The Metaphysics of Money

[nebris]

From The Archdruid Report
Wednesday, September 30, 2009

To mention money and metaphysics in the same sentence, as I did at the close of last week’s post, is to invite any number of misunderstandings. The hoary habit of thinking that walls off philosophical questions in a ghetto of abstractions apart from the world of ordinary life gets in the way

Comments

So you're saying . . .

[peristaltor]

"Cogito ergo vast sums" is wrong?!?

[roadriverrail]

What can be measured is only a subset of what can be known, and what can be known, at least in any given situation, is only a subset of what exists

To which my only response is-- "Oh, yeah? Prove it."

The sort of bad logic that treats quantitative measurements as the only things that really exist is pervasive in the sciences, but its grip is even tighter on those fields of study that want to claim the prestige of science but can’t quite pass muster. Economics could be the poster child for this noxious effect. Down through the generations, against the sound advice of its best practitioners, economists have consistently treated the one thing in their field that can easily and consistently be measured with numbers - money - as though it was the one thing that matters.

Actually, economics used to be considered a subset of politics, and it was a 19th century project to try and adopt the language of science so that it could ride the coattails of the modernist gravy train.

Money is a unit of measurement, so it’s inherently easy to