(November 18, 2013 at 3:25 pm)Zazzy Wrote: My thinking is: the ONLY thing propping up both gods and economics is belief in something that is not real, and has no intrinsic value. Only the belief (faith) that your money will buy you something makes it valuable to you. The fact that we all share the faith- that the guy at the store believes it, too, and will take it in exchange for a good- would seem to further the religious metaphor: people prop each others' faiths up in gods and in money- but it is faith. There is no evidence that money is valuable or real EXCEPT THAT WE BELIEVE IT. There is no evidence that god is valuable or real EXCEPT THAT BELIEVERS believe it.
Is that full of shit, or does the argument hold?
You're right, but there's a big difference between God and money. Believers consider their God to be real, to be the reason anything real exists. Economics works fine without believing that intrinsic value is a real thing. Indeed, economics kind of relies on intrinsic value not existing. Economics functions on the idea that everybody will assign different subjective values to different things.
Money does not exist with the purpose of having intrinsic value. It is a tool to make transactions better for everybody. Let's say you're selling wheat because you want to buy a cow, a barn, and some chickens from somebody else. You could simply trade your wheat to someone who has these things, but only if they want your wheat. Likewise, if someone who didn't have these things wanted your wheat, you could trade them for what they did have, but then you'd have to sell that yourself. The reason we have money is because you could sell that wheat for x amount of money, and then you could give that money to someone for the barn and livestock, who could then give that money to other people to buy what they need. That's all money is for.
That's why I look at the people who talk about selling all their paper money for gold and I laugh. Gold is worth no more than paper, intrinsically. In a worldwide economic disaster, you might as well use gold bricks for legos.
