Economics: Time Value & Optionality

As so often happens, when I’m having trouble writing it’s because I’m writing too much, covering too much scope at once. I turned the previous chapter on economics into 4 chapters and out it came. I’ll post the next one tomorrow.

Somehow I got to my mid-30s understanding nothing about the nature of money. I could buy & sell stuff, I could "make" money, but I didn't understand the physics of moving money at all.

Computing to the rescue. A series of finance-related projects forced me to program basic money-related concepts. Since programming is how I understand the world, I started to understand money. Over time the lessons soaked into my intuition & changed how I saw development.

Mark Buchan in "Frozen Desire" makes the case that we often want stuff but not right away, & that money represents this "frozen desire". If you have created enough value to eat for a month, but you don't want to store a month's food, it's extremely convenient to be able to store the value you've created and turn it into fresh lettuce a week at a time.

Money, though, is curious stuff. It has its own nature.