cross-posted from: https://thelemmy.club/post/12591808

  • Jared Bernstein, Joe Biden’s Chief Economist, faced difficulties explaining money’s workings in a documentary or Finding The Money,’ despite his role.
  • He stumbled through concepts, highlighting the confusion around government money printing and borrowing
  • Bernstein, who is head of the US Council of Economic Advisers, is not formally trained in economics and appeared bewildered in the clip
  • dead [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    5·
    2 months ago

    Marx defines money in chapter 3 of capital. Here’s an excerpt, better to read the whole thing.

    These historical causes convert the separation of the money-name from the weight-name into an established habit with the community. Since the standard of money is on the one hand purely conventional, and must on the other hand find general acceptance, it is in the end regulated by law. A given weight of one of the precious metals, an ounce of gold, for instance, becomes officially divided into aliquot parts, with legally bestowed names, such as pound, dollar, &c. These aliquot parts, which thenceforth serve as units of money, are then subdivided into other aliquot parts with legal names, such as shilling, penny, &c. [10] But, both before and after these divisions are made, a definite weight of metal is the standard of metallic money. The sole alteration consists in the subdivision and denomination.

    The prices, or quantities of gold, into which the values of commodities are ideally changed, are therefore now expressed in the names of coins, or in the legally valid names of the subdivisions of the gold standard. Hence, instead of saying: A quarter of wheat is worth an ounce of gold; we say, it is worth £3 17s. 10 1/2d. In this way commodities express by their prices how much they are worth, and money serves as money of account whenever it is a question of fixing the value of an article in its money-form. [11]

    https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch03.htm