Connecting the dots
One evening I found myself thinking about something we use every single day without ever really asking what it is: money. The deeper I sat with it, the stranger and more interesting it got. Here's a small thought experiment that started it.
Suppose there is only one $20 bill in an isolated town, and Alice has it.
- Alice pays Bob $20 to fix her bike.
- Bob spends the same $20 at Carol's grocery store.
- Carol pays David $20 to mow her lawn.
- David pays Alice $20 for dinner.
By noon:
Did anyone cheat? No.
The important part is that money isn't consumed when it's spent. It's less like fuel and more like a token that records ownership as it passes from hand to hand.
The bicycle repair still exists. The groceries were delivered. The lawn was mowed. The dinner was eaten. Four real, physical, irreversible things happened in this town. And the same single $20 bill simply changed owners four times to make all of it happen.
So, what is money, really, for you?
A term economists use for what happened in this story is the velocity of money: how many times the same dollar changes hands in a given period. It's one small piece of a much bigger question about what money actually represents, which I'll keep sitting with.
More about who's writing this is on the About page. If this got you thinking, or you'd push back on any of it, I'd genuinely love to hear it: sharma.rujjwal [at] gmail [dot] com.
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