What exchange economies motivate?

A system of exchange motivates the people within it to act in a certain way. If you're in the system, and you want to survive or to thrive, you'll need to take certain actions or think certain ways in order get there. These aren't necessarily pathological - they are logical, reasonable things that everyday people do in good faith.

Exchange capacity

In order to participate in an exchange, a person needs something to exchange. The most common things are labour, assets and savings. For example, a person who can do hard physical or mental work can exchange their work for money (and this is obviously pretty common). A person can also exchange their things; a shop can sell products, or a person could sell their house or their car or their jewelry. And, of course, a person can exchange money for things - and most exchanges in liberal market economies involve money.

The amount that someone has to exchange I'm going to call exchange capacity. So someone with the ability to labour a lot has a lot of exchange capacity, as does someone with a house, as does someone with a lot of money in savings. If you've got exchange capacity, you can participate in exchanges.

Accruing exchange capacity

People need to participating in exchanging things, unless they find themselves with everything they need already. But if someone is not growing their own food or generating their own power or producing their own medicine, they'll need to get these things from people who do make them, and in a market that means exchanging things.

Because of the need to exchange things, people need exchange capacity. People could, perhaps, roughly calculate the amount they need to maintain their quality of life right now, and aim to obtain that much exchange capacity. But they also might want to improve their quality of life, or they might be worried that some misfortune might befall them in the future - illness, injury, or a disaster - and need enough exchange capacity to cover that unknown future sccenario.

In these cases, a person will be motivated to accrue as much exchange capacity as they can. For some people, this is a major driving force and they will work extra hours and take unpalatable jobs, but for others this just means trying to save a reasonable amount. In either case, there is a tendency towards keeping things, even if those things are not necessarily useful to someone at the time.

Motivation to work

Another motivation is the motivation to work. While assets and savings are also exchange capacity, labour is one of the most available and easiest ways to grow exchange capacity. And, for many people who don't have assets and savings, labour is one of the only types of exchange capacity they have available.

Placing value on things

People in systems of exchange also have a tendency to place value on things. Anything that they own has the potential to be exchangeable and so, if times are tough, they are possibly things that could be sold for necessities. Money provides a useful unit of account with which to measure and demark this value - an old comic book might be worth $50 if it is in good condition, for example.

This tendency is often applied everywhere. People think of themselves in terms of their net worth, their house in terms of its value, their time in terms of dollars. Even a human life can have a price determined by insurance agencies.