Economists say that money is fungible. What they mean by that is that it can be traded for any number of different commodities. A school can use its money to replace the roof or to buy new textbooks. That is why some legislators don't like giving private schools money to compensate for keeping attendance records or having school lunches. It means their money can be reallocated to religious instruction. Some other than money certificates are also at least partially fungible. Frequent flier miles can be credited for gaining flights to any number of destinations so long as you use the same airline.There are also other matters that do not seem to be economic which are also fungible. Affection is partly fungible in that the affection of a spouse is transferred to an inlaw or at least given the benefit of the doubt until events warrant treating a person otherwise. All that is required is that something can be spread around by a party which has some entitlement to do so, as is indicated by a dollar bill, and whatever is exchanged can be retained by the person who engages in the trade. The exact value or unit of exchange may not be clear,but it is useful to provide denominations whereby amounts of the fungible product are comparable. It is hard to trade diamonds all of which are large but there can be produced diamonds of various qualities and sizes. Sex is clearly fungible in that it is a service that can be traded for any number of different things, from money to social position to affection and so the market on sex is highy controlled by the customs and laws of society so as to assure the value remains of high value, so that it can be exchanged for marriage, and so that people do not become too coarse in their exchanges, and so people continue to ssociate sex with affection, though some people think it liberating to dissociate the two.
My point is that even money is not fungible as can be seen in the social practices about money that prevail. Consider a family to have a savings account and a credit card. The family makes a small and steady portion of its monthly pay checks to the savings account even as it pays a larger but not complete payment to its credit card. It does so because it regards the savings account as a long term increase, slow but steady, to its wealth, while the credit card is an expense on present debts, to be more quickly paid off than contributed to a savings account, even though the family pays interest for the remaining debt on the credit card and that may be greater than the interest gained from increasing its savings account. These two accounts are treated differently even though the family loses money for not having retired the credit card as quickly as possible even if the savings account languishes for a while. Strictly speaking, in economic terms, that is an irrational way to deal with money because there is more cost in paying into the savings account. But that is irrational only in the purely economic sense, what is rational by definition, when the experiences of the two kinds of accounts are different and because people in fact treat the two differently. The practice of making constant payments to a savings account seems reasonable because there is an emotional commitment to make a savings deposit come hell and high water, while credit card payments go up and down depending on one’s expenses and variations in income. Money is funny that way. While all legal tender are the same, we put it aside in different envelopes for different purposes.
Here is another way in which money is not fungible, meaning that money spent in one way is less valuable than money spent in another way. A person or family has a way of life that requires them to buy cars of a certain quality, “luxury” cars, let us say, while another family trades in used or junker cars for as long as they last. In one case, the level of car is seen as a necessity for the family to keep its standard of living while the other family has a lower allowance for its car purchases and so sees anything other than a junker as a luxury that can be done without. People will deprive money of other things such as a vacation so as to make sure of the car purchase while other people will always get off what seems to others to get off cheaply. This can seem a comparison between tastes or how much value the two families value a car but there is more in it than that in that more is at stake than relative cost, some additional pleasure for some additional cost, because what each family is to regard as how important the item is to their self respect and their social class standing. People used to rank various GM cars as ranking social class, so that Chevrolet was lower down on the scale than Pontiac and Oldsmobile was a higher price and social class over Pontiac, and Cadillac higher than the rest of the range of cars, but that misses the point of being a Pontiac or an Oldsmobile owner. Even if income is down, people will stay with their familiar preference and adjust their finances accordingly. Moreover, the value of a car is so unstable that, as the expression goes, the car’s value goes down as soon as you drive off the lot, which means the car is not exchangeable for money but is an item unto itself. You have title to the car, not its purchase price or something close to that. In short, rather than think of objects as having shifts in valuation while money stays the same, think of the money as being more or less valuable because of the objects purchased. People decide to treat objects as subject to much higher costs because of long standing prejudices about value rather than because money itself gets inflated or is itself of higher added value for its cost. A family is devoted to a family having a level of expense for its vacation and will economize on other items to pay for that as that vacation may require while others take cut rate accommodations or see paying high air fares, like no stop flying, as part of the experience rather than as something to save on so as to get to the vacation. These are qualitative matters rather than economic ones.
Here is another way in which the fungibility of money becomes questionable. There are some objects that are treated as something fungible, which means translatable into money, and these same things are treated as not at all fungible. What is the value of a certificate of competence rather than, say, a license? A price can be established by its going rate. A taxi medallion goes up and down in accord with the availability of car medallions. The price can get higher and ;ower. It functions as a normal economic market. Other licenses are non transferable and so cannot be bought or sold. A plumber’s license is a certificate of competency that is not transferable to another person but has to be earned by the particular person who establishes that competence. But what about college and university certificates? A Bachelor's degree attests that a person is reasonably or minimally well educated. fIt can be translated into a preference for a job and its value is graded on the ranking of the quality of the educational institution. A Yale degree means more than a Podunk degree. Graduate degrees are also translatable as measures of general ability so that a law degree suggests that a pearson can marshall information, make inferences, and be reasonably glib about any number of matters and so is qualified to be hired by a business or a politician even if that person will not engage in legal work. The same can be said of any number of other degrees. A doctorate in astronomy or english can be assumed. Unless proven otherwise, they can engage in discussing abstract matters with a good deal of diligence and have a high level of general information. The same is true of an engineer, but some engineers may know nothing of politics or of biology and so are not suited for those occupations even though they are considered bright people; they are considered limited even if they are deep people.
