Money

Humanity’s second worst invention—right after the internal combustion engine—is money.

Imagine what a better place the world would be if money had never been invented.

In the first, place, there would be no billionaires; that alone is enough to make the case, but that’s not all.

If there weren’t any money, then no one would have to work some crummy job just to earn it.  This isn’t to say there wouldn’t be any ditch-diggers or roofers or people who clean out porta-potties; people would still have to do those things; it’s just that there would be other incentives or maybe a system where people would rotate into those jobs: rock star one month, sanitation engineer the next.  Human beings have figured out how to schedule 32 major league baseball teams while simultaneously making room at their stadiums for the occasional country music concert; it shouldn’t be a problem to manage the arrangement of job shares for an equitable division of desirable and undesirable occupations.

Besides, if money didn’t exist, plenty of jobs that are currently considered desirable no longer would be.  No one really wants to be a hedge fund manager, for instance, for the sheer pleasure of manipulating numbers on a computer screen; it’s only because doing so affords one the opportunity to endow concert halls and museums in one’s name or to populate one’s superyacht with supermodels and gym rats.

If it wasn’t about making a lot of money, plenty more people would prefer to be janitors or farmers; chances are, it would be all that difficult to divvy up jobs so all the necessary work of having a society could be taken care of.

Some will contend, of course, that without the motivation of having to earn a paycheck, that people would only do what they want to do.

But if you ask me, that’s a feature, not a bug.

After all, no one is paying me for writing this, are they?