(Why) Money Matters

Ray Briggs
Is money the root of all evil?

Josh Landy
Or is it just a technology that makes our lives more efficient?

Ray Briggs
Should some things just not be for sale?

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. We’re coming to you from our respective shelters in place via the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Ray Briggs
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where I teach philosophy, and Josh directs the Philosophy and Literature Initiative.

Josh Landy
Today we’re thinking about money matters.

Ray Briggs
Well, I think that money matters too much. We’d all be better off if we did away with money.

Josh Landy
Oh, I don’t know, Ray. I mean, if we didn’t have money, how could we exchange you know, crucial goods and services among each other?

Ray Briggs
We could barter. I give you some flour, you give me some olive oil.

Josh Landy
Well, that’s fine for oil and flour. But but what if I’m, I don’t know, a grape grower. I only have grapes in the autumn, and I can’t keep them fresh all year.

Ray Briggs
Okay Josh, then we could make a long-term agreement. You give me a bushel of grapes in the summer, and I’ll write you an IOU for a bag of flour in the winter.

Josh Landy
You know what happens when you take that system to its logical conclusion?

Ray Briggs
Yeah—socialist paradise!

Josh Landy
No—money!

Ray Briggs
Why would you need money in a socialist paradise?

Josh Landy
Well, people are still going to need to save for a rainy day. I mean, there might be like a grape flu that kills on my grapes,

Ray Briggs
A grape flu? You don’t know anything about grapes, do you, Josh?

Josh Landy
Fair enough, I don’t. But I do know that saving is a good thing.

Ray Briggs
Saving—you mean hoarding resources so that poor people can’t access them. You know, Josh, that’s how capitalism got started.

Josh Landy
Well, maybe. But even if we don’t have saving, I mean, there’s still gonna be trade, right? I mean, I can’t grow all my own foods and make all my own clothes and build my own house. I mean, I don’t wanna have to give you a whole horse just for a cup of sugar. That’s why we need money.

Ray Briggs
Oh, I see. You think that money is just a handy mechanism for the exchange of goods.

Josh Landy
Well, yeah. What do you think it is?

Ray Briggs
Well obviously, Josh, it’s a system invented by governments so that they can tax us.

Josh Landy
Ray, you’re starting to sound like a paranoid conspiracy theorist.

Ray Briggs
No, it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you. Look Josh, the earliest use of money is from ancient Mesopotamia where—guess what—it was used to keep track of taxes.

Josh Landy
Okay, that is a fun factoid. Okay, so suppose I grant that money was first invented for taxes—that’s still got nothing to do with what it is today. Just because something came into being one way doesn’t mean it has to stay that way forever.

Ray Briggs
But money still is like that today. It’s guaranteed by a central bank—that’s what makes it money. And the federal government can just print more of it. They just created $2 trillion to bail us out from COVID-19. And I mean, thank God they did.

Josh Landy
Whoa, wait a minute Ray, Hang on. You just said a minute ago tou don’t like money. And now you’re telling me you’re delighted there’s trillions more of it?

Ray Briggs
Well, if the government is gonna create money anyway, they should at least be humane about it.

Josh Landy
All right. So let’s be clear. What exactly is your problem with money?

Ray Briggs
Well, it tricks people into thinking that things have equal value when they don’t. So look, a new insulin pump costs $6,000 if you don’t have insurance, and a Patty the Platypus Beanie Baby costs $6,000. Josh, do you really think those two are worth the same?

Josh Landy
That is crazy—Patty the Playpus? I have to admit Ray, that is bonkers. But I guess what I want to say is that not all prices are like that, right? Sometimes you really can put a dollar value on things like, I don’t know, when you insure your property, for example.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I just think there should be a better system.

Josh Landy
Oh, I’ve got one for you: Bitcoin.

Ray Briggs
Bitcoin? You mean the thing where money is just numbers on a computer? How is that even money?

Josh Landy
Why shouldn’t it be? People used to use salt or even rocks.

Ray Briggs
Wait seriously—rocks?

Josh Landy
Yes, rocks. We sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter Holly J. McDed to tell us more about that. She files this report.

Holly McDede
Money. What is it?

The Big Short
You smell that? What is that? What? What’s that smell? Cologne. No. Opportunity? No—money. I smell money.

Scott Fitzpatrick
Money on a lot of different levels is kind of arbitrary.

Holly McDede
Scott Fitzpatrick is a professor of anthropology at the University of Oregon. He says the money we value is often determined by randomness and geography.

Scott Fitzpatrick
A lot of currencies developed out of precious objects or precious metals, and things like that.

Holly McDede
Fitzpatrick has dedicated most of his academic life to studying giant stone money. This passion started for him in the mid 90s. When he went on a research expedition to Palau, an island nation in the Pacific. He wandered along the raised limestone islands and coral reef skeletons.

