It's often said that

Bad money drives out good (Gresham's Law). This expression was coined (sic) to describe the situation where cash of similar fiat (legal) value were circulating, say coins in gold and also in lead, or say, the Democratic Republic of Stalinstad's kopekniks vs. Canadian dollars. People would naturally spend the former quickly (by tomorrow the weak currency might only by a tenth as much, if that) and save the latter, perhaps melting gold coins down to sell for its real value, or finding a way to export to a foreign country or exchange it for the latter's (sounder) currency. More broadly, when a country's currency is being devalued due to runaway inflation, people tend to acquire and keep that of a more stable nation while spending the locally denominated currency as fast as they obtain it. This is a frequent occurrence in third world nations where currency is often devalues by several orders of magnitude, then replaced by new units worth thousand or millions of the old. The good stuff does not circulate, as it is an asset, whereas keeping the bad stuff around creates a liability. In a hyperinflationary economy, by a week thence you might need a wheelbarrow of today's money for bus fare, a candy bar, or a postage stamp.

Indeed, as any stamp collector knows, the classic example is 1921-1923 Germany. Hyperinflation there is sometimes attributed to the calculated avoidance of paying WWI debts, though there were other factors. There are stamps denominated five million Marks overprinted with billions instead. If you were paid at noon, you rushed out to buy groceries at lunchtime, because by closing time, your pay might not suffice to buy a toothpick. Some misgoverned third world countries (often ruled by dictators who stash "good" currency such as gold bars in Swiss banks for personal use after they are deposed--assuming they survive said exercise--have replaced their currency with a new one worth thousands of the old multiple times with no end to the repetitions in sight. In many of those situations people obtain U.S. dollars for real currency as legitimate savings.

Oh, and having brought them up in another context, it's also true that bad stamps drive out good stamps, this is two senses. First of the good ones there tend to be many forgeries, as there are always shysters ready to take advantage of the gullible or the incautious. Be warned of "bargains" in any collectibles; be even more warned away from any investment of which the purveyor assures one or more of "trust me" or"you can't lose" or "it's a sure thing". Indeed, anyone who utters more than one of these three in a conversation is almost certainly a con artist with one metaphorical hand reaching for your wallet and the other for your bank account. But second, modern post offices, have seen their customers abandon mailing letters for e-mailing a few words, and likewise scorning their services to send and receive parcels in the Amazon/E-Bay "mail me my house and bridal dress era, and rather than print fewer stamps, issue more than ever. Only the collectors are buying them, and a t face value or more. Everyone knows they now have no intrinsic value--they won't ever be used to pay for a service--their only value is the sense of ownership in a collection. They're paper money that will never be spent. Hmmm.

Returning to currencies, the saying can be taken in various ways. Another way of putting it is that bad monetary policy destroys the circulating currency (cause and effect rather than use of the artifact). If a country has an independent central banking policy that sets the reserve rate or ratio (the percentage of deposits banks must keep on hand rather than loan out) and the benchmark interest rate (at which banks may borrow from the central bank, thus affecting the prime rate they in turn loan to their best customers), these rates can be set on a "best practices" basis to control the money supply and therefore inflation. If instead these rates are set by the current "glorious dictator" who is often financially illiterate (and may be that in other ways as well), sheerly for short-term popularity reasons such as keeping interest rates at arbitrarily low levels, the automatic result will be hyper inflation and the destruction of the country's real and imaginary wealth relative to the rest of the world.

Running large deficits year after year with no intention of every paying the money back does the same thing. By whatever means, putting too much money in circulation subverts the value of any one unit of the currency. Likewise running large deficits and borrowing money to cover the debt also adds to the money supply (so predictably that it is often termed "printing money". It has the additional problem that if continued long enough, servicing that debt with interest charges becomes the single largest budget item, and will eventually bankrupt the nation if it does not first make its currency worthless through hyper inflation, effectively bankrupting both the banks and its own citizens, unless they have bought "good" money such as gold as a hedge. Thus the saying: If you owe fifty thousand to the bank and can't pay, you're in trouble, but it you owe fifty trillion and cannot pay, the banks (and everyone in your enterprise, whether corporate or national) are in even more trouble. Handling these rates has become tricky as the modern worldwide banking system is effectively friction free, so every transaction has an immediate effect on the economies of all countries whose currency is involved, whereas in the pre-computing era, when transactions took much longer to complete, the downstream effects were muted by being delayed.

At times over the centuries, one currency seen as particularly sound had been widely adopted as a secondary standard in addition to say, gold, in which other nations' monies are denominated, and against which exchange rates are quoted (a "reserve currency". It would become the "good-better-best" currency that served as an asset in preference over any other (relatively "badder"). So various nations would keep quantities of that reserve currency to settle debts, much of it in consisting of bonds against the debt of the reserve country, this in part to provide more stability to their own. In effect they trust it above all others, including their own. In New Testament times the Roman denarius was the universal currency. For centuries the British pound was that reserve currency, but in modern times the American dollar took its placen its place.

