Is Money a Virtual Refrigerator?
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors probably didn’t often catch big game but, when they did the quantity of meat would have amounted to an inconvenient surplus. It would go bad before you could finish eating it, even if you gorged yourself sick. What they needed was a fridge. Their virtual refrigerator was the stomach of a friend. Struck lucky today? You may be hungry next week. Feed a friend today and they’ll feed you when they get lucky.
It's a general problem. The graph of available good things is not a convenient flat line. Hills of glut alternate with dearth valleys. “Virtual refrigerator” is a metaphor for all the ways in which the landscape can be flattened, hills smoothed into valleys.
Water is a precious resource, and likely to become more so. There are droughts and there are periods of excessive rainfall. Reservoirs need to be large enough to bridge from one to the other.
When the sun shines full on your south-facing roof (north-facing if you live in Australia) your solar panels generate a surplus, in danger of going to waste. You can store it in a battery. You can hook it up to an electric pump, raise water into a high tank, and use the water pressure to drive a dynamo later when the sun isn’t shining. That’s not efficient, but it illustrates the principle.
What other virtual refrigerators can we think of? Is money a virtual refrigerator?
Richard Dawkins
How about books and other modern media being “virtual refrigerators of thought and progress” ?
Here is what ChatGPT thinks:
Applied to modern society, there are many examples of "virtual refrigerators":
Physical Infrastructure: Dams, reservoirs, and batteries can store surplus resources such as water and electricity, respectively, for use during shortages.
Investments: When we have excess money, we invest it in stocks, real estate, etc., hoping that it will grow over time and we can rely on it during times of financial need.
Insurance: We pay premiums when we have the financial ability to, so in the event of unexpected financial burdens (like health emergencies, property damage, etc.), the insurance acts as our "virtual refrigerator", providing resources.
Data Centers: Storing excess digital information for later use. This can be personal (like cloud storage of photos and videos) or at a larger scale (like businesses storing customer data).
Pension funds/Social Security: We pay into these systems when we are able to work, storing resources for our retirement years when our income might be lower.
As for money itself being a "virtual refrigerator", it can certainly be seen as one. Money is a universally accepted medium of exchange that allows us to store the value of our labor or goods sold, in a form that we can use to obtain what we need or want in the future. When we have a surplus of resources (like food or energy), we often sell that surplus and convert it into money. This money can then be used to purchase what we need during times of scarcity. Hence, money can act as a "virtual refrigerator", storing the value of surplus resources for future use.