Superphysics
Resource Mechanisms: Stores of Value
August 24, 2022 4 minutes • 783 words
Table of contents
In order to facilitate exchanges of goods and services, humans need a tool.
Historically, the tools for exchange were commodities:
Homer says that the armour of Diomede cost only 9 oxen, and that of Glaucus cost 100 oxen.
The following were the common instrument of commerce:
- salt in Abyssinia
- shells in some parts of the coast of India
- dried cod at Newfoundland- tobacco in Virginia
- sugar in some of our West India colonies
I am told that to this day, workers in a village in Scotland can carry nails instead of money to the baker’s shop or the ale-house.
These were exchanged based on volume or weight:
The following people trade by exchange:
- savages who have few merchandise
- civilized nations who have only two or three species.
The caravans of Moors who go to Timbuktu, in the heart of Africa, do not need money. They exchange their salt for gold. The Moor puts his salt in a heap. The Negro puts his gold dust in another. If there is not gold enough, the Moor takes away some of his salt, or the Negro adds more gold, until both parties are agreed..
Basing value on weight is really basing it on its material density, since denser bodies are heavier. This is really a quantitative way.
Money as a Store of Value
Gradually, as humans became more civilized, they chose precious coins as their tool. The preciousness is the qualitative way.
Coins standardized the value and prevented fraud:
Mints are institutions exactly of the same nature as the aulnagers and stampmasters of woollen and linen cloth. Through a public stamp, they ascertain the amount and uniform goodness of those commodities when brought to market.
The first public stamps affixed to precious metals were intended to ascertain the goodness or fineness of the metal.
This money system was used by the commercial system and mercantilism.
- This disrupted native modes of valuation and exchange of using commodities and weights.
Coinage was later standardized into silver, and augmented by paper bank notes and paper stock certificates. This allowed rapid economic growth because people could now increase money nominally by writing bigger numbers.
This manifests as paper assets and paper wealth that can be created or be made to vanish quickly, through:
- hyperinflation and financial crisis during the Mississippi Scheme
- stock bubbles like the South Sea Bubble
- poverty and inequality during the industrial revolution
These problems persist even today.
Why Money Causes Problems
If we plug it into our 5 Strata model, we find that it occupies the lowest stratum. This is because, as a reprsentative number, it is purely quantitative and not qualitative. This makes it very precise, but at the expense of other information.
For example, we can think of 3 tomatoes as either:
- 3 real, red, wet, juicy, shiny tomatoes, or
- This one has a lot of information that is expressed during our perception of them.
3and"tomato"- This only has 2 pieces of infromation:
3andtomatoes
- This only has 2 pieces of infromation:
And so quantitative resource mechanisms drastically reduce the amount of information in every transaction. This is done so that decision makers can make quick decisions through aggregated data, instead of granularly making decisions for each item.
Quantitative resource mechanisms drastically reduce the amount of information in every transaction
For example, assume you were a manager who had to fire 10% of your 100 staff who you did not personally know. To make a quick decision you would refer to some quantitative data like productivity or contribution to revenue.
However, you might not be aware that some of your staff are contributing in non quantative means to the success of your company.
Relying too much on quantitative information alone would therefore lead to bad decisions. However, qualitative information would be hard to define or cause information overload. Or it would incur a cost to collect.
The removal of qualitative information in favor of quantitative information fits the limiting tendency of the Negative Force. This is opposed to the Positive Force that makes us curious and urges us to get more qualitative information.
This is why large companies tend to rely mostly on quantitative information or metrics.
Society can incur the cost of getting that qualitative information about its people because the purpose of society is not to get a quantity of money. It is to raise the quality of life.
Supereconomics uses both qualitative and quantitative information to get a more accurate valuation of goods, services, and living things in a supereconomy.
Information overload can be addressed by artificial intelligence.