Scott Fitzpatrick
And as we trekked up into the jungle in this really jagged karst terrain, the thing I was immediately struck by was this large flat piece of limestone that was circular in shape, and it had a hole through the middle of it.

Holly McDede
Fitzpatrick noticed the path had been cleared, as though people had been prepared to shuttle this giant stone disc elsewhere.

Scott Fitzpatrick
The people who had done this were pretty good engineers. So they were building other kinds of structures, stone walls and pathways and things like that to help them carve and move these very large discs.

Holly McDede
He soon learned that centuries ago, stones like this were moved over 250 miles north of the island group of Yap. People on Yap didn’t have limestone. Theses stones weighed more than a car. And the challenge of bringing them back and carving them only made them more valuable,

Scott Fitzpatrick
The chief would take those pieces of stone money and probably keep, you know, some of those. They would then place the stone in front of a residence, let’s say, and then that person would own it.

Holly McDede
These stones are called ‘rai’, or stone money. But Fitzpatrick says it’s not strictly a currency. The Yapese would trade it as a wedding gift or to celebrate of birth. It could be traded without ever moving physically. People who lived on Yap an oral tradition of learning and remembering who the stones belonged to at any given moment.

Scott Fitzpatrick
And that’s very different than what you see in other types of societies. And that’s the ability of people to have that memory.

Holly McDede
If you took a look at your wallet, you probably wouldn’t remember where your nickels came from. But if Fitzatrick says as different colonial powers vied for control of this part of the Pacific, the use of stone money in Yap waned. These days, the US dollar is the official currency of Micronesia.

Scott Fitzpatrick
Today, you can walk through jungles in Yap, and old traditional villages, that aren’t used anymore today, and you can still find stone money laying around that don’t have as importance as they once did, maybe 100 years ago.

Holly McDede
But stone money is still an important part of culture on Yap. Tou can still find an image of it on the license plates on the island. And Fitzpatrick says this old currency has a lot to teach us about a new kind of money: cryptocurrency. Bitcoin, like stone money isn’t movoed physically. It has value even though

Scott Fitzpatrick
Money on a lot of different levels is kind of arbitrary.

Tony Soprano
This thing is a pyramid since time immemorial. Shit runs downhill, money goes up—t’s that simple.

Holly McDede
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede

Josh Landy
That report rockedm Holly. I’m Josh Landy, with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about money matters.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Graham Hubbs, who’s a professor of philosophy at the University of Idaho, where he’s also Chair of politics and philosophy. Graham, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Graham Hubbs
Thanks.

Josh Landy
So Graham, lots of people are interested in money for one reason or another, but you’re interested from a philosophical perspective. So What first got you going in that direction? It’s you have a, like a collection of valuable rock somewhere?

Graham Hubbs
Well, I got interested when I was worried about having a collection of valuable nothings. I was on the job market in 2008. In 2009, when the financial crisis hit, and all the jobs that were available in academic philosophy seemed to wither up overnight. Not being able to fully understand what had happened around me, I became interested in economics in a way that I hadn’t been beforehand. And it was, didn’t take very long before that interest in economics led to asking fundamental questions like, What is money? And how does its existence in nature exert the kind of control over our day to day lives that it does, and I was often running from there.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, Josh and I were just arguing about the nature of money earlier. So he thinks it arose spontaneously from a barter economy. And I think it was invented by governments to tax us. So Graham, who do you think is right?

Graham Hubbs
Um, Ray is right. And since Ray is right, we can stop the show. Already. Give anything? No. So the question that comes up immediately after asking The historical question where I do think the the weight of the evidence favors Ray’s view is what? How does that matter for an analysis of what money is today the way that it functions in modern capitalist economies? I think that we would do better when we get to this point in the discussion to step back from asking about money itself conceived of as an object and instead analyze the concept of money, and say, so what is the concept of money and what sorts of things fall under it. And there’s pretty widespread agreement that there’s four functions that money or money like things have, that is to serve as a universal medium of exchange, sorted, be used to buy and sell things on the market, to be used as a means of payment, which includes discharging debts and obligations to state being a store of value. And that’s the one that I’ll come back to focus on here in a second. And then finally, being a unit of account, being able to dominate prices and, and liabilities and that sort of thing.

Josh Landy
Before we get off the subject to origins. Aren’t there cases, maybe maybe the very first use of money was for tax reasons. But aren’t there cases I’m thinking, for example, you know, this, this guy, Ira Radford, wrote this lovely essay in 1945, about the spontaneous emergence of money like system in a prisoner of war camp during World War Two, where all of a sudden cigarettes stopped becoming a thing that you could just buy and sell and started becoming actual cash, right, that became the currency. So haven’t there been cases where in fact, money if money like system did evolve from barter?

