Gongol.com Archives: December 2023
December 31, 2023
It took several thousand years of organizing before human civilization came up with coined money around 1,000 BC. It's hard to do anything that looks like exchange without some medium for counting, and coins are a reliable solution. But coins, in order to be durable, have historically been made from the ranks of materials with some intrinsic value. Durability itself is a valuable characteristic -- which is at least part of the reason it costs 11 cents to mint a quarter and 2.7 cents to mint a penny. ■ But even after coinage came out, it still took another two millennia before paper currency came into being. Paper currency has advantages over coinage, to be sure, starting with production costs: It costs 2.8 cents to print a dollar, or almost exactly the same as it costs to mint a penny. ■ It is believed that China's Song Dynasty was the first government to introduce a paper currency and make it the only legal tender. Paper money invites two high-risk forms of abuse, from two different sources: Counterfeiting and inflation. The authorities have every reason to use the long arm of the law to discourage counterfeiting (which is how we originally got the U.S. Secret Service). ■ Inflation, on the other hand, is prevented by discipline, market forces, and improved knowledge. The United States abandoned (rightly) the use of an asset-backed currency a long time ago, so the discipline has to come from a combination of political independence and public-mindedness on the part of the Federal Reserve. Market forces weigh in on a minute-by-minute basis (just search the news for "Market reaction to the Fed"). ■ But on this millennial anniversary of paper currency, we ought to celebrate the considerable progress that has been made in the study of macroeconomics -- and the huge impact that improved knowledge has on overall human well-being. Make no mistake about it (and the Federal Reserve doesn't): Poor management of the money supply made the Great Depression far more painful than it should have been. ■ We've had multiple enormous challenges to the world economy in the last 25 years, and there has definitely been economic pain along the way. What hasn't been celebrated (quite as much as it should have) is just how much the improved knowledge of economics has reduced the pain that could have been. A lot more remains to be learned before the 2,000th anniversary of paper currency rolls around.
Re-humanization one day at a time
The one New Year's resolution that would leverage more good than any other would be simple to describe, but require a great deal of conscious effort to implement. It asks (only, but also all) this: That every day for the entire year, each of us would choose to pause for just a moment -- ten or fifteen seconds -- to thoughtfully consider the complexity and richness of the inner life of just one other person. ■ We face significant challenges in the year ahead: Artificial intelligence is able to mimic human behavior like nothing we've ever seen before, raising thorny issues about how it should be treated and about how our habits of using AI might change how we treat other human beings. We see wars continuing with staggering death tolls. We see government oppression and food insecurity and unreliable and unsafe water supplies affecting millions, and it's hard to avoid reducing other people to numerals. ■ But if Rabbi Abraham Skorka, who co-wrote a book on interfaith dialogue with Pope Francis (before he became Pope), is right, then the only really durable way to break down conflict is by humanizing the others around us. ■ If everyone stopped everything every day to ponder the inner life of everyone around them, the world would grind to a halt. The gas station cashier cannot stop everything to "dialogue" with every person stopping in for a Mountain Dew and a candy bar. ■ But if one person tried to ponder the richness of the existence of just one other person encountered in their own life every day, that would be more than the capacity of a 737 after a full year. And if everyone did the same thing, it would be a profoundly different world. ■ De-humanization is the root cause of almost every one of our most sinister troubles. No one commits a war crimewithout first reducing the victim below human status. Most atrocities are the same. Even crimes and lesser injuries often require objectifying the other person. That's a habit that can only be broken by replacing it with something better. The vastness of the universe is too much to behold at all times, but it's worth considering from time to time. The same goes for the richness of the human universe.
