Over the last little while, various items relating to money have been bumping around my head. In our culture, that is probably not very unusual, but I started to wonder what, if anything, they had to do with each other. Perhaps it is nothing, but here they are.
After the earthquake in Iran (a year before the recent tsunami) countries worldwide pledged $1.1 billion. By the time it actually arrived, it was only $17.7 million. (See here or here). So after the tsunami, was the mad rush by the various countries to get listed in the headlines as the world's best neighbor just a publicity stunt? Will the money actually show up where it's supposed to? And if not, can I pay my mortgage with that kind of money (ie. the kind that gets me credit but doesn't actually come out of my bank account)?
Remember conspicuous consumption? During the recent inauguration, certain hotel packages in Washington, DC were going for between one hundred fifty thousand and one million dollars (not including tips or taxes). The deals include your personal pseudo-Secret Service escort, a chauffeur, a butler, wardrobes, Rolex watches, and diamonds. Another thing I noticed was that at the parade all the fur coats came out of hibernation (someone in the street referred to it as the "dead animal parade"). So, in conclusion, a lot of rich people descended on DC, and for what it's worth, I didn't see any homeless, destitute people celebrating among them.
A childhood memory: I remember imagining at one point exactly how it would work if our family suddenly dashed off a letter to the government, saying that we hereby seceded from Canada and our little acreage was now going to be an independent country. We could grow our own food in the garden and pump our own water from our well. We could set up a little booth at the end of the driveway to check people's papers when they came over to visit. We could station some of us kids out in the trees along the side of the yard to survey the borders and protect our land with a two-pronged national defense strategy involving our pellet gun and a slingshot (a strategy that has served Canada well for many years, I might add).
A question remained about what we would do for our official currency. That was one hitch. We kids had a lively economy thriving within the walls of our home. The way I saw it, these were our options: we could restrict trade to bartering (which was already in common use among us), adopt the Canadian dollar (or, more usually, the Canadian penny and nickel), or print our own. We could have started using or developing more accurate economic measures and indicators like the Genuine Progress Indicator instead of deeply flawed but almost universally accepted measures, like the GDP.
(Or maybe we would have become an economy whose only currency was love. People wouldn't need to have money because everyone would look out for everyone else's needs and share freely with each other. Maybe we would have become a model to other small countries, and then maybe some mid-size countries would feel the love. That's true, probably not, but it's my daydream, so back off.)
And finally, just in case anyone is getting frightened or excited by recent rapid changes in the value of the dollar, an article to let us know it doesn't matter, because dollars are so pass?: "The gold standard of sterling is long forgotten and now the supremacy of the greenback has been surpassed. The world has a new global currency - airline frequent flyer miles, which have a greater total value than dollars, euros, pounds or yen."
After the earthquake in Iran (a year before the recent tsunami) countries worldwide pledged $1.1 billion. By the time it actually arrived, it was only $17.7 million. (See
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