The conflation of money and things

5/14/2026 at 6:10:29 PM

This is a book excerpt. I didn’t find any in-depth reviews, but one of the authors posted a summary of the book here:

https://jwmason.org/slackwire/against-money/

by skybrian

5/14/2026 at 8:44:24 PM

I found a newer blog post based on a speech the author gave with some ideas from their book. It's very long because he's talking about multiple related ideas, but I excerpted some quotes here:

https://skybrian-links.exe.xyz/post/765

Here's one quote:

> We can find this same principle down through the history of the corporation. When in the beginning of the 20th century we see the generalization of the corporate form, it’s not a process where large-scale investment required raising more funds. The problem that the corporation is solving is that you have large-scale enterprises with long-lived specialized fixed assets, on the one hand, and wealth owners, on the other hand, with claims on those enterprises — often the owners of smaller enterprises that merge into one larger one, or the heirs of the founder — who don’t want an interest in this particular company. They want money. And so the function of the corporate form is to allow the conversion of ownership rights into money — to enable payments that will satisfy these claimants, so that their authority over the production process can be pooled, their smaller interests can be assembled into a larger whole.

> This is not a system for raising funds for investment. It’s a system for consolidating authority. It’s a system for reconciling the need for large-scale, long-lived organizational production, on the one hand, with the desire of the wealthy to hold their wealth in a more money-like form, on the other. As William Lazonick says, the corporation is not a vehicle for raising funds for investment, it’s a vehicle for distributing money to the wealthy. The origin of the corporation as we know it is as a vehicle for moving funds out of productive enterprises to asset-owners.

I would put it differently: sometimes it's about raising funds, but the more important part (he claims) is being able to cash out.

by skybrian

5/14/2026 at 9:43:34 PM

> The origin of the corporation as we know it is as a vehicle for moving funds out of productive enterprises to asset-owners.

It doesn't fill me with confidence that they got this completely backwards. The advantage of the corporate form is that the wealthy owners can cash out without moving any wealth out of the productive enterprises. The whole point of a corporation as opposed to a partnership or joint-stock venture is that wealthy corporate owners can sell their stock to other wealthy people without interfering with the productive enterprise at all!

by Bratmon

5/15/2026 at 4:13:06 AM

I think the author agrees with that. He uses the history of the East India company as an example.

by skybrian

5/15/2026 at 1:02:42 AM

I'll confess I haven't read the OP but I find the discussion of money interesting and want to share two great books I read recently that might be of interest:

Money: a story of humanity https://www.davidmcwilliams.ie/money

The corporation in the 21st century https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300280197/the-corporatio...

The first one especially. Every night I read a chapter, and every time I'd remark to my wife how entertaining this book was.

The second was very interesting as well. I thought the author took an appropriately critical look without overdoing it, and offers a history of big business in the past ~200 years.

by fillmore

5/14/2026 at 7:53:12 PM

Why do people write like this? So much preamble. Unnecessary metaphors. Just make your point and be done with it.

by Hnrobert42

5/14/2026 at 8:24:39 PM

Why do people even write, just so us pictures am I right ?

by toasty228

5/14/2026 at 11:04:39 PM

Why waste time say lot word, if few word do trick

by subw00f

5/14/2026 at 8:14:36 PM

Because "money and physical things are conflated in our thinking" is simple enough to sound trite.

by kristianc

5/15/2026 at 12:59:14 AM

It's as if the author doesn't understand why various forms of money came to exist, and why there are disagreements over monetary ideas/matters.

by Rury

5/15/2026 at 12:23:32 AM

it isnt really though

a ton of countries have been selling real stuff for basically nothing to the states to get some dollars back.

i think canada is better off keeping potash and oil and copper and so on than sending it down south, and the chinese are better off using the manufactured goods than selling them for usd

by 8note

5/15/2026 at 12:28:52 AM

trading their goods and services for money brought nearly a billion Chinese out of extreme poverty so I'm not sure they'd agree

by kristianc

5/15/2026 at 1:38:47 AM

They did also exchange that money for machines and technology that made them more productive.

