Paul Tyson — The Metaphysics of Money

Another historical study of the concept of money and its implications, along with an account of a theological basis for the gold and silver fetish, that distinguishes the essentialist and instrumentalist approaches.

The reason why I have taken you into the exotic realm of Medieval economics is that it shows us how different metaphysical approaches to money can be, and it makes us aware that our Modern understanding of the nature and meaning of money is not a fixed and certain reality. We can now hopefully see that our astonishingly instrumental and abstract assumed metaphysics of money is one option amongst many possible ways of understanding the nature and meaning of money. Modern money is one way of thinking and acting concerning the relations between work, commerce and finance; it is one way of approaching the nature of finance and its (non) relation to wealth, morality, reality and power. Perhaps, even, the abstract and instrumental nature of our assumed metaphysics of money is deeply implicated in the horrifying pathologies of high finance?...

If we are to change this situation, we need to change the way we think about money, wealth and power. This is where the fundamental matters are that will determine our future.

We are not, of course, going to banish extortion or immoral instrumentalism just by having better metaphysics. Criminals, extortionist and abusers of violent power were as common and powerful in the Middle Ages as they are today. Yet if we do not appreciate the relationship between the prevailing order of wealth and power and the metaphysical assumptions which we all share when we engage in the use of money and the practise of politics, then the vital collective sources of our norms and of how power is sustained will be invisible to us. The main game is, indeed, a struggle for our minds. Plato saw this with characteristic insight. As long as we believe that illusions are reality, we are controlled by those who manipulate the collective illusions that structure the operational norms of the world of finance and power as we currently know it.

How do we get money tied to the realities of real human life so that it becomes a fair function of the actual production and distribution of real wealth? How do we re-introduce the idea that finance should be tied in some concrete way to the real world in which actual producing and consuming people live? How can we get finance to serve human (that is political) ends rather than politics facilitating financial ends for high flyers in investment banking? These are the vital questions for us today in the post-2008 world.

MMT proposes a price anchor that establishes the value of a currency to an hour of unskilled labor connects the nominal to the real in a way that involves human beings rather than a commodity like gold or silver. Chris Cook proposes an energy standard.

Yanis Varoufakis
The Metaphysics of Money – Guest post by Paul Tyson
Dr Paul Tyson | Honorary Associate Professor of Theology, University of Nottingham

David F. Ruccio — Class and essentialism

I have worked for over three decades in a theoretical tradition, born at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and associated with the journal Rethinking Marxism, defined by a revitalization of Marxian class analysis (in relation to the appropriation and distribution of surplus labor) and a critique of essentialism (in both methodology, such as economic determinism and humanism, and epistemology, including rationalism and empiricism). What this means is that we tend to see class processes as neither essentialist determinants of economic and social outcomes nor the phenomenal form of some essential cause but, rather, as the overdetermined cause and effect of history and the myriad—economic, political, and cultural—dimensions of society.

But we have never really looked at the class determinants of essentialist views of the world. As it turns out, Dacher Keltner (whose research I have discussed before, here and here) has (with coauthor Michael W. Kraus) done just that. And the results are fascinating.

What psychologists Keltner and Kraus (behind a paywall) find is that social class is correlated with both essentialist conceptions of class and beliefs in a just world—and that the belief in a just world, in turn, reinforces essentialist conceptions of class. In other words, they found that upper-class individuals (as measured by subjective ranking rather than so-called objective criteria, such as income) were more likely to endorse the idea, first, that social class is an inherent, stable, and biologically determined social category and, second, that society is fair and just relative to their lower-class counterparts. Those on the other end tended to view the world through a different, social constructivist lens, that is, the view that “social class is based on changeable, external social forces.”

Occasional Links & Commentary
Class and essentialism
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics University of Notre Dame Notre Dame

The essentialism versus constructivism dichotomy is extremely important logically, ontologically, and epistemologically, with implications for ethics and social and political philosophy as well, hence, philosophy of economics. Understanding this is central to understanding the foundational differences in many fields, including politics, social studies, and economics. So please ask questions if anything is unclear. There is no such thing as a stupid question.