I came, I paid, I conquered. Or something like that. Maybe more Veni, Venmo, Vīctus sum (or that’s what Deepl translate gives me for “I was conquered” at the end.)
I am not an economist, so I have no answers to the questions I’m going to ask here. I seriously don’t understand the mechanisms of costs, why prices have gone up so much and how we seem to be living with so much debt (personal and national) just about everywhere.
Here’s the naive, uneducated way that I understand the world. You make something necessary, like clothing (of those “basic necessities: food, shelter, clothing”). Clothes have inherent value and we need them, so we should pay a lot for them. Except we don’t today because we mass produce, over produce, and underpay the folks who make clothes (all the way down the line from those producing the cotton/wool/linen/synthetics down to the person sewing them together).
We could still have very cheap clothes and pay the folks making them a living wage (because we’ve often outsourced production to places that are less expensive for the workers to live). Instead of a $5 t-shirt (using dollars here but we could also just say “unit of money”) we could pay ten. Sometimes I pay what feels like a decent sum and feel virtuous, but I don’t think that translates back very often to paying the workers sewing the clothes together more money. (I just used an LLM to look up which companies try at least: Patagonia, Vaude for my usual stock of colored t-shirts that I wear just about every day. Maybe they’re better than others? Or at least they have a reputation for making an effort.)
So anyway, naive me understands that you make something and you sell it, and from that you earn “an exchange medium” (money) that you can trade in for other things you want or need.
What I don’t get is why providers of some unnecessary services (bankers, insurance sales people) get sooooo much money, and other necessary ones get so little. How did that get so off kilter? Clothes are much more necessary than those incomprehensible banking products that twist the same sum of money around from one place to another so that it looks like it’s worth more.
Anyway, this whole discussion is because we paid some insane amount for coffee the other day. Three people shared one cold drink and each had a coffee and we would up paying around 30 (units of money). We can “afford” it but salaries for many professions haven’t kept up with those sort of prices. I also forgot my wallet, so I had to use my phone app to pay. We don’t have Venmo here but something similar. So Veni, Venmo, Vīctus sum.
We will skip this particular restaurant in the future, now that we know. Veni, vidi, non redibo (Deepl Latin again for “I won’t go back again.”)
I don’t know where we’re going with all this. I’ve learned Stein’s Law: If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. I just hope that it stops without hurting too many people.
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