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Comment by coronadisaster | Hacker News Reader

> In the west, we take fungibility for granted. [...] The fact that a dollar is worth the same in Los Angeles as it is in New York, or Vancouver as it is in Halifax, is worth celebrating.

not sure if that is true.... looks like bread is 50% more expensive in NY city VS Orlando: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

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That's not what fungibility is. Fungibility is the ability to replace the object (in this case the money itself) with an equivalent object (in this case another bill of the same value) and they can be used interchangeably.

Using the bread example: The baker in NYC doesn't care if you use a $20 bill from 1980 or a brand new one from the bank. Also, the baker in Orlando doesn't care which particular bill you use either, so long as its legal. That is fungibility. Money is designed (in the US at least) to be perfectly fungible, and that is a great feature of it.

thanks for the explanation but I was talking about the other part of the quote: "The fact that a dollar is worth the same in Los Angeles as it is in New York, or Vancouver as it is in Halifax, is worth celebrating." It just isn't.

the dollar is worth the same in orlando. the bread itself is worth more in NYC.

if you can buy less of the same thing with the same dollar, is it really worth the same in different areas? (no)

But if both people buy an item from the same vendor (say, an online store that services both areas), then obviously they would pay the same amount.

The differences in price you are describing are not changes in the value of the dollar but changes in the cost of producing and providing goods.

Google "unit of account"

A dollar is worth one dollar, literally by definition, set by the US government.

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