterlife. And the world does didn’t fall apart.
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The pandemic was the first big lesson in a long time that there are limits to solving problems by solving for money. Some problems are too big to financialize.
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The dangerous thing now is that money is not only not worth solving for as an end in itself, it’s not sacred. Which means people don’t feel as much guilt about getting what they need through grift rather than honorable effort.
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“Respect for money” was an intangible but powerful thing in the early 80s. There was honor in making money. Merely getting lucky was kinda contemptible. Then over 30y the equation flipped. You were a mug if you actually *worked* for money instead of gambling riskily for it.
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Now you’re a mug if money is the main thing you’re solving for, either through work or gambling. Fuck-you-money is so 2015. Now it’s fuck-around-and-find-out money. Just enough to leave the game, not “win” it.
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Much as I dislike the grifter economy and the weakening ability of money to guarantee anything, I can’t say I entirely blame people for choosing that path.
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These days I look for signs that someone is solving for something other than money before spending any on them. Whether it is a haircut or coffee, or an product from a website. And I don’t mean bullshit social missions.
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When money is sacred it is a highly effective coordination token. Efficient markets can run on it. When it’s no longer sacred, it becomes increasingly ineffective. Markets weaken. Grift becomes invisible inflation.
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This is not debasement through regular money supply inflation. If products are shoddy/fake and you have to buy and return items or spend hours on Yelp reviews to find an honest and competent dentist… that’s a kind of hidden inflation.
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This happens when the meaning of money has weakened, your handling of it does not reflect strongly on your virtues, and you just want to make what you need in the fastest dumbest way you can do you can get on with your real life. Lemon money.
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Despite these transient pains I think weak money is good. Money as a constraint rather than utility function is good. Grift as a weapon of the weak to devalue concentrations of capital is good. Desecration of money to the point we’re forced to look at alternatives is good.
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A sufficiently unequal world eventually discovers Universal Basic Grift. It’s a kind of creeping monetary rebellion.
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