Category: Economics, Finance, and Political Economy

I will do a video in the next few months Fred. It is too hard for me to do quickly. But I will leave you with a few puzzles to help you think it thru: We are not wealthier than cave men. We have simply made everything infinitely cheaper. The way we make things infinitely cheaper is to make many hands make light work. They way we make many hands cheaply do light work is through spacial proximity (nearness). By coming together in close space we decrease the cost of finding opportunities. Our very proximity ‘manufactures less expensive opportunities.’ We then use competition in the market to seize opportunities. When we seize opportunities voluntarily by exchange we create property. To make the cost of siezing opportunities cheaper we create money. Money creates prices. Prices allow us to calculate ever more complext and (efficient) and lower risk means of making work lighter and therefore faster.

We have a fixed amount of time passing at a fixed rate. Each person has approximately the same amount of time, although being smarter is certainly the equivalent of having more time – sometimes a lot more time. In the end our time is converted into many different things, with the surplus (extra) converted into the cheapst (most easily used) form of storage: money(investments, etc).

When you think about how much time and calories are involved and tha tmoney is a measure of it, and that productivity in time is all we are every doing to create surplusses that can be converted into money (saved time) the world becaomes much more understandable.

Why is this kind of thought hard? because we evolved a habit of using as little effort as possible in order to wait for opportunities. This sort of makes sense as a hunter gatherer. But as a human, ‘fixed’ time is no longer fixed. We are always making more with less time, when we have more smarter hands to work with.