What Is Money Anyway?
A quick guide on where it comes from and why that’s important.
In a perfect world there would be no need for money. If humans could work together in the John Lennon envisioned sort of way, then all things could be attained without having to account for any of it. Unfortunately, that’s not reality.
The Tragedy of the Commons is a problem in economics that describes how there will always be some people who simply do not follow the plan. In other words, there will always be people who screw it up for everyone else.
Now, if we could easily identify who those people were, then it would be simple to round them up and send them off to some island somewhere, right?
Wrong.
The situation in the Tragedy of the Commons largely exists because of a lack of information or trust, or both.
Imagine All The People
Pretend that 10 people live by a pond that is plentiful with delicious and nutritious fish. Each day all ten people take exactly five fish for themselves. For a while this works okay, however, over time one of the people starts to notice that it seems as if there are not as many fish as before.
Now, rather than coordinate with the others, this one person instead decides to take…
