Financial Crisis update: The Reality of Money

Remember the days when you used to get your pay in a little yellow envelope?  I remember counting what I’d earned as a checkout-chick, putting bits aside for things I wanted or needed, and eagerly taking part of it down to the bank to put into my passbook savings.  I handed it over, and watched the numbers grow.  I could open it up anytime and see how I was doing, and how much further to my next milestone amount.  It was exciting.

Fast forward to today.  There are no paypackets anymore.  We’re all forced to have our money deposited directly into an account.  What that means is, we work for one company, but never see any money from them.  We do nothing for the bank, but they’re the source of all funds.  There’s no longer any visible link between doing work and getting paid.  Sure we know they’re linked, but in reality nothing supports that knowledge – the source of money is the ATM.  And the boffins in government wonder why everyone’s so casual about taking out more debt?  Why would we be, when it doesn’t seem any different to just withdrawing our pay? It’s all just slips of paper coming out of a machine in the wall.

It gets worse, though.  Never seeing the cash that comes from our hard labour, these days the whole concept of money (and work as well) is rapidly losing its credibility.  After all, it’s just numbers on a piece of paper, and we handle similar pieces of paper several million times a week.  What makes it any different, or more special?  Added to that is how easily we can get extra ‘numbers’ added on: just sign a piece of paper and forget it, after all you never ‘pay’ anything by handing money over, you just see deductions from those numbers on that mysterious balance sheet.  So long as the cash keeps spitting out of the wall, none of it is real.

For that matter, it’s no wonder savings rates are through the floor, either.  You put money in, and it transmutes into those meaningless numbers on a page you get sent once a month.  Where’s the excitement of seeing your new balance?  Of watching the numbers gradually grow as you hand over your cash each week, fortnight or month?  You don’t even have to hold it in your hand to do it – just punch keys on a screen and it moves it in or out.  Again, there’s a dissociation of the two.  There’s no motivation for saving, except an abstract concept of ‘should’, and a vague link to some numbers on a screen or a monthly piece of paper.

Putting aside any pre-conceptions for a moment, imagine if you tried to train a rat to push a lever by putting feed pellets into a slot on the other side of the box, which would only deliver one pellet at a time, but had a reserve balance depending on how much it pushed the lever.  Does the rat see the reserve balance?  No.  Does it get pellets at any time, regardless of whether it’s pushed the lever or not? Sure, most times.  So how on earth is the rat supposed to figure out that pushing the lever a lot of times is a good thing?

To restore faith in the reality of money, we need to let people experience the reality of money.  At the very least make employers give kids up to 25 the option to get a REAL pay-packet and see the value of what they’ve done, and get the banks to offer passbook savings accounts again, so they learn to save.  Heck, offer them to everyone so I can see the reality of climbing numbers and experience the joy of watching my savings grow again…

What do you reckon? Have we undermined money by taking away the ways we learn about it’s reality and value?

Tagged as: Automated teller machine, Economic, financial crisis, money, reality, Saving, Savings account, value