I imagine there are still products they want from the US.

by jurgenburgen

5/14/2026 at 8:00:23 PM

Haha agreed, but remember, it's posted on lit[erature]hub, not tech[nical]hub.

by SilasX

5/14/2026 at 8:58:06 PM

This article is a reminder to all of us programmers that there is a belief that is common among non-programmer intellectuals (especially the above-average-intelligence-but-not-genius types) but completely non-existent among skilled software engineers:

Abstraction is inherently dishonest.

If you're a good software engineer, you quickly build an understanding that abstractions are vital for detailed understanding of complex systems, but can leak or even fail entirely. Less quickly, software engineers build very good instincts at how to tell when an abstraction is leaking/failing (that's what debugging is, after all).

Outside software engineering, this is not a skill that is consistently practiced. As a result, you end up getting takes like this one, in which the authors figure out that "money" is an abstraction over "all productive work and assets" and that this abstraction sometimes leaks.

But because the authors aren't used to dealing with abstractions, they assume that the fact that the abstraction "money" leaks sometimes means that it's worthless and should be removed. In fact, the opposite is true: the abstraction "money" does leak (which can cause real serious problems), but in the cases it doesn't, it's essential to human flourishing in any economy more complex than "exchange bread for pelts"

by Bratmon

5/14/2026 at 9:10:37 PM

The first author is a professor of economics who seems to be some kind of socialist, but they readily admit that money is very useful. They're trying to get to grips with the nature of it. They're saying that some abstractions about money are better than others.

To come up with better abstractions, sometimes you need to strip away the abstractions and study what's being abstracted.

by skybrian

5/14/2026 at 9:36:47 PM

Apparently both authors would develop a better way to explaining and separating these things if they took some Systems Dynamics[1] courses. Everyone who has taken college level economics was taught that money isn't real (I mean the first money was owning a very large rock on a ledger where that rock might be at the bottom of the ocean. [2]) But what is absolutely real is a contract of labor or materials. Using numbers to allow you to trade contracts for wood and carpenters for a house and using tokens to represent those numbers is sufficient to create a more flexible market than just straight up barter.

[1] https://systemdynamics.org/

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/02/15/131934618/the-...

by ChuckMcM

5/14/2026 at 9:32:29 PM

Are you trying to tell me that the the book titled "Against Money" is not against money?

by Bratmon

5/15/2026 at 4:11:24 AM

Well, not in a simplistic way. He kind of fudges it:

> The title Against Money is trying to do a few different things. First, it highlights the distinction between the network of money payments and values, on the one hand, and on the other hand the concrete social and material reality that exists apart from them, and often in tension with them. In this sense, we mean “against” in the same way one might distinguish a figure against a background; by writing about money, we seek to clarify our vision of the social world that exists around, outside and in opposition to it. Second, the title announces our criticism of familiar ways of thinking, our challenge to the dominant view of money within economics. Finally, the title links the book to a political project that seeks to transcend markets and property rights as the organizing principles of society, and to imagine a future in which money no longer defines the scope and possibilities of our collective existence.

by skybrian

5/14/2026 at 7:35:00 PM

A friend of mine uses the term “coin sickness“ to describe somebody who would rather have money than material wealth. Someone who sees the brand of clothing but couldn’t identify quality fabrics or stitching.

by justonceokay

5/14/2026 at 7:58:24 PM

While financialized society is still standing, I'd much rather have money than material wealth.

Security and freedom, time, and well-being. Worth much more than another luxury t-shirt.

by whytaka

5/14/2026 at 9:47:35 PM

I think the point was that the poorly made luxury t-shirt has less intrinsic value than the well made generic t-shirt and the difference in the market values of the two is "coin sickness"?

by WhatsTheBigIdea

5/14/2026 at 8:10:44 PM

The "money vs things" framing gets sharper if you split "things" into two buckets: consumption goods (the luxury t-shirt) and productive assets (land, tools, an income stream, a paid-off house).

