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Money & Economics

How do money, debt and asset ownership change the choices available to a family, a business or a society?

Updated November 1, 2026

What happens to the hours I’ve already worked?

In my journal I tried to work out why money gets such a strong reaction out of me. My time is finite. I spend some of it doing something somebody else values enough to pay for. If I save part of what I earn, I’m trusting that the work I did today will still buy me choices years from now. That’s what I mean when I talk about money as stored time.

Now picture two families looking at the same house. One can bring twenty years of home equity to the closing table. The other brings what they’ve managed to save from their paychecks. I want to understand how a system that both families work hard in can give them such different choices. That question is what keeps me reading about money long after I’ve put the company’s books away.

Jump to the books and conversations ↓

Who gets to decide what the work is worth?

A price lets two people who want different things make an exchange. It also leaves a trail I can follow. Who did the work, who got paid, and who now holds a claim on what somebody will produce later? Those questions matter to me because the freedom to save some of my earnings is part of the freedom to choose how I spend my time.

Lyn Alden’s Broken Money gives me a place to start with the payment itself. Rana Foroohar’s Makers and Takers asks where money goes next. Financing a new production line and bidding up a building that already exists can both make someone wealthier. I want to know what changed for the person who works there or hopes to buy in.

Find Broken Money · Find Makers and Takers

Why I call it an equity snowball

An owner can bring the gain on one house into the purchase of the next. A first-time buyer has to build a down payment out of income, after paying for a place to live. As prices rise, yesterday’s ownership can become part of today’s buying power. That difference in starting positions is what I mean by an equity snowball.

I suspect the monetary system amplifies that advantage. The two buyers below show the arithmetic. To understand what caused a price increase, I’d also want to see wages, homes available, borrowing costs and who actually bought in the same place and period. Jeff Booth’s conversation with Natalie Brunell pushes on a related question. If technology lets us produce more with less work, who gets the benefit?

Listen to Jeff Booth and Natalie Brunell

What changes if the price stays the same?

Take a $400,000 home. Say one family can put $200,000 from a previous home sale toward it. Another has saved $40,000. Before closing costs, one would need to borrow $200,000 and the other $360,000. They can see the same listing on the same afternoon and face very different monthly commitments. That’s why I want to see the starting balance sheet when we talk about who can afford to buy.

Why changing the money only takes me so far

I’m drawn to money whose rules I can inspect. Reading about gold and Bitcoin pushed me to ask who gets to change the terms after someone has spent years saving. Then I ran into a problem with my own argument. As I said to Rich Hoffmann, people can still build layers of promises on top of a scarce asset. Somebody has to decide whose promise to trust. The rules matter enormously to me, and human judgment is still in the picture.

That changes what I want from an economic argument. If I think credit could tighten, I can ask what decisions a company would face if a bank renewed its line, reduced it, or declined to renew it. Each answer leads to different work today. I’d rather understand those choices than have everyone in a boardroom agree with my prediction.

Hear Rich and me discuss money and power · Hear why I connect money with time

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