Blue Planet #4: Employment and its Consequences
From: campbell@ufomind.com (Glenn Campbell, Las Vegas)
Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 14:15:30 -0700
|
The fourth chapter of "Blue Planet" is now available in early draft
at: http://www.ufomind.com/people/c/campbell/guide/employment/
(The excerpt below is reprinted with permission.)
Blue Planet: An Alien's Guide to Living on Earth
By Glenn Campbell
Chapter 4: Employment and It's Consequences
To explain employment to you, it will be necessary to condense
centuries of economic theory into a short and simplified summary.
There are many subtleties of finance and monetary policy that we do
not have time to cover here, but we can at least explain the
fundamentals. To interact successfully with humans, you will have to
get a job. Why? For one thing, your host family will be reluctant to
support you when they think you are old enough to care for yourself.
For another, you will need a job to expand your travel options. Having
a steady income can greatly increase the quality of your
transportation. accommodations, food and entertainment. In short, you
will need a job to make the money to buy the freedom to do the things
you want. Of course, this begs the obvious questions: What is money;
what is freedom, and what do you really want?
What is money? Money is a credit for work you have performed, or for
work that you will perform in the future, or work that you promise to
perform and never do but that someone pays you for anyway thinking
that you will. Most humans think of money as the paper bills and hard
coins that people pass back and forth in retail stores, but in fact
those physical devices have no value apart from what the buyer and
seller agree they are worth at the time of the transaction. Money is
nothing more than a gentlemen's agreement among a group of humans
about the relative value of the products of labor. Like other forms of
human language, money is subject to the whims of perception, and its
value is constantly being redefined. If you say, "dollar," it will
mean different things in different circumstances, depending on local
resources, needs and human desires.
Money is an intermediate medium in the trade of goods and services.
Let's say that you have accumulated too much clothing while someone
else has too much food. If you get together with this person and trade
some of your excess resources for theirs, both of you might benefit.
This interaction is called barter. Money takes barter a step further
by allowing you to trade your resources or labor for symbolic scrip --
dollars, for example -- which you can later trade for food or whatever
else you want. Money is a popular medium of exchange because it is
portable and easy to store, requiring in some cases only a few bytes
of computer memory. Even if it is worth nothing by itself, people will
kill, steal or work very hard for money because of the many goods and
services it can purchase. While it doesn't solve all of your problems,
money can give you more options for dealing with them and at least
supply your physical needs.
You do not have to understand all of the subtleties of money to get a
job. All you have to know is what you need: You need to eat, right?
(That's what your body is saying when your stomach makes those funny
noises.) Stores and restaurants offer food, but you have to pay for it
using the coins or paper bills that people think are worth something.
The easiest way to get those objects is to work. Work is some form of
directed labor on behalf of someone else that they think is valuable
enough to give you currency for. To accept employment from someone,
you do not need to know where they got their money or what their
ultimate motivation may be. You do not have to agree with their
judgement or philosophy because you are being paid to pursue their
goals, not yours. Right now, you can't be picky about where you work
because you have to eat soon before your body collapses.
Continued at:
http://www.ufomind.com/people/c/campbell/guide/employment/
(c) Glenn Campbell, 1999.
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
| UFOMIND MAILING LIST |
| Supporting the World's Largest Paranormal Website |
| www.ufomind.com Moderator: Glenn Campbell |
| |
| Archived at: http://www.ufomind.com/misc/ |
| Submissions to: ufomind@lists.best.com |
| "unsubscribe" (in body) to: ufomind-request@lists.best.com |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
Created: Jun 1, 1999
