Money serves as a medium of exchange and store of value. Price
provides an important clearing mechanism in a society. Here we are
going to explore the interesting dynamics between money and price.
In
a free market, when the quantity of money is fixed, the fact that the
price of an apple is $1 and that of a Parker pen is $2 has tremendous
implications. It takes knowledge, ingredients and time to grow an
apple while it involves branding, material, and capital to produce a
Parker pen. What the market says here is that the total efforts put
into producing the pen are worth twice as much as the efforts of
growing the apple. There are thousands of valuations communicated
through the market by this simple exchange. Over time, with advances in
technology, it takes fewer efforts to produce more goods. The same farm
that used to grow 10,000 apples can now grow 20,000 in half the time.
While the ratio of exchange between apples and pens might still be 2 to
1, since it also takes less to produce a pen, in a world where the
quantity of money is fixed the price of both apples and pens should
decrease (i.e. 80 cents for an apple, and $1.60 for a pen).