Real money vs. fake money

I think about money a lot because it’s part of my job here, but also because I always have. While cleaning out my closet a few months back, I found a stack of old college notebooks that contained the embarrassing things a 19-year-old reading political theory for the first time might write down—“WHAT IS FREEDOM UNDER CAPITALISM??????”—mixed in with endless pages of equations I had done and redone in the same tight, all-caps script. They were budgets: my weekly earnings with rent, groceries, and utilities deducted. I crossed them out and started over any time I picked up another shift, lost one, or had the front wheel stolen off my bike and had to replace it.
I still keep budgets, and still think about these things with the same mix of stoner abstraction and material practicality. Money, as I understood it then and still do now, was both real and not real. The expense lists are the real kind of money. Jeff Bezos is the fake kind, which is to say that there’s a certain level of wealth or number on a spreadsheet that’s more an idea than anything else. Last month, while tens of millions of people were applying for unemployment and burning through their limited or nonexistent savings, the Amazon founder’s fortune grew by $24 billion. His net worth now stands at $138 billion. What do you do with $138 billion? It doesn’t feel like a number. It’s a horizon—a money infinity—not a place. (This is also why deficits don’t matter.)

Money like that only gets treated like it’s real when people actually need it, as my colleague J.C. Pan pointed out this week. Bezos’s newly acquired wealth—which he will never spend, likely couldn’t if he tried—nearly matches the cuts now being threatened against public education, health care, and other core programs across the country. “Billionaires’ earnings on paper over the period of less than one month,” she wrote, “could have covered all of these programs, with money left over.”
Thinking about money and need in these terms—a redistributive calculus that moves individual fake money into a place where it can become real for millions of people—is very simple, which makes it seem almost stupid, which I think is the case for most true and fair things.
My colleagues Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene talked about some of those stupid and fair things this week on The Politics of Everything. They asked me and a few others to reimagine a post-pandemic economy that works better for more people: postal banking, a modern version of the Works Progress Administration, just giving people money. Can you imagine? Anyway, it’s a good episode. You should listen.
Talk to you later.
—Katie McDonough, Deputy Editor