Humanities are good for the brain too. As a Humanist (History) turned Software Engineer it’s been an edge my whole career. Humanities taught me reading and writing complexity in a way that’s surprisingly applicable in Software Engineering. While colleagues wasted their time complaining about how unintelligible some code was or preferred watching YouTube videos to learn some new tech, I was able to do that knowledge work way faster by just reading and understanding the code for what it was, and reading the whole documentation of the system/language/platform I use. This made me look like an expert on whatever tech we were using but in reality it was all from just reading docs and code.
The order of how money emerges is wrong and thus the premise that each step moves the trust higher in hierarchy is wrong.
It didn’t necessarily come from banter (see rai stones from yap island). Debt didn’t always come from currency (See Inca system of Reciprocity and Redistribution where there was no currency). Private Banks don’t always precede Central Banks (see Sumerian Temples).
I do agree with the argument that money is backed by trust. But I don’t think it’s inherently hierarchical. I think if anything, money and its diverse manifestations in currency are a complex graph where of course there are regions that exhibit hierarchical behavior (eg. Chilean bank backed by Chilean Central Bank that issues bonds and buys or sells US dollars). But for example I believe Crypto/Cigarrets in Prison/Silver/Gold/etc aren’t part of that hierarchical region.
> But for example I believe Crypto/Cigarrets in Prison/Silver/Gold/etc aren’t part of that hierarchical region.
Many early chinese kingdoms had coins as money and they were based on the rarity of the metal. And they began turning to shit when they started creating coins out of thin air, with hardly any rare metal in them: some kingdoms literally lost it all once they began hyper-inflating their currency by creating way too many coins (and at times there were so many worthless coins they couldn't even store them anymore).
I think coins made of metal are definitely part of the hierarchy of money.
And arguably Nixon "temporarily" ending the dollar's convertibility to gold in the early 1970s is an experiment for which we'll soon see the eventual result:
It’s one of the main reasons I don’t use mainstream social media. It has always irked me how on the one hand people are unknowingly being used as laughingstock, but on the other hand users are unknowingly wasting their attention on making a platform billions, and making some questionable people millionaires.
> This was fuelled by what is known as moka, a system of competitive gift giving, where you give someone in your tribe goods like a pile of pigs and shells, and they are then obligated to give you back more later, and you them more again after that. Whoever gives the most, publicly, becomes the big man.
This reminds me of the Reciprocity and Re-Distribution system in the Inca Empire. There wasn't a system of currency or markets. But there was an Ayni (mutual aid) and Minka (collective work) system, paired with a Mita system: work done for the Sapa Inca which was in return "paid" by the Sapa Inca in feasts, food and goods/gifts. This was all glued together by the concept of Ayllu (family), where these obligations were established through family connections and of course the Sapa Inca had marriage connections with subordinate chiefs.
I myself can't stop thinking about the Inca Empire Economy and how it shows in reality that currency is not about the paper nor number nor symbols, and more about the "I owe you"s that move in the economy.
I’d recommend reading the late David Graeber’s “Debt” which does a good job illustrating exactly what you described, which is how currency is at its core an IOU
To expand the sibling comment. In principle the money would reflect IOUs the general public owes them. But also following this logic the way I see it is they accumulated their money was by getting more IOUs through: people employment (being able to command a big pool of work and get a cut of IOUs from it), arbitrage (exchanging lower value IOUs with higher value IOUs), or simply stealing (eg. siphoning government resources).
This was the intention. Originally it was more clear but I moved the other half of the story to the conclusion where it's even more evident that the stories were a way to build rapport and establish some kind of credibility.
I like these abrupt switches that tie-in later. Kind of like a b-roll but in text.
To be honest what happened was that I tried to write a short introduction with both stories from university, they got way too long, then wrote the writing advice, and then tried to mix them both into a coherent post, then noticed the analogy of the trunk was a good anchor and remixed the article even more around that, and this is what we got. Still I enjoyed writing it.
There's always hope for a Part II. Maybe on rhetoric; which is what I interpreted "The second most important thing" to be about. But the concepts introduced there are entirely new to me so I may be off.
Yes please add an obvious method to go back to your homepage - I also attempted to click the circles to do that because there was no link or anything :) I was interested in checking out more of your writing and I had to change the URL to do that.
Your site isn't the only with this "feature" that I've seen lately, not sure what's up with this pattern.
Yep. The main reason I didn't further pursue History academia was that it was too much of a monoculture with a bit of nepotism sparkled all over it. Not to discard everyone there of course; there were some awesome courses and faculty. But there's no way I was going to dedicate my life to such environment with so little in return for it.
But I do agree ethics is a big one.
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