When you are not able to find a satisfying Metaphor to describe and encompass a phenomenon, then you haven't understood it yet.
For example, electric current is often seen through the metaphor of the flow of a river.
This metaphor is indeed correct because this is exactly what happens with it: instead of having a flow of molecules of water, you have a flow of moving electrons; but this is fundamentally identical.
Now, do you know an exact metaphor to describe "Money"?
I searched the web, I googled "metaphor money", I read papers and blog posts but literally, no metaphor was enough encompassing and at the same time simple enough in describing the nature of Money.
Between others, I encountered the following: Money as a Growing Tree, Money as a Commodity, Money as a Renewable Energy, Money as a Growing Material etc...
The least wrong and the most comprehensive one was for me Money as a time-to-deadline, that I discovered in ribbonfarm.com, the blog of Venkatesh Rao a researcher in Decisions Science at Xerox. But this is still not satisfying enough.
This metaphor is indeed correct because this is exactly what happens with it: instead of having a flow of molecules of water, you have a flow of moving electrons; but this is fundamentally identical.
Now, do you know an exact metaphor to describe "Money"?
I searched the web, I googled "metaphor money", I read papers and blog posts but literally, no metaphor was enough encompassing and at the same time simple enough in describing the nature of Money.
Between others, I encountered the following: Money as a Growing Tree, Money as a Commodity, Money as a Renewable Energy, Money as a Growing Material etc...
The least wrong and the most comprehensive one was for me Money as a time-to-deadline, that I discovered in ribbonfarm.com, the blog of Venkatesh Rao a researcher in Decisions Science at Xerox. But this is still not satisfying enough.
It's obviously crucial to possess a correct metaphor of Money, given its ubiquity, role, and preponderance in Society.
And it's amazing how many metaphors of Money there can be out there;
So I wonder: if Money has not got a single correct metaphor, maybe it's because "Money" is a given (i.e. a foundation, a pillar) of our developed societies and you cannot express Money by something more fundamental than Money.
Or Maybe it's because, as Robert Kiyosaki underlined, we are trained in our educational system not to think about what Money is, hence our pain and struggle to think about it correctly.
Or Maybe it's because there is nothing in our daily layman life that behaves exactly or very much like Money ; and I think this is the case.
Indeed, I believe the correct metaphor can be extracted from Computer Science and I think I've found it.
Economists like to say that Money allocates Resources. True, but that does not constitute a metaphor.
So, for the lucky ones that read this article, I expose it here for you a little bit. But hush... Keep it for you for now. Otherwise Ben Bernanke will bust you^^.
The metaphor I found is as follows.
Our Society can be viewed as a big Computer; we live in a Computational World that has its Master and Slave Devices, Peripheral Devices, a Motherboard, a CPU etc... and an Operating System on it ... and Money must be Instruction; Money quantifies Computation.
Got it?:) Much more detailed to come in the next Post soon!
