| Mnementh said: Yeah, you are right that money is a pretty bad indicator of economic value. But thing is, it is among the best we have. We could measure work (in hours for instance), but that would result in a less automated economy being more valuable than a more automated one - which can't be right. That is the reason GDP as measurent stuck as much as it did. Because we have pretty much no better indication. |
The problem with using money to measure economic value is that it's very easily manipulated by changing the supply of fiat currency out there. We don't want more of money, we want more value for our money out there so a UBI does not fundamentally change the mechanics of the game ...
We have to ignore the idea of money for a moment and look at our economy at a very low level to break it down into a simple supply and demand model. Gold for an example is always assumed to be in a fixed supply but it's demand is not so it keeps increasing in value relative to the other goods or services because of it's increasing demand. The issue here with using money or any other form of currency in this instance is that they seemingly cannot properly capture or embed the changing relativity in value between the differing goods or services ...
No matter how much everybody wants it, we truly can't fix the value of money to anything out there so GDP as a measure of productivity is not so cut and dry. If we only had half as many services or goods out there but the same amount of cash in the next year would you argue that the productivity is still same despite showing that the GDP was also the same as last year's ?