Degrees, therefore, are fungible to a degree but let the buyer beware of whether this coin has been altered or degraded. But in being partly reliable, degrees can be traded for other degrees, as when a first class economist does better at as an investment banker than a person with a business degree, or an economist can work as a statistician more readily than can a sociologist, thoujgh some might do or excel.Things are more or less fungible depending on the general assessment of what trades can be made and which ones are so as a stretch. That also means that the character of the object is at question rather than the economic value established by the object,
The ancient regime did not treat quantities as fungible but used various coins as differently interchangeable until nations created sound currencies by making a single measure of money throughout the society, as John Locke did at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Other social entities were also not fungible. Max Weber thought there to be three of them: social class, which had to do with the opportunities available because of wealth; social status, which was the prestige a group of people held; and organization, including political power, which had to do with the relative power of an organizational position. These three social entities were not commencerable in that only with difficulty could one of these be exchanged for another. It took generations for a person to turn wealth into nobility and a great deal of ingenuity and hard work to turn status into political position.
What was discovered in the Eighteenth Century was that there were a number of ways in which objects could be treated as fungible or commensurable and that overturned the idea of the distinctiveness of these social qualities and objects. The most radical of these was Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence which, like “The Communist Manifesto”, was a political document which was carried out on the highest levels of abstract social thought. Jefferson had said that all people were equal in that all people had the same essential qualities and that therefore people were interchangeable in that the same ones that applied to one of them applied to all of them. Specifically, each and every person had unalienable qualities, which meant that they could not be recognized as human if any of their inherent properties were eliminated. Moreover, those inalienable qualities were life, which meant that no one could be taken away without significant legal disruption, liberty, which meant the right to travel and converse and engage in a livelihood without unnecessary coercion, these two safeguards the heritage of the previous century, safeguarded by Hobbes and Locke, while the third, the pursuit of happiness, is a quest, often seen as a vague substitution of Locke’s right to property, with in fact a magnificent expansion of the idea of freedom, which is that any person can try to be heroic and achieve some goal other than what others imagine, whether to be an explorer or a poet or cultivate one’s garden. Everyone has that capacity and is to be respected eleven if every one of us means something different in happiness. Private quests are equivalent to one another and so of the same coin as all the others. (That Jefferson owned slaves was not hypocritical. What his views meant was that a person was free to pursue these matters only so far as people were understood to be human, and slavery raised the question of whether imported Africans were indeed human.)
Another method for fungibility was to treat every commodity as subject to price, which is the way Say’s Law puts it. This invokes the old joke of someone who says it is ridiculous to buy an elephant which costs two thousand dollars but says “I’m talking” when the seller offers to sell a second elephant at half price. Something becomes valuable when its price goes down. In general, people will be rational about economics when they think of the exchange of favors and goods based on price, as Adam Smith said in that same eventful year of 1776.
A third method of fungibility is to create formulas whereby very disparate entities or qualities are translatable into other terms. That is why Thomas Malthus is significant far beyond its concern with explaining why the Irish are becoming ever more impoverished. He was saying that very different kinds of things, such as births and the productivity of land, are related to one another because there is an equilibrium between the two but that there is increasing disparity between the land to support a population and the size of the population because land increase or production goes up in linear fashion (though it does not because new fertilizers and seeds and methods of cultivation can allow much greater food productivity) while population growth is exponential, or at least was the case until the middle class world meant that the replication of the population might not continue, many western countries replacing the next generation with immigrants and even the Chinese wondering about what to do with slow birth rates. So births and land are translated into one another so as to create an equilibrium though without money as the mediating influence. Money isn’t everything even though modern day economists treat everything as such.
We can understand social life much better if we shift away from the universality of fungibility by going back to Weber’s insight that there are different kinds of qualities and quantities not transferable into one of the others. Think of the Presidency of Donald Trump, which will last for a long time as an object lesson for any number of things about American politics and the nature of personal passions, either as a sport or as an inherent possibility. Why, for example, was he able to get the Republican nomination even though his primary opponents held him in contempt and not just because he was winning and they were not? What Trump offered were snide nasty remarks like “sleepy Jeb” or “tiny Marco” and no one else on the ever diminishing panel could match him at that. That was all. He had no policies or personal attraction, only the ability to sound bitter and outspoken, people feeling downtrodden or thinking of themselves as such liking the gumption of saying these slights. So The accomplishment or value of Trump was as slight as a disparaging set of remarks, but remember that this often is all that it takes to get elected than a campaign slogan, as when Joni Ernst said that when she went to Washington she knew how to castrate pigs, or that Bill De Blasio became Mayor because his son Dante had a pleasing Afro. Campaigns all find sufficient money. What is important is that part of the social process to get elected depends on slogans and images people can manufacture and are not translatable into big money backing or demographic trends or political ideologies long sowed and harvested. It seems quaint and incidental, but there are many things in life that are like that, such as the turn of a nose or the timbre of a voice that leads a man to marry someone for fifty years, or a chance meeting which leads to friendship and perhaps a conjoined business venture. Atomize social structure so that there are so many things going on at once and try not to reduce them to a few formulas of fungibility.