Graham Hubbs
Sure. So when you read the Radford paper, one of the things that’s interesting is the fact that the the British officers who were kind of running the prison camp had an exchange where they were accepting cigarettes at a centralized location for the various goods that were available. There. So even in that particular example, if I’m remembering the paper correctly, it’s not that cigarettes emerged from out of nowhere, the way that maybe Adam Smith describes gold or precious metal emerging as the the universal medium of exchange. But even if even if that were to be the right story about about what went on there, when we’re analyzing the nature of money, it seems like what’s going on there is that a group of people who are very familiar with money and cash transactions in a capitalist economy, just make do with what they’ve got sitting around in order to manage their little economy within the prison? I would, I think it’s more philosophically interesting to say, how did we come up with the practice and the concept, initially, given the varieties of ways that we can imagine distributing goods through a through society?

Ray Briggs
So if I have a commodity that’s, that’s not regulated by a central bank, but that exists in a wider money system? Does it sort of inherit its money Enos, from the wider system? Like I think I’m a little puzzled still about why the cigarettes counted as money. Was it because there was a central, like pseudo bank? Or was it because they lived in a bigger money system?

Graham Hubbs
Oh, well, let me let me back up, I would say that the reason that I began by a numerating functions associated with the concept of money is that I think that we do best to think about money as a family resemblance concept, there are going to be things that are more or less money ish. So within that, within that economy, cigarettes are money ish, to the extent that they are serving the universal medium of exchange function, and they’re being used to denominate prices. But presumably, they’re not clearing all debts and being used as means of payments, the way that sovereign currency is in a state that issues its own currency. So the folks who’ve got a money concept or applying it, you know, sort of to meet the economic needs that they happen to have meager as they are in the prison camp. You know, it’s just table thumping at that point for one person to insist or that’s definitely money or for someone to say no, it’s not because it’s, you know, not issued by A, by A sovereign sort of authority.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about money matters with Graham hubs from the University of Idaho.

Ray Briggs
Is the price of something the same as its value? Should we trust the invisible hand of the market? Are there some things that shouldn’t be for sale?

Josh Landy
Money, markets, and morals—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Spinal Tap
Gimme some money…

Josh Landy
Hey Ray, why don’t you give me some money?

Ray Briggs
Uh… no.

Josh Landy
It was worth a shot. I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about money matters with Graham Hubbs from the University of Idaho.

Josh Landy
In the age of COVID, we’re pre recording this episode from the safety of our respective shelters in place. So unfortunately, we can’t take your phone calls, but we can keep the conversation going online. Email Tell us that comments that philosophy talked, or G or tweet us, our handle is at Phil talk radio.

Ray Briggs
So Graham, would you say that money is a good way of measuring value?

Graham Hubbs
Well, within markets, I think it may be the only way to measure value of all of the things on the market so that they’re all commensurable with one another. But I don’t think that we should presuppose that the only value that a thing has is its market value. Which is why I think it’s useful for keeping track of the different functions of money again, and thinking of it as a family resemblance concept. If you get seduced into thinking that money is exactly one kind of thing and has one kind of value than its use to evaluate things would it would amount to evaluating I don’t exactly one metric, if money is multifaceted and multi formed, and the varieties of values and kinds of values that it might measure might themselves be various.

Ray Briggs
Do you think that there’s a concern here, that money could create illusions of commensurability, when in fact, like, two things just aren’t comparable in value at all, like say, take the life of somebody who needs a life saving medical device, versus a lot of people having a pleasant commodity, like maybe the life is worth like infinitely more, or maybe there’s just no comparison to be made there, like does money, like distort that in some way?

Graham Hubbs
I wouldn’t put the onus on money, per se, but again, markets and the the the ways in which goods move through markets, and the democratizing effects of markets put everything on an even keel, when one goes back to the history of money, so one of the elements of the history, Ray’s already counted as the use of money in order to denominate and collect taxes. Another ancient form of money is known as ver guild, which is the kind of money that I believe in ancient Germanic societies was used to pay off things like blood debts, where the money itself was a recognition that the thing that it was being used to pay off was something that could never be paid off. If someone kills your cousin, and you demand something in return for them short of the life of another person. There’s a recognition on all sides, that the thing that is being taken is exactly not the same thing as the equivalent of a life. So there’s a there’s an old, old old history of money that already baked into the concept is this this tension between demanding something in payment for something that could never be repaid, like the life of a family member?

Josh Landy
That’s really interesting, because you often hear the line that comes from originally from Georg Simmel, the sociologists that, you know, money is just a bad thing, because it reduces all qualitative differences to quantitative but you’re saying, first of all, it’s not just money that potentially does that. It could be it’s maybe it’s just the markets, or maybe it’s just a form of the markets, maybe it’s a certain kind of capitalism. And then secondly, that even so even within the money system, you could still recognize qualitative value. So you are ultimately an optimist. Do you think you know, in this capitalist world we live in where money is quasi ubiquitous, we can still live within the kind of social arrangement that we would all want to.

