Value is a thing of faith. Cash is physically worth nothing but paper, ink, and in the case of coins, metal. Sometimes, as in the case of the penny the metal is worth more than the value attached to the object; the copper in a penny is worth 1.5 cents approximately, but most of the times it is the reverse; a $100 bill costs about 50 cents to make. I won’t claim to be an expert in economics, but I do understand why some people argue that we should go back to the gold standard (whatever that means), or just get rid of cash altogether and switch to digital points as if life were a video games. I'm pretty sure we are much closer to actually doing the latter than going back to metallic standards.
In Time, comes up with an intriguing proposal about using our lifetime as -basically- cash. A cup of coffee costs ninety minutes of your life, a taxi to midtown a year. In this world the rich are semi-immortal, with a million years to spend, and the poor live day by day; spending most of their daily wages on sleep just so they can rest in order to earn their hours the next day.
In Time, comes up with an intriguing proposal about using our lifetime as -basically- cash. A cup of coffee costs ninety minutes of your life, a taxi to midtown a year. In this world the rich are semi-immortal, with a million years to spend, and the poor live day by day; spending most of their daily wages on sleep just so they can rest in order to earn their hours the next day.
