Then trillions of dollars were extremely inefficiently allocated to the task of creating better worlds and a much better world could have been created with that money instead, costing lives in the process.

Having noble goals doesn't immunize you from accounting.

I recommend you read "Money: The Unauthorized Biography [0]" You'll never look at money the same way again. Money is not a commodity even though we treat it as such. It certainly is not a finite resource.

Plenty of money gets created everyday for thing far more stupid than trying to save the world. Look at how much money has been created (and will be spent) for no good reason at all in the current cryptocoin bubble. The massive capital gains are going to be cashed out and spent somewhere, creating market distortions, making people who contribute nothing insanely wealthy. Money is not sacred. Better we use it to try and save the world than to treat it as if it (and the market) are some all-wise, ever-perfect allocator of human and natural resources.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F1W0DAO/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

I already have an alternate view of money. I look at generalized wealth more directly, with money merely an somewhat interesting special case that is less special than most people think it is. (I tend to think even economists pay too much attention to currency. Not that they pay attention only to currency, but that they pay too much attention to it.) The simple truth is that if you bend the economy towards creating wind and solar and cutting down hydrocarbon usage and all the other things we have to do, all the people doing that stuff as the result of a hoax aren't doing something else that would have been more useful.

Money isn't the issue; finite time and resources are.

My point has nothing to do with how terrible capitalism is or any silly bete noirs like that. It is simply the observation that if we waste our time on A, we can't be using that time to do the better B. It sits at a level of fundamental truth far below debates about economic systems or the nature of money.

I wonder where the theory that government spending is simply free actually comes from, that somehow when the government spends money (or enacts regulation or taxes, same thing) that the cost is somehow magically not that everybody has to work more and/or harder to achieve those things.

But it's sure becoming a popular theory.

Also: I think what you're describing might be the broken window fallacy: http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fal...

>all the people doing that stuff as the result of a hoax

Are you saying that human-caused global warming is a hoax?

Actually.. Original money was just a highly marketable commodity. Salt, spices, gold, cigarettes in prison. I highly suggest a better biography of currency. Maybe something authored by one of those pesky Austrians.

The book you want is David Graeber's, but it will not confirm austrian leanings, nor the history of money you present above.

It's not fair to just say go buy someone's book without a single supporting argument. Drop some wisdom on me, man.

The tl;dr is that the commonly told origin of money, right back to Adam Smith, is a-historical assumption that is contradicted by archeological evidence.

The a-historical account is that money was developed to make barter more efficient. This is not what we see in the records from Sumer, and there is similar evidence in the other locations where we know writing arose. Before the neolithic revolution societies economic structure was largely based on social ties and a sense of reciprocal behavior: a sort of informal communism. As sedentary agriculture lead to the development of temple complexes and cities, debt and credit records replaced these. Money was not developed until nearly 2k years later. Barter was actually uncommon in the ancient world and was typically reserved for interactions between strangers such as traders that had traveled long distance and had no social ties to one another. Coinage in particular typically arose as part of a complex that involved raising armies and funding them via taxation.

The commodity theory of money is a-historical, and not what "original money" was.

It's a great book, though Graeber has little restraint in taking pot shots at economists, which might provoke some readers to defensiveness.

So you're saying the first money was essentially "social credit"? I don't disagree with the spirit of the argument, but your good-will credit in your community doesn't have the properties we associate with currency such as fungibility and divisability.

If they used a formalized series of IOUs that allowed for the long term planning of capital then I'd be more inclined to call it currency. But sounds like an interesting book, may have to give it a read.

I'd strongly recommend the book. It's a little verbose in places but that's also because Graeber makes and justifies his arguments in detail.

And yes, it's the latter: formalized debt records that meet the 3 criteria we commonly define money by.

The author addresses this. I suggest you read the book before making assumptions.

I gave a one line rebuttal. Could you not do the same?

And none of it means anything if we all die because the planet cant sustain us any longer.

S/He's responding to "What if it's all a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?" therefore in this scope there is no GW

quite a nice little set of rhetorical positions you've constructed for yourself

I have heard this line several times before, and it is the environmental equivalent of "What if there is no God, and we are being good to each other for nothing."

It completely ignores tradeoffs. General environmentalism has been very aggresively anti-nuclear. In a world of CO2 caused climate change, it has to rethink that opposition. Another example is with diesel engines. There is a tradeoff between NOX emmisions and efficiency (and thus CO2 emissions). What you decide the tradeoff to be, is influenced by how much you thing climate change is a problem.

Another example is endangered species. If we really are going to have catastrophic global warming, then maybe we don't try as aggressively to protect all species from habitat destruction say from building hydroelectric, wind, solar power plants in Africa.

There is no tradeoff.

Reducing waste (CO2, methane, heat, whatever) increases profits.

Not for the entrenched interests, obviously. Happily, everyone else who's been paying their externalized costs (taxpayers, consumers) benefits.

There is only so much you can reduce waste though. The internal combustion engine is limited by thermodynamics to about 50% efficiency, we are already reaching >40% in production engines. There just isn't much more waste we can get rid of. (electric cars bring up a different sets of limits, though probably higher)

Fewer trips, fewer miles/km, lighter vehicals, vehical sharing, etc.

Optimize the whole system. Localized optimization leads to decreased overall efficiency.

"Reducing waste (CO2, methane, heat, whatever) increases profits."

That's a broad generalization and far simpler model than what the poster is referring to.

Yes, riding a motorcycle instead of an SUV decreases all emissions. This is the simple base case.

However driving a diesel SUV decreases CO2 but increases NOx wrt to a gasoline one. This is the higher-order effect.