Graham Hubbs
I am optimistic that when we go through the history of money, and when we analyze the concept of money, from a philosophical perspective, we can see that many of us perhaps most of us have been blinded by a narrow conception of money that arose, I think, near the end of the 17th century, and has had a grip on our thinking over the course of the last few centuries that once we liberate ourselves from that, we can see the power of money to do what we want it to do, rather than us answer to it, as if it were a virus, some sort of alien force that was controlling our lives and, you know, making us unable to get jobs or on the job market in 2008 2009.

Ray Briggs
So I’m curious about commensurability, which you mentioned, and sort of having different forms of money to pay off different kinds of debts. So it seems like one possible type of system you could have is have sort of different economies for different kinds of commodities. And we have sort of things that resemble this. So So I think food stamps, which can only be used to pay for groceries, are kind of an example of like a limited money. And I was reading a paper by by Posner and some collaborators that suggested vote buying, you don’t want people to actually like buy votes with real money, because then rich people will buy up all the votes. But if you gave everybody the same number of voter credits and allowed them to spend them on issues they cared about, maybe that would be a good scheme. Do you do you think that having separate economy is is a valuable way for Word?

Graham Hubbs
Well, I think that there are some interesting lessons to be drawn from the anthropology and sociology of money in this regard. So the anthropologist, the Bohannan, studied the Tiv in Nigeria in the 50s and 60s, and wrote about how they had different spheres of exchange. So there, it wasn’t like different forms of money were being used for votes on the one hand, as opposed to commercial goods on the other. But money itself was only used in markets where the presupposition of going to the market is that you would be dealing with people who were effectively strangers, who would try to screw you over if they could, it’s a it’s a toned down version of Hobbes is state of nature. And so that you always had to be on guard and suspicious about what was going on in the transaction that you would have with such a person. And so you get haggling over the price of things. But did you never behave that way with your neighbors, when you when you think about what a neighborly debt is, like, imagine going to your neighbor’s house and the old fashioned example of getting a cup of sugar or a little bit of butter so that you can make some cookies, you know, it would be a neighborly for your neighbor to then say like, Okay, I want seven cents in return for that quarter ounce of butter that I gave you or whatever. No, instead, the nice thing to do is to bring him some cookies when when you’re done. And what they noticed was that in those kinds of exchanges, people were always a little bit into debt to one another, you always bring back a few too many or few too few cookies so as to maintain the social structure within your neighborly interactions. So there, you get two different spheres of activity. In the in the neighborly arrangement, you don’t really have money, but you do have some sort of loose debt tracking going on. But you need to be really precise when you deal with strangers that you can’t trust in that way. So I think that there’s a lot of lessons to be taken from that. Could you formalize that? You know, I don’t know, I’m not entirely sure about that. But being aware of those different kinds of debt relations is helpful for us thinking about how we can use money and the kinds of social relations that we bear to one another.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about money matters with Graham Hubbs, from the University of Idaho. So Graham, I listen, I love your optimism, and I think I’m persuadable. But before you get me completely on your side, I want to try out a couple of you know, possible worries additional worries about money. One is something that Ray mentioned earlier about hoarding, right money is great because it allows us to save But the flip side of that is people can hoard money, there can be this creation of hereditary inequality, which is something that Thomas Piketty has talked about. And another is a kind of perverse incentive. Right? Once you have money, people can start wanting money as their ultimate goal, right? It’s not just a means to an end, so you can get more Beanie Babies. So whatever it is that you want, but you can, you know, set as your goal a kind of endless accumulation of money as as marks on even Aristotle had to worry about this. So. So how do we how do we push the system more in the direction that you were just talking about this, this wonderful set of positive system where people deliberately, you know, their people treat their neighbors kindly, and they don’t just, you know, quibble over seven cents, and avoid these negative consequences.

Graham Hubbs
Right. Well, this is where I think it is relevant to go back to the difference between the theory of money. Josh, I think that you were outlining at the beginning, which is the market theory of money, that money spontaneously emerges out of market transactions and the quarter ListView that Ray was articulating. One of the things that the quarter, let’s view, at least as it’s embraced by modern monetary theory, today recognizes is the capacity of currency created by sovereign governments to be managed as just technical instruments of the government. So worries about accumulation. If you think about money, primarily as a legal tool in order to organize labor amongst the citizens of a state, then it’s a tool that can be brought under the power of law. So you deal with problems of accumulation by levying inheritance taxes. That’s, that’s one way at least to take care of, or to mitigate some of the effects of transgenerational wealth accumulation. So thinking about it from the courts perspective, it money again, is not this alien quasi biological force out there that’s running rampant. It’s simply a tool of law and laws can be made in order to mitigate its negative effects. In terms of it being an object of accumulation, there’s a good argument to be made that that’s just what capitalism requires. And so if you wanted to somehow legislate out, taking money as an object in and of itself to be accumulated in your right, Aristotle worried about this, and Marx thought that there was deep insight there. That’s going to be I think, the end of capitalism. Now, is that a good thing or a bad thing? I’m not weighing in on that one right here. But I think that there’s a tight connection there that maybe is what you’re signaling? Yeah.

