The social influence of money

2 min readJan 10, 2022

Don’t talk about money, they say. Most people adhere to this and know correspondingly little about what money is. Even fewer people know what its two sides are: prosperity and asociality.

Prosperity springs from the store of value that hard money, such as the one, which (gold and) Bitcoin provides. Like batteries store energy, money stores the value of our working time.

Without a monetary store of value, prehistoric men were forced to save their working time by means of reciprocity [1]. If a hunter-gatherer had more food than he needed, he shared it with others members from his clan. The latter returned the favor as soon as the former had little or no success in his own endeavour to find food.

In 1968, John Yellen was able to observe reciprocity among the indigenous Kung people. In 1975, he visited the Kungs a second time. The community had discovered money. This gave him the opportunity to study the effect money had on them. It weakened social cohesion. This newly introduced store of value reduced the collective need to save and promoted individualism. Thus, money makes people more antisocial [2]. It forces each individual to care for himselves.

On the other hand, money promotes progress. Like a measuring tool, money indicates each individual’s contribution to the well-being of his community. Seen from this perspective, prices reflect the attractiveness of services and products, while an individual’s standard of living reflects his contribution to society. This transparency leads to desirable products and services finding imitators, fuelling competition in their turn. In this light, progress is guided by the “invisible hand” of the market, according to Adam Smith [3].

Since the invention of money, we have been chafing at both sides of money: prosperity and asociality. Our goal must be to reunite them. In my next posts, I would like to address how Bitcoin might help achieve this goal.

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