Mathew Forstater — Alan Watts got it. So did Alexander Del Mar

Alan Watts, best known for bringing Eastern philosophy to Western readers, had a better understanding of money than most economists. In an essay entitled “Wealth versus Money,” he writes that money is a unit of measurement, like acres measure units of land. You can run out of land, but you can’t run out of acres. Here’s the passage from his essay:

'It was just as if someone had come to work on building a house and…the boss had said, “Sorry, baby, but we can’t build today. No inches.” “Whaddya mean no inches? We got wood. We got metal. We even got tape measures.” “Yeah, but you don’t understand business. We been using too many inches and there’s just no more to go around.”'

This is similar to Alexander Del Mar’s distinction between a unit of measurement and the thing it measures. Del Mar wrote that, “Money is not pieces of merchandise any more than…minutes are pieces of clocks.” Or Warren Mosler’s admonition that money is how we “keep score,” and the idea that we can run out of money is as absurd as the idea that the scorekeeper in a football match can run out of “points”: Peyton Manning threw another touchdown pass? Sorry, no points left, we can’t increase the Broncos’ score!

Mathew Forstater
lifted from FaceBook

Great find!