Talking to My Daughter About the Economy

goods with commodities

the process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled’

, which comprises two words: oikos (‘household’) and nomoi (‘laws, rules, constraints’). This is the etymology of ‘economy’, which literally means something like the ‘laws of running, or managing, a household’.

credit’: it comes from the Latin credere, which means ‘to believe’.

The worst slavery is that of heavily indoctrinated happy morons who adore their chains and cannot wait to thank their masters for the joy of their subservience.

Which goods end up evolving into a unit of currency has always depended partly on chance and partly on their having some basic properties. They must be durable so that they do not perish, unlike say bread or fish. They must be convenient to carry, preferably pocket sized. They must be easily divisible into smaller portions. And their appeal must be evenly spread throughout the community.

Looked at in this light, it is in the interests of all market society – including even employers in the overall balance – for workers to resist their own mechanization, for it is this alone that puts the brakes on the profit-destroying process of automation

And here we encounter another irony that should provide some hope for humans in the race against machines. Employing humans always comes with the advantage that workers, unlike machines, recycle their wages, however small they may be, helping to ensure there is a market for the T-shirts and other products they assist in producing. By the same token, if those wages fall – as happens when work becomes more mechanical and less skilled – there will come a point when they are too low to support the sales of the goods they help produce.

This is why the unemployment deniers are wrong: because the labour market is based not just on the exchange value of labour but on people’s optimism or pessimism about the economy as a whole, and so across-the-board wage cuts may well result in no new hirings or even lay-offs.

However, it is this same point that underlies the conviction of certain people that there is no such thing as unemployment, only workers who refuse to sell their work at a low enough price.
Unemployment deniers