Ray Briggs
So you’ve emphasized the role of the state a couple of times, which I think is a very catalyst idea. And I’m kind of curious about the role of corporations in making money sort of mean, what it does and function the way it does. So it seems like the entities that wield a lot of economic power in our lives are things like Google or Amazon, which have like entire production chains that they control. And like, many, many deployed workers, are they entities that we should be looking at changing? Internally, like just abolishing, like, how should we even think about those entities and their relation to money?

Graham Hubbs
Right. Well, let me let me back up and say that another kind of corporate entity that that needs mentioned in this discussion is banks, bank deposits end up creating, you know, I think over 90% of the the money that actually gets used in in the economy today. So they are private banks or institutions that need to be mentioned in terms of the nature of money and the creation of money and the regulatory framework that we would want to bring out in order to make money serve the ends of the population to the best extent possible. But back to the the Amazons and the Googles of the world. I mean, it seems to me like the the questions to be raising about them have been raised for years now, which is are they monopolies and in as much as their monopolies? Are they harmful, even under capitalism, precisely because of the monopolistic effects that they’re able to exert? So I would think that that’s the right way to approach the potential problems of companies that have sides is to revisit old concerns about problems of monopoly and capitalism. And not think that, that treating them immediately with considerations of money is the thing to be done.

Josh Landy
Let me see if I get this straight. I am I right in thinking that your view is if we have the proper understanding of money, which is that ultimately, it’s a tool that a state can use? And like many other tools, it’s sort of value neutral? Depends how it’s used. And, you know, if we can set the state up, right? Well, we can actually get money to do good things. So first of all, is that right? And secondly, what kinds of good things

Graham Hubbs
I like that idea a lot that once we think about money as a tool in and of itself becomes value neutral. I mean, I guess I’m still Aristotelian about this, it does have a Taylor’s and so baked into that Taylor’s is going to be some mode of valuation, but it’s far more value neutral than we might might otherwise think. How do we put money to good use? Well, we make sure that there is enough of it to keep people employed, to keep people being able to obtain the things that they need in order to live, and to keep people you know, living, the aerosol tilian distinction, not merely for the sake of mere life, but for the sake of good life, well, managed monetary regimes should enable us to live that way. And so if we’re in a time of recession, heading into depression, and people are having a hard time getting the goods that they need, even just for the ends of mere life, making sure that they have access to the money and credit they need in order to go on living until the economy can recover, say from a massive virus that’s made millions upon millions of people unemployed. That’s something that it’s within the power of the state to do in order to keep us all living as well as we possibly can under strange conditions.

Ray Briggs
So as the concrete proposal that I should take out of this, like an economic stimulus is really important, because it’s the thing that the government can do, and that can help people sort of get by during a crisis time. Is that right?

Graham Hubbs
Precisely.

Josh Landy
And how does that work? I mean, is this something I’ve never understood? How, how can the government keep printing money? And some people say, There’s got to be a limit to how much money the government can print and other people seem to think, well, at least we haven’t reached it yet. What’s your view on that?

Graham Hubbs
Right. So I think that the temptation to think that there is a limit is comes from analogizing the government to a household or to an individual, or maybe even to a corporation, which is still a private entity. In all those instances, if you want to obtain goods or services or pay for labor, or whatever, you need to go out and get some money in order to obtain for the things or pay for the things that you want, you can do so legally, by going out and working. You do so illegally by going out stealing a bunch of money, but one way or the other, you have to go somewhere else to get the thing that you need in order to pay for what you want. And that is precisely what the government doesn’t have to do. The government can just create money as it needs in order to do what it wants. So that might be putting people to work. As you know the model there would be the works programs during the, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, we see that on being proposed through a green New Deal, which could be financed in the mode of the government just creating more money. Note also that the sovereign that creates its own currency is able to pay any of its debts in that currency, because that’s all that its debts are promises to pay in the very currency that it has the capacity to create. So an analogy that modern monetary theorists use to show the silliness of talking about the government rolling at running out of money. If you go bowling, it doesn’t make any sense to talk about the bowling alley running out points, there’s as many points as there need to be depending upon the number of pins that get knocked down. Similarly, the government is not limited extrinsically In a metaphysical way, now, they might be limited. Legally, if the United States were still on the gold standard, then there would be exchangeability rates that would determine the amount of currency that it could issue. But since it went off of the gold standard in the 1970s, it’s been subject to no such legal restrictions. And even then those weren’t, you know, when we put take our law hat off and put our philosophers hat on, not genuine metaphysical restrictions that were placed on the amount of currency that could be produced.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, today, we’re thinking about money matters with Graham Hubbs from the University of Idaho.

