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Comment by booleandilemma | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I see sentiments like this, or when I hear people with comfortable jobs in the tech industry talk about how money is imaginary, etc., it just comes across as being detached from reality to me.

It's easy to fall into this trap when money is abstracted away to being just a number you see on your smartphone, but money is very real, and if you don't have it, you can't pay rent or for heat in winter.

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Reminds me of how my friend, who has a mogul of a father, and his now wife, who has a mogul of a father, are looking to buy a house. The moguls put a cap on the amount the house can cost, and my friend said to me about how the ones they want are out of that range, "I don't care about money, man. You know that."

I don't think he understands exactly what the sentiment behind "I don't care about money" is.

When we were young in our marriage, my wife and I would argue constructively about money things, and when I would tell her that we can't afford something (I am the accountant in the relationship) and try to talk to her about being content within our means, she would take offense saying something like, "I feel like you're trying to say I'm greedy, but it's not about the money to me!"

And I wasn't trying to imply that she was greedy, and I very much believe it wasn't about the money. The thing was she just grew up the youngest child (and a daughter at that) in an upper-middle-class family and she was pretty sheltered from cost, while I grew up in a working class family where money was tight. It was an odd disconnect.

The opposite is also weird when one person in the relationship came from nothing, and now you share comfortable finances: Conversations like "yes plane tickets will cost $500 more than bus tickets but we'll also have two more days of vacation", or "we don't have to shop around for the very best deal".

Yep, we've been there too. It's taken me a while to come around to spending more on things now that we have comfortable finances. That said, I'm pretty proud that we rigorously optimize our spending for the things that make us the happiest, and we save a lot for early retirement.

"It may not be about money to you, but it's definitely about money to the bank."

I grew up with fairly frugal parents. I mean, my dad had a great job as a software engineer, but we still wouldn't spend money we didn't have to. My mom often made our clothes (to our horror), we didn't waste any food, reused everything, and my favourite stuffed toy came from the trash.

I'm trying to instil similar frugal values on my kids, but it doesn't stick. My wife and I both have excellent jobs, and we really can afford to waste a lot of money, but I just don't think that's a healthy way to raise our kids. Unfortunately, our kids don't care. It's hard to instil these sort of values when money isn't tight.

Yeah, I didn't learn money management from my parents, I learned financial anxiety from our parents. I learned to fear scarcity. I didn't learn how to use money efficiently, I learned that I needed to figure out how to use money efficiently[^1]. If you are financially secure, I think the best bet for financially-secure parents who are trying to raise frugal kids is to teach gratitude and contentment. Teach them to look with compassion at people who are lower on the social ladder rather than looking up with envy. Maybe try to help them understand how precarious and insecure you feel when you're poor, but also how happiness is divorced from wealth--deep joy comes from relationships, the natural world, etc. The happiness from purchased things is fleeting and superficial. To summarize, before parents can teach kids how to manage money, I think parents need to build the emotional connection around "why they should manage money". At least that's sort of how it worked for me.

[^1]: This sort of contextualizes how I feel about student loan forgiveness--it's ostensibly there to help people in need, but I lived frugally and worked my way through my engineering degree to minimize the amount of loan money I needed to take out, while the overwhelming majority of my peers partied, skipped class, lived in the dorms, paid for meal plans and then ate out at restaurants all the time, and majored in unmarketable programs. They didn't work and they got money from their parents every week. I never resented them for being able to afford their lifestyle or anything, but loan forgiveness feels like it's mostly bailing out those spoiled kids in the name of helping poor kids (although I'm sure there are some poor kids who will benefit). Lots of poor kids didn't even go to school in the first place, and many who did were frugal. If this really were about helping poor kids, there are so many significantly better approaches.

And mind you, I benefit from loan forgiveness because frankly my wife was one of those spoiled kids (with lots of debt and an unmarketable degree) and we didn't pay off her loans because the interest rates were so low it was better to use the money for other investments, especially during deferment (which is why it also irks me when people refer to student loan interest rates as "predatory"--there's lots of predation in higher education, but it's not interest rates). But (and seems to blow a lot of minds) just because it benefits me doesn't make it right.

