[FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

[Russ Abbott]

Here is the *Cliff Notes* introduction to Money
<https://www.cliffsnotes.com/study-guides/economics/money-and-banking/functions-of-money>
.

Money is often defined in terms of the three functions or services. Money
serves as a medium of exchange, as a store of value, and as a unit of
account.

Money's most important function is as a *medium of exchange* to facilitate
transactions. Without money, all transactions would have to be conducted by
barter, which involves direct exchange of one good or service for another.
The difficulty with a barter system is that in order to obtain a particular
good or service from a supplier, one has to possess a good or service of
equal value, which the supplier also desires. In other words, in a barter
system, exchange can take place *only* if there is a double coincidence of
wants between two transacting parties. The likelihood of a double
coincidence of wants, however, is small and makes the exchange of goods and
services rather difficult. Money effectively eliminates the double
coincidence of wants problem by serving as a medium of exchange that is
accepted in all transactions, by all parties, regardless of whether they
desire each others' goods and services.

As a medium of exchange, I think of money as something like a ruler. You
can use it to measure things, to compare the measurements, and to exchange
things for tokens of units of such measurements. Certainly, such a
measurement is not a complete description of the thing measured. Is
claiming that a measurement of a thing is equivalent to the thing itself
what you are referring to as reduction? I doubt that anyone would take that
position. So if you are arguing against that, I think it is something of a
red herring. No one seriously takes such a position.

Still, money is extraordinarily useful for facilitating exchanges that
would be very difficult to arrange otherwise. Of course, if it's a
complicated exchange one generally needs more than a ruler. That's why we
have contracts, laws, etc., to spell out the additional details. I
certainly agree with you about that. But I still don't see how a complex
society can get along without something like a money-like ruler as a way to
establish basic comparisons as at least the starting points of many if not
most exchanges.

-- Russ Abbott
Professor, Computer Science
California State University, Los Angeles


On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 9:21 AM uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> Using wooden chits *and* US dollars limits overly reductive conceptions of
> money. It's fine to play word games and point out ambiguity in the usage of
> the term "money". But it should be clear that, like with languages, having
> diverse types of money is less reductive than 1 type of money. I'd no more
> want to rid the world of Yen than I'd want to rid the world of, say, Farsi.
> Here lie many of our disagreements about hooking one nation's money to
> another nation's money.
>
> Options are contracts. You can trade contracts without money. We do it all
> the time with, say, "quit claim" deeds. While the overwhelming majority of
> these trades use money, my claim is that money isn't *necessary*. Of
> course, it may be effective and efficient.
>
> This conversation is about the accumulation of capital and UBI as a
> band-aid to help maintain a society under the tendency to accumulate
> capital. In that larger conversation, reduction to a singular, grand
> unified measure like a single money, like USD, washes away the variation in
> ways to store value. Storing value in Yuan, as opposed to Euros, actually
> means something (at least Putin thinks so). Similarly, storing value in a
> .25 acre plot of land with a fairly maintained building on it is different
> from storing value in gold. Although they can all be *thought of* as money,
> only a capitalist does so. The rest of us think, say, our espresso machine,
> is different fundamentally from our pickup truck.
>
> On 5/10/21 8:22 AM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> > As you say, your alternatives are "money writ large." So how does that
> eliminate money? It just changes its form.
> >
> > I don't understand how options further your position. How do you trade
> them without something like money?
>
>
> --
> ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ
>
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