Imagine you have all the gold or bitcoins or dollars in the world, but instead of being on earth, you are the sole inhabitant of say Titan (one of the moons of Saturn).
Question: What can you do with all that gold, bitcoins and dollars?
Answer of course is absolutely nothing. There is no one else on Titan who would take any of these valuable things and do something useful for you. They are completely useless in a world without other people. The idea behind looking at this extreme example is simply to bring out the unsung fact that money is more about people than assets.
Continuing with our example, let’s add another person for company in our story. Now we have two persons at Titan instead of one. If survival requires doing N work items, having two people means they can divide the work among themselves. If one of the person dies, it means more work for the survivor. Clearly, the other life matters. Even if the other person does only 5 out of 100 things, his death increases work for our original sole inhabitant. There is no need to be fair in this world of two persons. Fair is nice and all, but every hand reduces the work per hand, even if by minuscule amount.
Looking for the perspective of an individual, the money he has is simply a measure of favours he can call upon others to do for him, in exchange of favours he has done to others. The beauty is that favours are transferable. Do good for person P and get something in return from person Q. Looking from the perspective of human kind or perhaps network of people who trade with each other (say a country with a common currency or even adding other countries with which one’s country trades), money is a measure of interdependence. Like blood brothers, it would be nice to call each other money brothers or brothers by interdependence.
A cup of coffee in a shop, is the product of work done by everyone else on the planet, not just by farmer or roaster or waiter. Each one of us gets to do what we do because someone else somewhere is doing something that we don’t have to. We don’t notice it, but when one person dies, many businesses lose one customer, making them slightly expensive. Someone has to do more work because one person is missing. In the grand scheme of things, with billions of people and millions unemployed, these small loses of life seem to play minor role, but make the population small enough and every loss will show its true and measurable impact.
In a way, billionaires are the biggest losers in the world because they have given so much to the world but have no idea what to get back from the world for what they have done. Inequality and that too highly concentrated has one nice side effect: it doesn’t reduces the world work force. 99% of the people still show up at work and do something useful for someone. If world was more equal and 60% of the people had enough money that they don’t need to work, we would only have 40% of the population working and supporting the rest of us.
Pursuit of money is then simply the pursuit of solving problems for others. As long as we as a society have a good and shared handle on what are our problems, money ensures they will get solved by someone. Good businesses need to solve the problem they claim to solve, over and over, cheaply and better than others to survive, unlike good intentions which have no inbuilt feedback mechanism, no proof of solution, no competition for making solutions cheaper or better.
Money is almost as good as God. Just keep searching on google for what you want instead of praying and someone somewhere will figure out the economics of providing exactly that at a price you can afford.
Fixed price is the simplest possible contract, which excludes none, is partial to none and is economically viable. Free and priceless are on the other hand always complicated. Money is what makes the world one big family, nameless and unknown people helping each other in making life better for everyone. Without people, money is futile and meaningless.