> Your savings account's number is totally detached from accurately representing value. It's mostly a representation of where you were born

This could also be true because the number of dollars in circulation is "just bits on a disk" that politicians can manipulate for various reasons.

Someone can work very hard and save their earnings, only to have the value diluted in the future. Isn't that also a delusion?

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komali2 18 hours ago | parent [-]

> Someone can work very hard and save their earnings, only to have the value diluted in the future. Isn't that also a delusion?

Yes, it is.

It's one of my pet peeves about the cryptocurrency movement vs neoliberal institutional types. "Bitcoin is juts bits on a disk!" is always answered with "well, dollars is too!" To which the institutionalist can only say, "no, that's different." But really, it isn't.

What the cryptocurrency people get wrong is that replacing one shared delusion with another isn't a useful path to go down.

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dagss 16 hours ago | parent [-]

Unless you do substinence farming, you would not last a month without "shared delusions" in place to make sure farmers supply you with food, getting nothing in return except a promise that they can go somewhere to pick up something someone else than you made in the future.

Money isn't "only bits" it is also an encoding of social contracts

You use the word delusion like it also includes a) things everyone fully agree only exists in people's mind as intersubjective reality (no deceit going on really) and b) things you depend on for your survival.

You talk like getting rid of "delusions", as you call them, is a goal in itself. Why? It is part of human technology. (Just like math, which also only exist in people's minds.) Humans have had contracts since we were hunter gatherers in groups...

I would recommend Yuval Harari's "Sapiens" for you, you would probably like it. It talks about the history of "shared delusions" as you call them, as a critical piece for development of society.

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komali2 11 hours ago | parent [-]

> would recommend Yuval Harari's "Sapiens" for you, you would probably like it. It talks about the history of "shared delusions" as you call them, as a critical piece for development of society.

Already read it. Counter: read "Debt, the first 5000 years" by Graeber for, finally, a non- "Chicago school of economics" take on the history of trade amongst humans.

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dagss 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Thanks for the tip.

Just to be clear, I agree the money abstraction is not working particularly well. And that in the age of computers something that is more directly linked to the underlying economy could have worked better. But what needs to replace it is a better and improved "delusion", not a lack of it.

	▲	komali2 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But, why? Regarding your farmer example, there are examples throughout history of farming that fed many without the involvement of currency or the paying off of debt. Take a look into syndicalized Spain if you ever get a chance (~1936-1939). Farms were collectivized and worked on by volunteers, distributions done by need with some bookkeeping to track how many people were in certain regions. Worked pretty well until the communists decided it needed to be centrally controlled and kicked out the anarchists! Everyone always starts every future speculation assuming capitalism, or at least, currency. Isn't it worth challenging these core baseline assumptions? At the very least, the other ground is well covered, so we might come up with a little more interesting.