A common fantasy of adolescence is imagining a world without money in which you can get whatever you want without needing those pesky green pieces of paper bearing pictures of George Washington.
The fantasy quickly turns into annoyance that some people have lots of those Washington portraits. What makes those people so special? Why should they get to acquire all that cool stuff when you can’t?
Enter Cory Doctorow’s novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, a veritable Fantasyland for the indignant adolescent. In this world, money has magically morphed into Whuffie.
Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn’t starve; contrariwise if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented—your personal capital with your friends and neighbors—you more accurately gauged your success.
To our embittered adolescent, that seems so much better. Up against the wall, green pieces of paper! Whuffie is here! Whuffie seems like a really amazing new form of money. You get more Whuffie by doing nice things for people. You lose Whuffie by being mean. So if you want to spend your days writing poetry or making puppets, you can still acquire Whuffie and be rich! Finally the right people are the rich ones.
Alas, go one step further and the Whuffie experiment starts unravelling….
Read the rest at Econlog
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