What if it's all a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?
Having noble goals doesn't immunize you from accounting.
Plenty of money gets created everyday for thing far more stupid than trying to save the world. Look at how much money has been created (and will be spent) for no good reason at all in the current cryptocoin bubble. The massive capital gains are going to be cashed out and spent somewhere, creating market distortions, making people who contribute nothing insanely wealthy. Money is not sacred. Better we use it to try and save the world than to treat it as if it (and the market) are some all-wise, ever-perfect allocator of human and natural resources.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F1W0DAO/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
The a-historical account is that money was developed to make barter more efficient. This is not what we see in the records from Sumer, and there is similar evidence in the other locations where we know writing arose. Before the neolithic revolution societies economic structure was largely based on social ties and a sense of reciprocal behavior: a sort of informal communism. As sedentary agriculture lead to the development of temple complexes and cities, debt and credit records replaced these. Money was not developed until nearly 2k years later. Barter was actually uncommon in the ancient world and was typically reserved for interactions between strangers such as traders that had traveled long distance and had no social ties to one another. Coinage in particular typically arose as part of a complex that involved raising armies and funding them via taxation.
The commodity theory of money is a-historical, and not what "original money" was.
It's a great book, though Graeber has little restraint in taking pot shots at economists, which might provoke some readers to defensiveness.
If they used a formalized series of IOUs that allowed for the long term planning of capital then I'd be more inclined to call it currency. But sounds like an interesting book, may have to give it a read.
And yes, it's the latter: formalized debt records that meet the 3 criteria we commonly define money by.
Money isn't the issue; finite time and resources are.
My point has nothing to do with how terrible capitalism is or any silly bete noirs like that. It is simply the observation that if we waste our time on A, we can't be using that time to do the better B. It sits at a level of fundamental truth far below debates about economic systems or the nature of money.
But it's sure becoming a popular theory.
Also: I think what you're describing might be the broken window fallacy: http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fal...
Are you saying that human-caused global warming is a hoax?
It completely ignores tradeoffs. General environmentalism has been very aggresively anti-nuclear. In a world of CO2 caused climate change, it has to rethink that opposition. Another example is with diesel engines. There is a tradeoff between NOX emmisions and efficiency (and thus CO2 emissions). What you decide the tradeoff to be, is influenced by how much you thing climate change is a problem.
Another example is endangered species. If we really are going to have catastrophic global warming, then maybe we don't try as aggressively to protect all species from habitat destruction say from building hydroelectric, wind, solar power plants in Africa.
Reducing waste (CO2, methane, heat, whatever) increases profits.
Not for the entrenched interests, obviously. Happily, everyone else who's been paying their externalized costs (taxpayers, consumers) benefits.
Optimize the whole system. Localized optimization leads to decreased overall efficiency.
That's a broad generalization and far simpler model than what the poster is referring to.
Yes, riding a motorcycle instead of an SUV decreases all emissions. This is the simple base case.
However driving a diesel SUV decreases CO2 but increases NOx wrt to a gasoline one. This is the higher-order effect.