essays
Reflections on Money
by Kianga Daverington
September 1, 2020
This essay, written by Kianga Daverington of Daverington PLLC , was originally published in January 2020. The piece as been condensed for clarity.
Money is not a physical object like a coin, a bar of gold or a dollar bill. Money is at its core, a technology. It is a human invention designed to solve a specific set of human problems. Consider money, perhaps, in a new way. Think of money as a system for capturing time.
Time is the one thing we each have that is absolutely finite. We are born, we die, and the dash in between is all the time we have.
Think of production. We can usually produce more of some good by adding people to a task (also known as “WORK”). But we are still constrained by time. Whatever we produce is still limited by the amount of humans that can be organized to go into that production. Each of us possesses a limited amount of time available to us individually, so we need to convince or coerce others to add their time to ours if we want to achieve more than we can alone.
Out of this imperative, nations are born.
The most important quality of any particular form of money is how well it preserves the value of time over time. Can you buy the same amount of stuff or more in the future than you can buy today? If yes, congratulations - your money is accumulating time for you and future generations while you relax on the beach. If it takes more and more of a unit of money to buy the same amount of time in the future, well then I’m sorry, but that unit of money is getting weaker and weaker. It’s losing value or said another way – it’s losing purchasing power. The longer you hold it, the less it buys.
In a way, by purchasing goods and services, you are purchasing time. Every product and every service requires time to make and time to deliver - your time and/or someone else’s. The price therefore reflects the collective value of all the time put in. Money is a way we exchange time and move it around from where it is valued less to where it is valued more.
This is where prosperity comes from. It comes out of how well a society, collectively and each person, spends its time. How much time is spent creating and making? How much time is spent consuming? If we make more than we consume, we have something left over called wealth. If we consume more than we make, we are left with debt. You can’t consume what you don’t have, unless someone extends credit. Where does this “credit” come from? Basically –it’s made up.
Too much credit or debt eventually collapses and everyone is mixed up in the collapse.
If we understand that a unit of money represents a unit of time, and we understand time is limited, then a unit in a system of money with unlimited supply cannot have any value. This is the problem we are facing today with the world’s money supply. The supply of money in the world is increasing exponentially as central banks create money by giving loans to national governments, which is where our money comes from.
Our entire world financial system is a powder keg of debt.
National currencies today are known as fiat money, a currency without intrinsic value that has been given its power to be used as money by a government that says it is money by regulation. Wikipedia says, “Fiat money does not have use value, and has value only because a government maintains its value, or because parties engaging in exchange agree on its value.” Well said, Wiki.
A government’s job of maintaining the value of its national money boils down to a confidence game. On what basis do the people who use that government’s money believe it has value?
What happens to the money and those who hold it when the foundation of that belief begins to crumble?
essays
Mass Incarceration is Making Us Sick
by Sandro Galea, MD, MPH, DrPH
June 5, 2018
Sandro Galea is a professor and Dean of Boston University School of Public Health. His book, Healthier: Fifty thoughts on the foundations of population health, was published in June 2017. Follow him on Twitter: @sandrogalea.
Ours is a culture of incarceration. There are currently about 2.2 million people locked up in the US. Our incarceration rate is higher than any other country in the world; despite being only about five percent of the world’s population, Americans comprise 21 percent of the world’s prisoners.
Our astronomical rates of imprisonment, and the extent to which they disproportionately affect populations of color, have rightly made mass incarceration not just a legal issue, but a moral one. Less talked-about, however, is its status as a threat to health, not only the health of those incarcerated, but all our health.
Mass incarceration undermines health on multiple levels, harming individuals, families, and communities. This harm is felt most keenly by the incarcerated themselves. Prisons represent a dangerous convergence of threats to physical and mental health. The cramped environment of prisons, and the unprotected sex and injection drug use that occurs within them, can increase the risk of exposure to diseases like TB, viral hepatitis, and HIV. At the same time, reviews of the evidence suggest that rates of mental illness are higher in prisons, with many people who might once have been institutionalized diverted into a system that is not designed to cope with their mental health needs.
Heightening disease risk is not the only way incarceration undermines quality of life for those it affects. Upon release, many former prisoners are denied access to basic civic resources like housing, social welfare benefits, and even, in some states, the right to vote. By excluding these people from the resources necessary for smooth reentry into society, we make them vulnerable to the poor health that comes from a lifetime of marginalization and economic hardship.
About 2.7 million American children have an incarcerated parent. The problem touches so many kids that, in recent years, Sesame Street introduced a character with an incarcerated parent, to teach children strategies for coping with this difficult reality.
What are the effects of incarceration on families? According to Pew Research Center data, more than two-thirds of incarcerated men were employed before serving their sentence, and about half had lived with their kids before going to prison. Over half of imprisoned parents were the main earners supporting their children. When these breadwinners are removed from the household, the wage-earning burden falls on the remaining parent, with all the challenges that come with this responsibility, including having less time to spend with the child. It is worth noting that these problems do not always disappear when the incarcerated parent returns. Incarceration reduces earning power, keeping the financial pressure on families indefinitely.
Finally, incarceration can make entire communities sicker. In 2015, I worked on a study that found that people who live in neighborhoods with a high rate of incarceration are likelier to meet the criteria for a major depressive disorder than those who live in a neighborhood with a lower rate. Evidence also suggests that incarceration may increase rates of violence and infectious disease within communities.
For all the distinct health hazards associated with incarceration, its capacity for causing harm is even greater than the sum of its parts. The "prison-industrial complex” has turned incarceration into a kind of contagion, spreading physical hazard, mental distress, and social breakdown within communities and within prisons themselves.
In the short-term, however, we need to rethink the legal structures that perpetuate it; in particular, the mandatory minimum sentences that have sent so many nonviolent drug offenders to prison and fueled incarceration rates to such an extraordinary degree. This is especially critical as the Trump administration mulls increasingly punitive approaches to solving the opioid crisis, including strict enforcement of drug laws, and even the execution of drug dealers.
At core, we are faced with a simple choice. We can choose to view our criminal justice system as merely a means of punishment or as a first step on the road to rehabilitation. If we choose to discard the incarcerated, keeping them out of sight and, as much as possible, out of mind, their health, and ours, will continue to suffer. If, on the other hand, we choose to empathize with the incarcerated, and work toward making them once again fully productive members of society, we can create a system that is indeed truly corrective, and a society that is far healthier.