Throughout history, money has been mostly about trade and military conquest. Only recently has it been used as a tool of big government and social services. Not surprisingly, it does great with international trade where goods can be accurately compared and worths accurately estimated. It does not do so well with hard-to-value social functions such as education or health care where service providers cannot be objectively judged.
Teachers complain constantly about being "underpaid," becoming particularly embittered at what they perceive to be outrageous compensation paid to athletes and entertainers. However, the problem seems to rest largely in the fact that no one knows the value of an individual's education or those teaching. Objectivity eludes. We know that wealthy societies are generally well-educated ones, but who should get the credit and when? The athlete or the entertainer, meanwhile, is measured every day through ticket sales and changing franchise values without having achieved tenure. Is this fair? Money doesn't care about fair.
Of course there are other factors at work. Money has also reflected cultural male dominance where hunting and military prowess have generated power. Birthing, child care, health care, nursing, elder care, education, social work and the like have been functions traditionally performed by women. These functions are hard to monetize. They tend to present valuation difficulties, and they tend to pay less than more easily measured occupations.
We also pay for scarcity more than utility. Albert Einstein once observed, "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." Money is the embodiment of this sentiment. Indeed, the sinews of family and community are for the most part formed without money, yet they are vital to a functional civilization. Similarly, such life essentials as air and water have been notoriously undervalued.
Money is unpredictable and unreliable. It is subject to periodic crashes, panics and manipulations in diverse market sectors. And these are not necessarily accidental per se. It seems instead that they are the natural result of systems that often reward those individuals who take on extra risk, yet trust the public to bail them out when the going gets tough. While economic systems like predictability, people like to take risks and reap rewards. The cycle leads to private gains and public pain, as demonstrated by our current crises.
Unfortunately, money taps human eccentricities. I once heard Jacob Needleman observe, "Everybody is weird about money." There are no exceptions, not among bankers, lawyers, politicians, consumers, financial planners, spouses or chairmen of the Federal Reserve. In other words, the very people we trust to be sensible around money are also weird about it. Remember, even Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Barack Obama were once lads, with mothers, communities and thousands of years of tradition behind them. Why would they be better with it than everyone else?
Money requires special expertise and esoteric knowledge. Ideally, it would be machine-like in its operations. It would grow predictably and mechanically. In an ideal world, we could look five years down the road and trust that it would function with some certainty, just like crops, fishing waters or extractable natural resources. This would be of great help to everyone from public officials to individuals trying to plan for their lives. We could even prepare for bad years. Unfortunately, we know it doesn't work like that.
As we try to plan for our needs 20 to 40 years hence, we know we will encounter different economies with different employment situations. We won't know what that will mean. For the most part, the economies are out of our control. Yet we are asked to plan for our circumstances decades beforehand at the same time we are asked to understand complex financial products in the present. We're also asked to appreciate all the various individual risks we face, such as theft, incompetence, natural catastrophe, personal injury, legal trouble or simple moments of extraordinary stupidity. One thing is sure: Money is tough. It cannot be trusted to provide long-term security.
Although money is based on scarcity, fungibility and definable value, it is not inherently fair. That seems to be a problem for some folks. Neither does money care about unintended consequences, including metaphorical elbows to the nose or knees to the groin. As do natural forces, money forces blow through people's lives and communities not caring who gets hurt. Witness Detroit. Is it the workers' fault they trusted the engineers and marketers to get it right?
Perhaps money's most unfair aspect is that it requires scarcity in order to be effective. If there was enough money for everyone, no one would want it. Pricing would be impossible. The system would collapse. Yet it seems inherently unfair for some to have plenty and others not enough. Oh well.