Ray Briggs
is money in more trouble than it’s worth? Can we change it to reap more of its benefits? Or would we be better off without money altogether.

Josh Landy
The future of money—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Wyclef Jean
Dollar dollar bill, y’all.

Josh Landy
Cash rules everything for now—but maybe it’s time for a new regime. I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, our guest is Graham Hubbs, from the University of Idaho, and we’re thinking about money matters.

Josh Landy
So Graham, I’m very impressed not just with your analyses of what money is, but also your thoughts about what money could be so so we’re going to appoint you czar of money. Here. Today, we’re going to give you total power to solve all of the problems we were talking about earlier, the Aristotle problem, Marx is where we got exemples worry, what’s the first thing you’re going to do with these powers?

Graham Hubbs
Right, I’m going to show my philosophical stripes here, I think. And the first thing I’m going to do is implement an education campaign began excellent, probably in middle school, but certainly by high school, to include the study of economics of macroeconomics, and the history and anthropology, and about, you know, philosophical analysis of money. So that it’s just a part of what people are brought up thinking about Hoard. And the reason that I think that that’s so important is I think I said this earlier, since, you know, I would say the, I’d lay the blame at the foot of the great John Locke, in the late 17th century, there has been this tendency, both on the part of lay folks and on the part of professional, many professional economist to assume that for money to be valuable, it would have to be valuable in the way that a commodity is valuable because commodities are where value lie and markets are the way that we distribute value amongst a population. And once you start thinking down that road, and you get trapped into conceiving of money itself as a commodity, it’s a very special commodity, how does it have the power that it does? blinding yourself entirely to this entire an alternative way of thinking about money the quarter LIS way, and it can then lead to raising the kinds of questions that we were just talking about? Well, if the government just creates an endless amount of money, isn’t it gonna create deficits that it can never pay off? Those those questions, presuppose and account of money, that, you know, if we could shake off the thinking about money originally, as if it were a commodity, that we would free ourselves to be able to think more creatively about it? I’m reminded of the way that Anscombe talks in her paper on modern, modern moral philosophy, and says that we need to shake off thinking about morality in terms of the moral arts, because that concept ought only makes sense within the context of there being a divine legislature and even though she herself was Catholic, she thought most people don’t believe in a divine legislature anymore. And so the very idea that we ought to do things as if a law was handed down from on high, doesn’t make any sense. Similarly, I think if we can shake ourselves free of gold standard thinking we might open up ourselves to the possibility of wider ways of using money to take care of ourselves.

Ray Briggs
So Because I get educated in the new education system, I’m wondering how like, how will this change my life. So like, one way it might change my life is that I might sort of conduct my own private life differently and sort of have different ideas about how to spend my money. And I guess another way is that I might sort of vote for different politicians and consider different social and economic policies viable. So what would you like to see changing in response to a more educated population?

Graham Hubbs
One of the things that that you would see is that the question raised by by politicians, in particular, federal politicians in Washington, DC, how are we going to pay for that would never be taken seriously anymore? It wouldn’t be a concern, because the the answer to how are we going to pay for that would be, we will just create the money that we need to pay for that, readjusting the political discourse so that that does not become an artificial limit on what we have the capacity to do as a nation, I speak here as a citizen of the United States. But this line of thought would apply to any nation that is, issues its own sovereign currency, I think would reshape the or the political debate in a way that would help the lives of many, many people who don’t get access to, you know, often things that they need from your life, and certainly things that you need for good life due to artificial constraints imposed by thinking that the government is subject to the same kind of budgetary pressures that you and I are,

Ray Briggs
I have a question about how are we going to pay for that? Like I don’t, I don’t want to know how we’re going to pay for that. But I want to know, like, whether we should be paying for all of the things that we currently pay for as private citizens. So right now, my employer pays for my health care, if I did not have an employer that did that I would be paying sort of out of pocket for my health insurance. Right now I pay for a place to live and I pay my landlord for a place to live. And if I wanted to buy a house, I would I would pay for that. And then I would pay property taxes. How much of that stuff should the government be providing? How much of it should be sort of open to markets?