What you are defending isn't money as an end, it is the optionality a functioning financial system gives you: time, mobility, ability to redirect capital quickly. That dominates a closet full of brand-name clothing for almost everyone.

But it collapses in two scenarios most readers haven't lived through:

1. Currency stress, where the optionality is denominated in a unit losing real value faster than wages adjust. Hyperinflations (Weimar, Zimbabwe, more recently Venezuela and Argentina) compressed the trade to weeks; people who held land, working businesses, hard commodities, foreign currency kept their wealth.

2. Counterparty failure, where deposits, money-market shares, and bond claims turn out to be promises from someone who defaults. 2008 was a near miss; the bank failures of the 1930s were the actual outcome.

Steady state: you are right. Tail state: the opposite. Most US household-finance advice assumes the steady state holds forever, which is a strong assumption.

by cfgeorge

5/15/2026 at 9:09:06 AM

This blog post is founded on the mistaken assumptions that economists care or study money or real economic activity.

>If barter and money produced the same ends, then why do we use one at the almost complete exclusion of the other?

In one breath a neoclassical economist will tell you that the introduction of money is neutral to the economy, in the other breath they will tell you that money acts as a transaction cost saving lubricant.

So which is it? They can't be both true at the same time. In the second scenario money is a labor saving device that enhances the productivity of the economy, which is to say it is not neutral.

The answer is that economists make heavy use of linguistic sleights of hand. In the former "neutrality of money" is defined as the neutrality of a change in the stock of money, which linguistically implicitly includes a change from a stock of zero to a stock of some non zero quantity, but when you look deeper they only study the cases of going from non-zero stocks to non-zero stocks of money.

For neoclassical economists this is good enough. The problem has been dealt with and any further problems are caused by an unwillingness to adopt the sleigh of hand, but for the unfortunate and unenviable ones who cannot simply shut their brain down, those who keep thinking past this point, they notice an impossible to ignore problem here.

If money is a labor saving device that enhances labor productivity, then how is it any different from conventional capital that you can own, like a hammer? If I rent it out, it will net a return merely because of its labor saving properties, independent of the nominal value written on the bills. Given any interest theory that assumes money is neutral, the yield on money will be the neutral interest rate plus the yield from the labor saving device properties. Similarly, if I buy or sell it, there will be consumer or producer surplus.

Once you understand this, you will start wondering "how high is that surplus/extractable yield?". Let's arbitrarily decide that the holder of money is the "producer" and the income the "producer" gets from the labor saving properties is his producer surplus. The answer to this depends on the difference between the market clearing price and the production cost of the producer. The market clearing price here depends on the most expensive method of human labor organization that is necessary and capable of organizing production.

So yep, the producer surplus for money is the difference between the productivity of the economy with division of labor and the productivity of the economy without division of labor. When you look at how productive the division of labor is, you will notice that essentially 99% of the modern economy wouldn't be possible without it, which in turn means that the interest rate can be set so high that for a borrower there is no difference between the division of labor and no division of labor.

It's no wonder then that usury has been demonized for millennia. For the borrower, charging usury is the same as bringing the economy back to the stone age. It's priced as if there was no economy and you had to build the economy from scratch all by yourself.

So, why is the modern economy different? The reason is that the central bank acts as a middle ground between money and no money. The central bank can set an arbitrary interest rate that all banks can borrow from overnight. The policy range for the central bank has the neutral non labor saving interest rate as the lower bound, below which there will be inflation, this lower bound can be negative and also an upper bound, which is set by the labor saving interest rate above which existing money owners start undercutting the central bank instead. If there is a zero lower bound, the effective lower bound on the interest rate is 0% + liquidity preference.

