I had an insight into money this autumn that strikes me as profound. When I try expressing it to others, the reaction is a polite, “Of course, so what…” so maybe it is profound just for me in the same way discovering that 1+1=2 is profound for a child but is no longer profound for adults. After all it is simply a consequence of money being a symbolic means of economic exchange.
Being symbolic, money has meaning only to people. Another way to say it is the only things that ever get paid in economic transactions are people. In other words, all money flow is to salaries and income.
Standard budgeting categories had clouded my awareness. For example, if I was building a bridge, a certain amount of my expenses would be salaries for the workers. Another part would be for equipment and materials to build the bridge. If I stop there, I am left with the idea that only part of the money flow goes to people. Much of it goes to “natural resources”.
But if I follow the purchase of, say, the concrete, I find that the money I earmark “for concrete” is not “for concrete”. It is for the salaries of people working in concrete plants, for the profits of people who own the concrete plants, for gasoline and equipment and electricity, for the purchase of other materials needed for concrete. Similarly, I can then follow back the part that goes “for gasoline” and find much of it going to salaries and profits for those who own and work the oil companies and for those who own title to the land under which the oil is found and the rest going for equipment and such. And if I follow that part which is for equipment, I find it going to the salaries and profits of those who mine iron and process it into steel and transform steel into machinery.
Whenever I follow the flow of money, never will I find money reaching the land or the other species (timber trees, corn, fish) that make the economic process possible. Never will I find money being used to negotiate with the Earth itself what it wishes to contribute to the economic flow.
It is like studying energy flow in an ecosystem and realizing that all the work happening on Earth (the winds and waves and forests and flying birds and diving whales and moving continents and water cycles and nutrient cycles) derives from electromagnetic energy flowing from the sun and nuclear energy and gravitational forces emanating from the planet. A simple truth underlies a complex diversity.
So it is with money. Money flows only to people. Money can never talk to the Earth. It only talks to people because only people listen to money’s symbolic speech. People can converse, through their actions, with the Earth. Farmers talk to the land when they plant a cover crop or do contour plowing. One can pay farmers to change the way they talk with the land. But the money goes to the farmer, not to the land. Money never repays the Earth for what it gives to the economic system. Only human actions (which includes the action of self-restraint) can do that.
A political implication of realizing that all money flows only to people is that, just like energy flows within an ecosystem, there is no waste. (Well, technically there is if one drops a penny down the gutter or have some paper money burn in a fire.) The money always flows to someone who is willing to receive it and, eventually, pass it on to someone else in exchange for something. So all the political talk of “eliminating (economic) waste” is very relative. What actually is being talked about is shifting who will get paid for doing what. One can look at a $600 toilet seat as waste. But none of that $600 went to the toilet seat or to the machine that made it or to the Earth that provided the materials for it. It all went to people who then exchanged it with other people. A stock broker is more likely to receive some of that money if the toilet seat money flows to a rich person; a grocer is more likely to receive some of that money if it flows to a poor person. But none of the money is wasted.
What can get wasted in money-driven flows is parts of the biosphere and parts of the human spirit. So, rather than talking about monetary waste, the deeper issue is “In which direction do we want our culture to move?” The next question becomes “Which economic actions actually move us in that direction and which actions move us away from there?” The answers to these questions then lead us to the challenge of shifting the flows of money so that less of it nourishes the undesirable actions and more of it flows towards nourishing the desirable actions.
Which, if I want to, can lead me back to charter schools. One of my hopes for Chrysalis (and charter schools in general) is that they help reallocate the flow of money so that a higher percentage of the public expenditure on education makes it (with hardly any strings attached) to the classroom teacher.
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