Graham Hubbs
I guess my initial reaction to that question is to say that part of the ebb and flow of democracy is trying things out and seeing what works and what doesn’t work. I don’t have a prescriptive view, as a all out capitalist or an all out socialist or an all out Marxist about what the state should or shouldn’t be supplying. I guess what I would say on this show focused on the question of the nature of money, is that the way to answer those questions is to talk about what people need talk about what the government can supply. Well talk about what the market can supply well, but never allow the question, how are we going to pay for it to enter into those decision makings? That’s a, again, because money is just a tool. It’s the thing that we’ll drag in at the end to figure out how best to if we think that the state should be giving everybody a place to live, then how to use money in the power of taxation and so forth in order to supply that the reeducation campaign that I would be advocating for Azhar of money would I guess put money in its place and recognize those the question of how to pay for things as a secondary concern, so that we could go on Ray and maybe take your, your social theory class that would then answer these questions more directly about which of these things is should we prioritize as things to be delivered by the state?

Josh Landy
That’s a nice thought, because I had a little worried I was is I love your idea. I mean, hate teaching is great. But you know, you see people having some views that I think are a little disturbing about the market, right where I mean, so for example, we’re we’re currently living in a time of lockdown thanks to the Coronavirus outbreak. And you have some people saying, you know, maybe we just be better off if we gave it to everybody, right on the grounds that it’s hurting the markets. And well, you know, if some number of people need to die, maybe that’s a necessary evil, to keep the Dow Jones Industrial Average up. I mean, it reminds me of, you know, the movie metropolis where you’re feeding human beings into the machine. So how do you? Is it enough to teach people what money is in order to change their views of the market?

Graham Hubbs
I don’t think so. I think that studying the ethics of our social existence under capitalism is going to be multifaceted. And in the course of teaching people these things in a democracy and especially in a democracy that’s coupled with capitalism, you’re going to get a variety of views. I don’t think that you would ever short of some sort of philosophical totalitarianism, which is incompatible with our conception of liberal democracy, that you’re going to be able to extinguish some of those views about give people the disease so that, you know, the markets can thrive or something like that, you know, the way the monster all of the various monsters that are not humans are the ones that need to survive, and we need to answer to their, to their whims. I mean, I don’t know, I don’t always find myself in agreement with mill on the value of free speech. And I I’d rather don’t like the the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas. Because that means the idea that, you know, fetches the most popular opinion is the one that wins, because that’s how markets work. Nevertheless, I think that the sentiment that Mel’s trying to express they’re about, let all ideas out, and then let the let the best ones where the best ones are judged by norms of reason succeed, you know, those ideas are still going to be around even if the Tsar if money has his way, and his teaching Kartal ism to seventh graders.

Ray Briggs
This actually makes me wonder about the the interaction between money and the spread of ideas, which I think like we see in a lot of domains. So political campaign finance, the more money you have, the more chance you have to get your political ideas out. Also sort of net neutrality, which I think is probably not going to happen at this point. But the idea that like, maybe we should just democratize anybody’s information or ability to put information out on the internet, and make it sort of have, in some sense, the same, like difficulty or cost, no matter who you are, like how do I sort of free ideas from the grasp of money and make sure that those two things aren’t getting conflated?

Graham Hubbs
Right, great. So let’s go to the the issue of Citizens United and money is campaign speech. You know, on the face of it, it’s absurd to say that money is speech in a vacuum, the metaphysics of those two things are so wildly different from one another, would make one wonder, how could How could anybody equate the two? I think that thinking about money, as the power in the market and in the private sphere, to do what one wants. And one of the things that one could do, if one so wanted would be to express a certain set of ideas, and maybe even a certain set of political ideas, can all be traced back to thinking about my money primarily in its market function. And as it’s being a universal medium of exchange to purchase whatever one wants there. If instead, one thinks of money primarily as a bureaucratic tool for the state, to manage the state’s activities, if we see that it is damaging to democracy to allow certain voices to have outsized weight over others, because of the economic power behind those ideas, because of the vested interest that those ideas prop up, we can then use money thinking about it from the cartilage point of view, as a way to make sure that the flow of ideas is democratized. And so that might be good old fashioned campaign finance reform. So I think that when we, again, free ourselves from the idea that money is first and foremost, something that is used to purchase goods and services in a market and think about it instead as a tool that we can use to make our democracy function better, then there shouldn’t be you know, a you shouldn’t be tempted into thinking that money is speech, but be you should think, Hmm, how can we use money so as best to generate, realize and sustain the common will of the people rather than protect the limited interest of a few

Josh Landy
Graham, we’re coming towards the end of our time, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you at all about Bitcoin. So you got 30 seconds for us on cryptocurrency?

Graham Hubbs
Yeah, sure. I mean, I this is the my answer on Bitcoin, maybe it will loop us back to where we started. Let’s not think about money as if it were a natural kind. Money is a cluster concept, a family concept or money ish things. Bitcoin is a money ish thing. It’s something that is used to denominate prices in Bitcoin markets. And it’s used to exchange for goods in that market. It’s obviously not a sovereign currency by design. And so it can’t be used to settle payments in the way that that sovereign currencies are.

