A long time ago, in the south-east part of the land lives the Taang people. The Taangs are a relatively docile bunch; they have a long history with trading, capitalism and something called money.

They didn't necessarily call what they do capitalism per se (a term made up much later in history that got turned into a strawman), but they practiced it to a level of mastery matched only by a few.

The Taangs long history allowed them to develop various psycho-technologies, specifically the kind that transmit high resolution concepts through only speech. What got widely spoken became true; prophecies became self-fulfilling on a collective level.

If we think of these techs as magic spells, one of the more potent spell is something we can only translate to gxfc. This is a simple phrase used only once a year. It's uttered by everyone to anyone they greet, as a term of celebration, positivity and endearment.

The spell is exceedingly simple: by uttering gxfc, it makes the other person on the receiving end rich. By rich we mean abundant with money. When enough people say that to each other, it makes everyone money-rich.

But there's a problem: if everyone got richer similarly, then no one got richer, not really. That's the funny thing about how money used to work. What ended up happening was that there's more money chasing the same goods. Things simply gotten more expensive, and everybody was in the exact same spot before gxfc.

Turn out there's a misalignment of intention. When gxfc was used, what Taang people were really after was about raising the standard of living. Having more money provided them more options on how to do that, but money ultimately is simply a bridge to arrive at a better standard of living. Money by itself does not achieve that, especially if there is nothing to buy.

The thing that actually raises standard of living is technology, which facilitates new inventions. All the money in the world does not buy a plane if the Wright brothers didn't invent them first.

Money by itself does not invent anything. Invention requires new knowledge.

The Taangs knew that intellectually. But the continuous use of gxfc didn't seem to reflect that. There's still an over-emphasis on money as the end as opposed to the mean. We can only speculate on why.

A generous explanation would be that the Taangs value optionality. Money being a store of value allows them to morph it into anything buy-able in the market. In a world that's unpredictable and volatile, there is tremendous benefit in not having your personal properties locked as a non-liquid form.

A psychological reading is that money as a tool has been overly-abstracted to represent better standard of living. Wealth and quality of life are being confused as the same thing.

They falsely assumed that if they are willing to spend the money on something that doesn't yet exist, somebody out there will invent it. It didn't cross their mind that maybe they should do the inventing themselves.

This mindset however carried some interesting side effects. Because money implicit implies the act of exchange, it creates a strong sense of dependence. The Taangs unspokenly understand that they depended on each other to survive (of which money facilitated), therefore developed a large suite of heuristics that maintained order, harmony and trade.

While exchange of value happened constantly among themselves, value creation resulted in more of the same. They made more and more lotus-flavored buns, everyone was well-fed; but no one came close to inventing the warp drive. Living standards stayed stagnant despite gxfc.

Did the Taangs overcome this? To be continued in part 2.