Money is Socially Stored Energy

Jim Mason
4 min readJul 23, 2021

It’s distributed through social grids; can we distribute it more equitably?

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

“Lucky, lucky, lucky me
I’m a lucky son of a gun
I work eight hours and sleep eight hours
That leaves eight hours for fun”
(Milton Berle / Buddy Arnold)

If we are ever to solve the problem of equitable wealth distribution, it may help to understand money as a form of stored energy. Like electrical energy, it is created by conversion from other forms of energy/matter (Cryptocurrencies essentially involve direct conversion of electricity to a new kind of money), and it is spent by conversion back to other forms of energy/matter, including, but certainly not limited to, electrical energy.

Unlike electrical energy, money is not distributed through physical grids, but through social grids. Similarly, money is stored in “social batteries”, not physical ones. Unlike physical energy, which can neither be created nor destroyed physically (only converted to other forms of physical energy or matter), money energy can be created and destroyed socially.

We humans don’t need money as a primary source of energy, just as we don’t need electrical energy that way. Our primary energy requirements are chemical (oxygen, water, food) and material (including clothing and shelter to help keep our body temperatures stable). But we often do need money as a social means to meet our physical energy requirements.

Fairly soon after we discovered how to generate, control, and store electrical energy, we developed electrical grids to distribute it, so it could be shared and used widely. Rural electrification has played a big role in reducing the discrepancy between the availability of electricity in small communities compared with its availability in larger cities.

We have yet to invent comparably effective means to reduce disparity in our distribution of money.

Our physical needs as human animals are fairly uniform and easy to understand. Each of us has limited needs to receive daily energy and limited means to produce it. Our emotional needs vary more, including our motivations to expend our daily physical energy capacities and our inclinations to hoard stored energy…

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Jim Mason

I study language, cognition, and humans as social animals. You can support me by joining Medium at https://jmason37-80878.medium.com/membership