Page 154 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Environment and Pecuniary Culture 143

light of present understanding of the future flows of costs and revenues.
More generally, and this is the main point, it is difficult to summon up
memories, loyalties, traditions, or a sense of belonging when one’s mode
of expression consists primarily of relative prices.
As well, the price system trivializes the future. Assuming a 10 percent rate
of interest (or discount rate), $1,000 payable thirty years from now are worth
only $57.31 today! (This is the obverse of the “magic of compound interest”:
$57.31 invested today at 10 percent is worth $1000 thirty years hence.) A
lower discount rate would raise the present value of the $1000 somewhat, but
even so note that the time period of thirty years, considered in ecological
terms, is extremely short. The more remote the benefit (or cost), the more
trivial it is to present-day decision-makers.
High interest rates, if attributable to conscious monetary policy, are an at-
tempt by monetary authorities to make present consumption and borrowing
less attractive compared to saving and investment; expressed differently, in
setting higher interest rates monetary authorities recognize that the future has
become so trivialized that the reward for saving/investing must be increased
to encourage this activity over present consumption/borrowing.
One might argue, of course, that it is not money as the predominant
medium of communication that causes present-mindedness, but rather that in-
terest or discount rates simply represent or reflect the preferences of people
for the present as opposed to the future. Any time one decides to consume to-
day rather than to save/invest, one is perforce making a decision with respect
to the present vs. the future. Interest rates, it can be argued, specify quantita-
tively the collective preferences (or the will of governments) in this regard,
just as prices for commodities are claimed to represent the valuation in rela-
tive terms of the ensemble of goods and services offered for sale. Except in a
laboratory, of course, the direction of causation is difficult to establish. What
can be said with assurance, however, is that as the price system “penetrates”
more and more aspects of people’s lives, those aspects necessarily become
understood through the logic of the price system, including such notions as
things of the past being forever bygones and the presumption that the present
and future are exchangeable at the going rate of interest.
Prioritizing the present over the past and the future, one might propose, is
a trait found universally in the animal kingdom. Indeed, many species may
have little or no conception of the future, in which case the attention/value
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afforded the future by the price system, albeit truncated, could be interpreted
as a marked advance over “natural” ways of cognition. To argue thus, how-
ever, is to ignore the importance of past and future to some, if not most, non-
pecuniary cultures. The concept of “stewardship,” for example, permeated
ancient Hebrew thought. Likewise, when taking certain decisions, Native