Anyone else have an interest in economics?

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TM I believe we actually agree on the "money" aspect. Your Buffet quote makes a lot of sense or actually nonsense.

How do we measure without money is a complex question. It implies we do not appreciate a "thank you", or that provocative glance from the attractive lady across the room. My point is as soon we depend on money as the p[rimary measurement for GDP(society) we can quickly become a unemotional, mechanical society.

I earlier tried to make the point that money and the bits and bytes that represent it can be too easily manipulated to present whatever one wishes.

Slowly appearance begins to replace reality and who knows where that could lead.

To the individual the value of money is subjective, non-linear, and circumstantial. An random $50 bill laying on the sidewalk in a busy city will be almost infinitely more valuable to a homeless person who is flat broke and hungry than it will be to a millionaire who also happens to walk by. But if both of them are stranded on an unpopulated island the $50 bill will be almost equally worthless to both. In reality, monetary value is the subjective value an individual can gain by purchasing or investing a specified amount of money, averaged over the entire population. But then it's even more complicated as corporations spend huge amounts of money bombarding people with advertising in order to "create" subjective value for their brand to the consumer, in which case it's more about psychology than concrete usefulness. And then there's value of money to those people who don't do a whole lot of anything useful with their money but derive gratification from watching numbers go up making them feel richer and richer. That's the kind of crap that drives asset bubbles and ponzi-type speculative borrowing.

Concrete assets or "real things" will always rule economics I agree. It is the distraction of money and its accumulation which gets economies and societies into trouble.

Let me become philosophic and say -- today we have the resources and technologies to comfortably feed, clothes, house, provide health care, educate, and entertain everyone on the planet. What is missing is the political/economic system that will allow that to happen. What is truly disheartening is we are not seriously looking for such a system. We are stuck arguing about historical systems which have not met this task.