social inflation

When you add more money to an economy the prices of things within the economy tend to rise. So if you have £1 today and it buys you a sandwich, and you then double the amount of money everyone has in the economy, soon you will need to spend roughly £2 for the same sandwich.

So money becomes less valuable as you increase the total amount of money.

We know this effect as inflation, but for my purposes here I’ll call it ‘financial inflation’.

My proposition is that as you add money to a society, the value of everything within that society correspondingly goes down too. I call this ‘social inflation’.

“The love of money is the root of all evil.”

Sounds like a Karl Marx quote doesn’t it? Well, it’s a quote from 1 Timothy 6:10 of The Bible. Not sure how the American pastors flying around in private jets while lobbying the US Gov to maintain their tax breaks manage to square that circle, but who am I to judge?

Fast forward a couple of thousand years from Tim, and the love of money is still in its ascendency. New heights reached each day, both inside and outside of the Church.

This wasn’t always the case. Usury was banned by the early Christian church and is still considered haram in Islam to this day. But usury is nothing compared to modern financial instruments. I wonder what Jesus would have thought of futures trading, or Timothy of synthetic CDOs, or the Prophet Mohammad of radioactive ape NFTs?

The reason gambling is haram, and ‘the love of money’ is condemned in the Bible, is not necessarily because it’s evil in its own right. It’s because it distracts people from living a virtuous life. Money can make people lose track of what is important.

As we come to embrace and love money more and more, the value of everything else is correspondingly diminished. And when I say ‘everything else’, to be clear, I mean you, me, our families and friends, humanity, all living creatures, the Earth, the Universe, existence and time itself. So yeah, a lot.

The media loves financial inflation. Graphs galore of bread, egg and energy prices going ever upwards. And then you’ve got the talking heads of people scared about whether they can afford to heat their home or buy enough food for the week. Suffering porn –  great newsworthy content.

By contrast there are hardly any public voices suggesting that perhaps our obsession with money has gone way, way too far. Or that our love of money is the primary cause for the way we’ve so heinously neglected our planet and each other. While this is not a million miles away from socialist dogma, most socialists in today’s media-vetted circuits would struggle to sound credible if they attacked money itself. So they don’t.

After all it’s hard to imagine a complex globalised society without a monetary system of value exchange binding everything together. I’m not really advocating the abolishment of money itself anyway. Just to Make Money Boring Again / Make Financialisation Haram Again, and demote money to a position of simple functional utility only.

I am not religious. But I’ve got to admit that religions have made a lot of important and astute observations about the nature of humanity, and particularly with regards to our fallibilities. I think the love of money is at the root of much evil.

I’m not a communist either, but the profound damage that our obsession with money is having on ourselves, our relationships with each other, and ultimately on our world is absolutely undeniable.

Money, as a medium of exchange, has always been by its very definition a means to an end. It’s just that by making money the focus of our entire society, we’ve forgotten what those ends should be.