Economic Thoughts

Probably due to listening to NPR again I have been having economic thoughts about how odd it is that people's willingness to expose themselves to debt affects the bottom line of many businesses, which in turn affects the disposable income of people who might be employed by those businesses, which links back to consumer spending power.

Seems like a steady state might not be possible, i.e. just endless cycles of boom and bust. Still I wonder if there is some way to quantify the value produced by working for a lifetime, or for just one hour, that would allow us to calculate the extent to which an individual or a society is overexposing themselves in terms of debt? Problem is that it is highly non-static and that value is in the eye of the beholder.

However, perhaps we can think of our monthly icomes as indicative of the worth that society places on what we are doing. Money is strange. I guess it is straightforward to work out debt exposure based on monthly income, but somehow the relationship between money and value seems a little broken ... e.g. We can be doing all sorts of things that we don't immediately get paid for, but produce longer term benefits, like raising children, or networking with colleagues. Guess I'm just wondering if there are any economic alternatives to money ...