Post
Topic
Board Economics
Re: What is special for a currency
by
myrkul
on 09/05/2013, 20:52:10 UTC

3. The economy activities are driven by currency, not demand. People have all sorts of demand, but unless they get currency first, they will not easily get their demand fulfilled, even others have the product they want, their product might not interest others. In today's society most of the goods/services can only be purchased with currency, not through barter.  This had some influence on people's behavior, they use the currency as a standard measurement of value.
And this is just plain wrong. Economic activity is not driven by money. It's made easier by money, but it's driven by demand. What you have to realize is that even if you're buying something with money, you're still using barter. Money is just a universally accepted barter good.

I remember that I played a game called SimCity many years ago, in that game you are the mayor start with 50,000 dollar, you have to build the road, build the water pipes, provide electricity and plan different district as residential district/business district etc... And there will be people moving into the city and work there, and give you some tax income

Due to limited budget, I have to start with building small and functional blocks and slowly accumulate more income through tax and upgrade the size and capacity of the city little by little

But the first thing I did, is to use a tool to modify the start budget to be 1 billion dollar, so that I can build whatever I want. In fact, after removing the limit on the currency, I can drive very large government projects quickly like highway, tunnels, airport, nuclear power plant and modern minicity, all with fiat money I created by typing 0s, and many people moved into this modern city and build many other things they like, every thing looks great, the only limitation is time when a new technology is available, and the amount of police I have to set at each block to reduce the criminal rate

That's my experience, the more currency you have, the more economy activities you can drive, this is just a common sense, do not need any second thought. Just like when a big customer arrived, everyone will be able to make big money. They never thought that the money itself will lose value unless they all get access to that newly created money at the same time



See, there's your problem: you're basing your economic theories on a flawed (by necessity, top-down) simulation.

It's a game, not an accurate model.