You could give me a million dollars, but if I feel that my daily activities aren’t contributing to my family or otherwise benefiting society-at-large then I’ll feel just as worthless and depressed as when I was poor.
I’m not a finance or economics geek, but I really enjoyed Jack Weatherford’s The History of Money. Weatherford asserts that immaterial mediums of exchange such as currency are implicit social contracts. Maybe this definition is common knowledge among economists but it was news to me, and made me appreciate currency as a social invention, first and foremost above it being an economic one.
Threads like this would benefit from talking in more concrete terms and eschewing ‘isms’ altogether, especially given the floating definition of ‘capital’ in economic theory.
