So I continue to ponder Cory Doctorow's Whuffie, Charles Stross's fast/medium/slow money, and other exotic speculative currency.
But the one I'm thinking about this afternoon isn't from science fiction -- not as far as I know, anyway -- but from Georg Simmel's The Philosophy of Money (1900).
I'm interested in a somewhat adapted, purified and thinned-out version of what Simmel describes as "the system of unequal prices corresponding to the means of the consumer" (p.343). It is a kind of antithesis to the Thomist just price, and you can also hear echoes of a remark of Nietzsche's in Human, All Too Human:
[...] a shilling in the hand of a rich heir, a day-labourer, a shop-keeper, a student are quite different things: according to whether he did almost nothing or a great deal to get it, each ought to receive little or a great deal in exchange for it: in reality it is, of course, the other way round (§25)