Within that lower and upper bound, the central bank is free to undercut existing money holders. Banks that refuse to borrow from the central bank will be undercut by banks that are willing to do so, thereby resulting in an effective interest rate reduction throughout the entire economy which reduces the producer surplus of money significantly. The cost of doing so is that there needs to be a permanent supply of newly introduced central bank money with the interest rate it set, since the central bank doesn't influence existing holders directly, but rather threatens to replace them to keep them in line.

by imtringued

5/14/2026 at 4:20:11 PM

So many popups.

by SteveDavis88

5/14/2026 at 4:59:02 PM

I love reading articles in Firefox. uBlock Origin takes care of most annoyances, immediately using Reader View on load makes it them look the same.

by kspacewalk2

5/14/2026 at 5:40:14 PM

That popups has an annoying article. I think.

by dnnddidiej

5/14/2026 at 5:10:23 PM

My mobile browser gave up it was so bad. Shame, it seemed like it could have been an interesting read.

by deanputney

5/14/2026 at 5:33:47 PM

It looks good on Firefox For Android with the uBlock Origin add-on.

by rationalist

5/14/2026 at 5:28:54 PM

Works fine on Lynx (on Termux).

by card_zero

5/14/2026 at 5:25:03 PM

Only if you run javascript

by everdrive

5/14/2026 at 7:22:35 PM

Didn’t see any in mobile Safari with ad blocker.

by layer8

5/14/2026 at 5:45:38 PM

i turned off adguard on ios safari to see what you're talking about... oh wow! You really didn't overstate it.

In other news, my appreciation of the block lists i have configured in adguard just notched up a few more points!

by CraigJPerry

5/14/2026 at 6:31:55 PM

lol 11 comments on this article and all but 1 are about the popups

by paulpauper

5/14/2026 at 5:39:00 PM

I use Chrome for iOS. On human-hostile sites like that, I take the human out of the loop. I press the “hey Gemini, what is this page about?” button and read a clean version in an overlay window.

by kridsdale1

5/14/2026 at 10:24:51 PM

Real money is a thing, usually made of some mix of metals in fungible tokens with composition set by law. It serves as a flux, to make commerce easier to conduct by serving as a trusted neutral item of barter.

With the loss of this once common resource, and the imposition of a system designed to prevent savings and force investment into stock markets and other ponzi schemes, there are very few honest and reliable ways to save at the personal level.

The collective effects of generations conditioned to accept a gradual erosion of "money" have lead to a well engineered blind-spot that is preyed upon by the top 0.01%.

Real prices should be stable across years, even decades, and there should be negligible inflation, instead of a 2% target rate that is pushed on the public as "natural", "stable" and "safe". When real packages continue to shrink, and actual prices are notably higher than the official numbers, it greatly erodes the collective trust of society.

by mikewarot

5/15/2026 at 9:22:20 AM

Is saving with money in a system with a forced interest rate floor of 0% ever "honest"?

This will obviously produce a glut of savings, which in turn will either produce a glut of debt or a collapsing economy since money is necessary as a labor saving device. Money is basically a public utility that can be owned and whose public utility value can be extracted for personal profit at the expense of the system as a whole.

The stock market problems are a result of the need to endlessly substitute the captured money with new uncaptured money, which inevitably gets captured again, necessitating an endless stream of "uncaptured but to be captured" money.

I'm still wondering how its common knowledge that rent control is "bad socialism", but it's not common knowledge that price floors on the interest rate are "bad capitalism". It's basically the same problem.

by imtringued

5/14/2026 at 9:51:18 PM

Selected notes:

  Excuse me everyone, I have an announcement to make. 

  *ahem*

  Barter is back, Alan Greenspan was the devil, and the government is lying to you about inflation. Thank you, for your time.

It's crazy to me that the period TFA is talking about took place a generation AFTER the Volcker Shock and a decade after the initiation of Japan's Lost Decade(s).

>And yet, in many contexts, money payments are treated as equivalent to the thing they give claim to, both by economic theory and in our day-to-day language.

Huh. Swaps.

>If money quantities do not refer to some underlying physical quantity or value, what do they refer to?

Capacity to coerce (mind control).

>If these payments and values and balance sheet entries don’t describe any of the concrete objects around us, why are our lives organized as if they do?

Why, indeed.

by underlipton

5/14/2026 at 9:56:53 PM

[dead]

by hacker_mar