Cards, Economics & Sci-fi

[steve B]

Sticking with the sci-fi scenario. There's a lot of people here, so we'd need something really plentiful as a base currency. I'd think 1988-90 donruss could cover it, and everything else could be described as multiples of that.

I'm sort of picturing 88 donruss as societies paper pennies. Yeah, I know that's way over valuing them, but Inflation was mentioned.



As to the other stuff, the concept of what backs our currency is a pretty slippery one. (Opinion follows, I'm not an actual economist nor did I stay at a holiday inn express, but I think I've got the overall concepts down) The Gold standard is simple, but at some point there isn't enough gold to back enough money to make it all work.

So what our money is based on and backed by is a combination of things.
First is the existence and value of the entire country, every building bridge, road, card, car, everything. This is the most important aspect.
second is the government says it's worth something that represents a particular ammount of someones labor. This is a bit less major since the value of someones time varies so widely as does confidence in the government. But some of that labor produces the stuff with a more stable value.

On a limited scale we all work with money in roughly the same fashion. If you read an old enough bit of money, it reads like a check. And a check is self issued currency backed (hopefully) by your bank account. If it could be trusted enough, a blank check for $1 would actually circulate as a dollar. In current practice, that just doesn't happen, but in theory it could. That's similar to the gold standard.

Now if you write checks based on your future earnings and enough people blieve you'll continue to make money.... That's more like our current system.
It's also sounding a lot like credit, and it's essentially what we're doing with credit cards. Way back the slips had to be banked and processed manually, and were actually worth something between the time the sale happened and the time they were banked.

Ok, so that's a bit over simplified, but I think it's pretty close overall.

Steve B