Josh Landy
Well, Graham, this has been an enriching conversation. And I’m going to say, I hope you’re right. I hope we do get your education program and we can turn this thing around. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Graham Hubbs
Thank you all this was delightful. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak on the show.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Graham Hubbs, professor of philosophy at the University of Idaho, where he’s also chair of politics and philosophy. So Ray, what are your thinking now?

Ray Briggs
You know, I like having money, but I think I like better having a functioning society. And I see how different ways of regulating money can cause society to function better or worse, and I think I’d be quite happy with less money if it meant a sort of more functional system overall.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I agree. I’m you know, I’m still trying to weigh up and on the basis of what Graham was saying, what’s really the culprit here? Is it Is it money or is it trade? Is it trade? Or is it capitalism and capitalism? Or is it the rapacious capitalism? We currently are linked to Scandinavia. Yeah. Okay. So if they’re linked, then yes, we have to go back to the root and start again. But this conversation continues at philosophers corner at our online community of thinkers, were our motto with apologies to Descartes is called Guiteau Ergo Blago, I think, therefore, I blog. And you can become a partner in the community by visiting our website, Philosophy Talk daco RG.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments at Philosophy Talk dot o RG, and we might feature it on the blog. Now, if time is money, here’s a guide that can save you million, it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales. Money is not a simple thing. It represents a system and one thing stands for another thing that may not even exist. Money is a cultural whim codified signified and put to work. It’s like rain it can quench thirst drown you. Flood evaporate, of course, artificial rain, artificial snow that is melted, then treated with economic theory so it’s safe to drink. That might be true. Even people don’t know what money is don’t know. Take Secretary of the Treasury Steve Minuchin recently spearheading his massive package of public dimes into a pandemic stricken America he stated quote, I think the entire package provides an economic relief overall for about 10 weeks unquote. Included in that package. It was a payout for individuals giving rise to Twitter opinions, evolution thinks 1200 bucks can keep it going for 10 weeks. sure if it’ll be their mom and don’t eat petition was seen as not knowing the value of $1. And if the Secretary of the Treasury doesn’t, who does? Well, there’s Kelly Lafleur, junior senator from Georgia appointed after the elected senator resigns. He’s under consideration to be on President Trump’s economic council to determine how to get the nation running again. After we quit the street of gun toting protesters. I mean, come on, don’t they have a home to go to anyway, after a private congressional briefing on the Coronavirus last January after sold off some stock to Twitter America. This looked like insider trading Senator laughter went to Tucker Carlson to say she had known about it. Her portfolio managers handle her trades. Well then, before she was a senator her MBA got her gigs at Citi Bank and more leading to the Intercontinental exchange which deals with the Major Arcana of metaphysical capitalism futures derivatives, credit default swaps, as I see it, it’s kind of $1 store for people with a billion dollars anyway, she married the CEO and now possesses to her surprise perhaps a 15,000 square foot estate out of Atlanta. I bring this up to point out that this was her definer says she does not know how our own money is spent. That’s all done by ellos and algorithms and the wisdom of the marketplace. On Fox News. She claimed that she’s being attacked for her success. Defending free enterprise is why she came to Washington to live on the public dime. So the attacks in her are ipso facto socialist, when she might have gained the system is proof. It’s how socialism is identified. Now meanwhile, protesters in the street protesting governance for being communist, which I guess means they favor lockdowns and social distancing, which are communist definitions now. I noticed when they’re interviewed, protesters don’t complain about jobs. No they can’t get their hair done or buy a board at Home Depot or have a basketball barbecue in the park or go to the lake it’s a stunted fantasy of freedom and independent wealth and health and tons of leisure time and willing to risk the virus to have it at least not mining it you get it you communist I don’t have a dime has given me a notion or anybody when does it stop being a public dime? Do you have to launder it like cocaine money is that way we have casinos do your own public dime your tax refund is it really yours? This brings up issues of fungibility which means as I understand that that all dimes are the same on Eric did a bar years ago the record is in the tail marked with red nail polish to be the jukebox. When the new black man came around, he gave them back to the bar they were not fungible there are a medium of exchange good in one market only and when your spent one you got one back socialism. You tell me once upon a time a guy could exchange a cow for magic beans get a beanstalk up to a castle in the sky. But the giant singing heart pots of gold I mean, come on. Who needs money managers when you have a magic card that can sing giants to sleep at that socialism? Well, so be it. I want to be a socialist I gotta go.

Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
Copyright 2020. Our executive producer is Tina Pamintuan.

Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, and Lauren Schecter.

Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
The views expressed or mis expressed on this program did not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, Philosophy Talk dot ORG, are where you too can become a partner in our Community of Thinkers. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Monty Python
Sorry… I love money. All money. I’ve always wanted money. To handle, to touch.