The Makeup of a Dollar
Three-tenths LABOR, Five-tenths TECHNOLOGY, Two-tenths PROMISE.
The left 3/10ths are Labor-derived value
The right 5/10ths are Technology-derived value
The last (middle green) 2/10ths are the Promise of the Future.
[There is a large image below where you can read the details more clearly.]
Kendrick Lamar asks and states in his poignant album To Pimp a Butterfly, “How much a dollar cost.”
How much a dollar cost. While the song is about deception, there is little more deceiving than what money goes to sow and on what money is poured to grow.
GDP is by grand consensus senseless [1], and yet it persists to be merri-go-rounded. Measuring “things that can fall on your boot” seems a bit antequated in 2020 where most of the labor force has a boss who is an app.
So what’s the makeup of a dollar?
What ratio is industry? What ratio is mining? What ratio is publications? What ratio is real estate? What ratio is before women have the right to vote?
Three-tenths LABOR,
Five-tenths TECHNOLOGY,
Two-tenths PROMISE.
The Makeup of a Dollar
LABOR
The three columns on the left are LABOR,
These columns roughly demarcate: Slave labor value in infrastructure, then the abundance and relative increase in purchaseable goods and options with the Industrial Revolution (WW1), and the booms of WW2 are there in red, but somewhat thin. Shifting a war economy to a consumer economy does not yield as much value as laying infrastructure initially, but does increase value as the number of purchaseable goods and options for consumers increases.
TECHNOLOGY
On the right there are three columns described as TECHNOLOGY,
The values from military technology are evident in our cellphones: GPS and the very existence of QUALCOMM are side-effects of applied military technology. The next column, “Wholesome Tech,” adds great value and continues to do so, slowly eating alive the rest of the dollar’s makeup. “Software is eating the world,” as Andreessen would say.
We have the “Magic Money” column which is Printingpressonomics, invoked when the appropriate Federal Reserve Divinations have been conducted and all signs are good-to-go. My strongest idea here is Guaranteed Progressive Income, which will be the subject of an issue to come.
Right now the strategy (3 May 2020) is to dilute the current makeup with printingpressonomics, and hopefully in the settling of the dust our economi(es) can make some real value, to tamp down the loose chaff of historical inertia.
Because notice that a large segment in the middle of the currency, that does not fall into LABOR nor TECHNOLOGY is “The Promise of the Future.”
And in all money there is an oft-overlooked property that I have yet to find a counterexample to: commitment.
A dollar represents
Previous labor (infrastructure I can use today),
Previous manufacture (goods I can purchase today),
Previous harvest (consumption that can happen today),
Current transformational potential via labor,
The commitments of the whole system, culminating in the printing press.
Currency: A Series of Coercive Transformations Based on Primal Necessities
The author is very skeptical of anything that tries to redefine currency. Currency is a deeper force of trade and often a series of coercive transformations based on primal necessities. Cleary, there is some contradiction with the “inventedness of money” in the last column on the bill above that shows Dollar Makeup, and while it cannot be helped with any central issuing authority that there is overcorrecting both leftward and rightward and leftward again, it can be seen that the main constituents of the bill in majority composition are forces of inimitable value. Wrought from wrangling with creativity and satisfaction of needs.
Humanity cannot determine economics any more than humanity can determine hunger or thirst. Which is a mixed ratio of power. The issue is not prediction of needs, but satisfaction of needs, which is why premeditated allocation of resources is typically less efficient, it requires knowledge of the future, which is as predictable as ones’ appetites in the aggregate.
[1] GDP by David Pilling and the Growth Delusion The World Economic Forum provides “Hours of Sleep” as a useful alternative measurement to GDP, which is a deplorable offloading of responsibility onto others at best, and laziness that gladly accepts the falseness of the GDP at worst despite a long narrative ranting on the shortcomings. If you are going to rant, I recommend providing a solution to the problem, and not just a problem. One is scientific, the other is complaining. Of course, the quality of investigation and offerings by both The Economist and the World Economic Forum have dramatically declined. I think it’s the destiny of anything that puts Economics in its name to fall victim to its own tautology, that we are doing well because we are right, not because of impersonal causal forces linking together. In a way, it’s like naming your science lab the “Amazing Science Lab.” Suddenly, the amount of actual science done there plummets. “We keep saying ‘science science’ but nothing happens, what gives?” By far, the worst side-effect of studying only Economics is that one’s view is naturally based in assumptions of limitation, as addressed in Limitation and Unlimitation and will be discussed more thoroughly in issues to come.