About Cam



gribbly.org* is the online home of Cameron Brown. Creative director, designer, musician, mediocre programmer, caffeine addict. Seattle

This is where I accumulate interesting links... If you're looking for coherence or context, you're in the wrong place!


2011-08-07

Two Views of Money

Monitoring an online argument, it occurred to me the participants had different models for what "money" is:

View #1 is unit-centric. It's interested in the total number of units in the system, and considers imprecise accounting a hard failure of the system.

View #2 is flow-centric. It's interested in the patterns and rates of flow. Units are interesting as the size of a reservoir, but imprecise accounting is just a kind of sloshing in the system, not that interesting. A soft failure, maybe.

I'm seeing this failure to communicate more and more, now that I've labeled it for myself.