> I don't care about money

I’ve heard this statement used frequently in business. I think this statement is incomplete… what if instead you said something like “I don’t care about money as long as you get it done before the deadline”, wouldn’t that sound as reasonable? Think of money as a tool, when used responsibly could do good things. I see a lot of people being cuffed not spend money just because it sounds “expensive” but really if you 2x’d that spend then it’s money well spent.

Money is politics by other means. It's real to the extent that a certain kind of politics is real.

If you don't have enough to pay your bills it's not because there isn't enough energy for you to heat your home. It's because making sure you can heat your home /pay rent/eat isn't a priority for the people with the political power to make those decisions.

Isn’t it? The vast majority of people in the developed world have enough money for food and housing, and the powers that be work fiercely - if ineptly - to protect that. I’m not writing off the influence of power and wealth, but this sentiment just doesn’t seem empirical to me.

Not in the UK it isn't. The government expect people to use food banks (run by charities, mostly churches) to make ends meet. They recently implemented a tax cut for the highest income decile in the country at a rate disproportionately larger than the tax relief for other income bands. The poorest barely got anything.

The tax rate on higher earners is higher (not to mention their absolute tax payment). The poorest people already don't pay any taxes.

You can't cut the taxes of the poor as much as for the rich, because there's not as much to cut for the former.

I have no idea whether the UK policy is any good or not. But your complaint is a weird one to make.

The complaint is that by reducing taxes for highest incomes there are fewer resources for the state to address the wellbeing of its citizens. It is not that the poorest pay less tax, it is whether social services and other government programs like education, environment, etc. are cut as a consequence of lower taxes on the rich (note the difference from raising taxes - where the wealthiest have greater capital mobility and access to professional services to shield incomes from taxation, so increasing taxes can fail to raise anticipated revenues when things go the other way.)

The only difference between an argument against a tax reduction and an argument in favour of a tax raise is what you consider to be the status quo.

The situation is more symmetric than you think.

Greater capital mobility cuts both ways: when you lower taxes you can also attract more rich people and their capital.

(I am not saying that this effect will necessarily occur, only that capital mobility comes into play both when raising and when lowering taxes.)

Oh, of course, the real solution to these problems is to tax land and not income nor capital: you can't hide land nor can it leave the country. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

In theory you could cut VAT.

Sure.

Of course, rich people pay more VAT than poor people. In absolute terms.

At my age my father supported a wife and two kids on one salary and was able to purchase a home. With 2 salaries and no kids my wife and I cannot purchase a home.

Yup. There _is_ a bottom line.

I remember a few years ago taking Ubers and thinking: "so cheap! But, well, this can't possibly last". And it didn't.

I wish more web developers felt that way about VC-backed tech startups. If they did, we might have less churn.

Coming at this another way, money is only valuable because society and the world says it has value.

Money doesn’t do anything on its own. If I’m cold in the middle of nowhere, a pack of matches and block of wood have value to me at that moment, but my Canada plastic money doesn’t even make good kindling.

If the world seriously falls apart, what are your dollars worth?

This is nonsense. Money is very real because it’s an abstraction for materials, goods, services, etc. If governments fail and currencies collapse yeah sure that money can’t do anything for you, but idk about you but my USD is good just about anywhere and it does a lot for me.

You might make arguments that when the world falls apart you’ll be glad you outsmarted us by buying gold or some other thing society decided has value. But if the world falls apart I wouldn’t bet on gold being the best thing to trade with. I’d rather have a stockpile of medicine, ammunition, livestock, and a seed bank. Those things are hard to store until you need them for an apocalypse. I can assure you that if you tried to give me gold for ammunition in this scenario you’d be leaving with gold.

You could also argue that gold/silver would and is a good currency abstraction and I’d agree with you. In the absurd scenario that the world falls apart I wouldn’t count on merchants coming around that actually want gold/silver. So many useful things become useless in an end of the world scenario that it’s not worth worrying about.

>This is nonsense. Money is very real because it’s an abstraction for materials, goods, services, etc.

Abstractions are by definition not real.

What's real about the money is the political and legal power (enforced by actual people) that allows you to exchange it with goods.

If the world falls apart your net worth will be composed only of things you can actually protect and defend, because everything else will just be taken away from you. The rule of law isn’t around to save you.

But that’s why if the world falls apart, the most valuable resource will be attention. If you have a lot of true followers, and they believe you know what you’re doing and that life could be better if they follow you rather than go it alone, then you will have many people to protect you and bring you resources, and in this way you can build your dominion in the post apocalyptic world.

If you’re a true prepper, you should be hoarding influence and attention. This will give you the best life possible at the end of the world.

So basically a bunch of acting, speech and leadership classes and a ham radio?

Maybe start your own cultish religion where you are the central figure or the only conduit to higher powers.

I thought 'apocalypse world' had very good archetypes for the types of people who'd do okay in such a setting. 'cult leader' is one of the standard types.

Instead of calling it "unreal", which is pretty vague, how about calling it "dreamstuff" or "dream artifact".

It exists in this consensual story.

When all this started going down I bought industrial engineering technologies I wanted to teach myself to use better - and got to work doing useful things with them. I'm unsurprised that these tools keep climbing in value. I feel like we are entering a world thats going to separate those who use technology to their advantage and those who are just being used by it - and it does not look good for the latter.

Money is an abstraction for other people owing you a favour. If the world falls apart, more than a stockpile of any particular good, what I'd want is neighbours who were willing to help me out. And for that purpose, "stockpiling" social relationships - attention - seems like a better bet than stockpiling gold or USD.

Money is definitely an intersubjective reality - valuable only because people believe it to be so.

It might be a very stable concept in most instances, but various very real and extreme edge cases exist. (Regular inflation, Hyperinflation, local disaster, global disaster, bank runs, etc)

I quite liked the description of the invention of currency and beaurocracy in "Sapiens".

It’s not real in the sense that you shouldn’t need to have to worry about paying for heat in the winter.

Our rate of technological improvement has outpaced the ability of our existing economic paradigm to keep up, which is why we’ve ended up in this strange late stage pre post-scarcity landscape.

While I agree that we could probably support the entire human species comfortably given our current level of tech development, I don't think that can happen without a revolutionary change of the economic/social system, away from capitalism.

The problem is that that won't happen in a nice way, if at all. Systemic changes come about after cataclysms, not incrementally.

Alas, cataclysms may be due soon...

I think the nuance is that money is made up, not that it is imaginary. It is an abstraction that lets you live in a society that will let people be cold and hungry without feeling too bad about it.

Borders work even better for that 'abstraction'.

Society is also made up. As are countries, corporations, laws, rights, and nearly everything that distinguishes a civilised society from barbarism. It's all made up, and yet it works.

Before money, people were also cold and hungry. I think money makes it easier to do something about it.

Agree, I just think the modern version of money makes it easier to hold the two ideas in your head that "I'm a good humanitarian" and "they can't afford a house because they are bad with money". Back in the old days they just plain thought poor people were inferior so they deserved poor treatment because of that.

Both are right. Currency is a real relatively stable shared imagination.

Guess one thing that menaces that stability?

Inflation!

This is just people not understanding databases (see: crypto as an extreme example)

Money is very real, it's just abstract in the sense that it's a unit in a database more than it's an object (it used to be both).

So sure, there are other units in databases that can be converted into money at a predictable exchange rate (often via code written by thousands of people sitting in information silos), but that doesn't mean that those units replace money in any holistic sense.

It's like saying money doesn't matter for TV networks, commercials viewership does (when ofc commercials matter b/c they lead to money).

Spoken like someone who has never seen hyper inflation.

Money is basically software. Meaningless without a machine to run it.

It is the opposite. Money is confidence in an idea, go back and evolving over millennium with massive buy in. Working hard for pieces of paper or digits on a HDD would otherwise make no sense! Money is a more successful religion than the big religions.

> Money is confidence in an idea

Specifically the idea that the issuing government either won’t default on its debts any time soon, or that it’s big enough to dominate the world order enough that it can run up its debts without somebody taking a shot at the king. It sounds less religious and more like a game of king of the hill from this perspective.

I know Yuval Harari’s perspective is that money is the “first religion of man”, and I think it’s useful in the context of discussing how mankind evolved, but considering the modern world I prefer Ray Dalio’s perspective: “money is (are?) the house chips in the casino of whoever dominates the current world order.”

At the end of the day, it’s weapons and businesses that give value to money.

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