Mind, this is all based on trust and stability. If either or both are broken, and there is no suitable alternative other than gold, transaction settlements no longer have a stable currency standard, and world trade becomes a higher risk endeavour. Sadly, that trust has indeed now been broken, and the Spy takes note that some national banks have begun selling large quantities of U.S. treasuries. If, as they come due, there are no buyers for replacements except at much higher interest rates, the very existence of a world economy will be threatened, and the U.S. could effectively bankrupt as its formerly good money is correctly then perceived as bad and should be dumped for...almost anything else perceived to have stable and reliable value.

It is worthwhile noting that although a nation's currency, and especially the reserve currency do have a tenuous intrinsic value based on the economy and productivity of the respective nations, cryptocurrencies have only the collective trust its owners have in each other to maintain a market value for something with zero intrinsic or tangible value whatsoever. Crypto values are mere smoke and mirrors. They are therefore extremely susceptible to wide swings in value, and should their blockchain encoding be cracked in the quantum computing era (or before), they will instantly have zero market value. Crypto cannot be called "bad money" in this context, because it isn't money, just an encoded idea multiply removed from the sweat of the brow of real citizens which at least ought to create value for their national currency unit...unless their government mucks it up because they have employed bad monetary policy to drive out the good, of which the ultimate folly may be using crypto as a reserve currency.

The badgood calculus has corollaries

and some are causally related, even if the application and the logic are different. It should be immediately apparent that bad politics/government drives out good,. This is true for money (noted above), health and medicine, aid, relief of poverty, foreign policy, immigration, discrimination, housing, energy, trade, and...nearly everything government is supposed to do/not do, or does or doesn't anyway notwithstanding reality. If good government is "of the people, by the people, and for the people" (in fact, not merely in rhetoric) it follows that bad government could be described as "of the people, by some small elite, and for the benefit of said elite, however the latter are defined." The latter systems are essentially kleptocracies run by a "president-for-life" for the sole benefit of a circle of criminal cronies. This is just a larger version of the neighbourHood running a protection racket, except on a grand scale, and seemingly above the law rather than under it, perhaps originally having been "elected" in a semi-democratic process, but installing himself as absolute ruler, complete with tax breaks or holidays for a few rich friends, a private army to cow or terrorize the populace into obedience by disappearing any who fail to give due obeisance to his glorious self, employing scapegoat rhetoric to blame some "other" such as a minority within the country or supposed "enemy" nation or people as a motive for "cracking down", and within a year or so of assuming power, engaging talks of suspending elections so as to rule indefinitely. This is a recurring play that has taken the world stage countless times throughout human history. Thus, if those who value democracy do not assiduously guard and practice it, even when its decisions sometimes offend them, and/or those who operate it fail to do their duty with integrity, they will inevitably end up losing it altogether. T

Similar things could be said of any institution. Take churches for instance and render the maxim bad religion drives out good. The Bible, in James 1:27 offers this definition "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world." Hmmm. That is, the everyday practice of Biblical Christianity has to do with one's relationships, first with God, then with others. This passage gives a few non-exhaustive examples. IOW, Christianity is not just about obeying a collection of rules made up by a church or other institution of religion--nope, that's bad religion, but historically, time and again, nominalistic or authoritarian institutional religion has crowded out and replaced the real thing altogether, even become its antithesis. See the Pharisees in Jesus' time--originally a back-to-the-Scriptures (doctrinally fundamentalist)movement that became nothing but a set of rules, often including ways of avoiding the actual Biblical commands for righteous behaviour. No wonder Jesus termed them whitewashed sepulchers; no wonder when he told them "lethe who is without sin cast the first stone" they all left the scene.

Read the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah for millenia-old-cum-brand new descriptions of false prophets spewing lies they claimed came from God, but were products of their own imagination to further their own ends. People do like exercising power over others far more than showing selfless love for others. The truth those two prophets repeatedly proclaimed to deaf ears was that God was about to punish them for turning his land into a cesspool of evil, injustice, and debauchery. Indeed, given the number of times God complained through his prophets about untrammeled injustice, it appears to be the cardinal sin resulting from not recognizing God as God in order to act righteously and justly, and instead doing the opposite and incurring his wrath. Why did he allow Jerusalem to be destroyed? Injustice. Ditto Sodom by the way. For the latter, see Ezekiel 16: 49-50 His mind was obviously made up before he discussed the matter with Abraham, and what happened on the visit to Sodom merely confirmed things.

Oh, and neither is Christianity a political movement. Hitching itself to that one worn wheel wagon is a sure way to ensure two potentially good things make each other bad at the same time even faster. For one instance, so-called "Christian Nationalism" is a double oxymoron--on the face of it bigoted, unjust, and so entirely un-Christian and inevitably nation wrecking in the medium (not even the long) run. Support for this view? Ask yourself how many times Jesus got involved with or even commented upon political leaders, other than when he stood before them at the behest of the religious leaders who wanted rid of him lest they lose their cushy deal with the Romans that allowed them essentially free rein in Jerusalem and surroundings. When Perter asked him about paying taxes, he played a practical joke on his follower--"go fish for it". This section's bottom line (read some history folks) is: Nations whose leaders lose or reverse their moral compass don't live long subsequent lives on the world stage. God has a way of making sure of that. Oh, and should the gentle reader not be a fan of Biblical norms, (s)he might perhaps revise this section to bad (non?) ethics drives out good.

Turning to another domain for an application of the saying we could try on bad literature drives out good.What sells the most, no matter what the delivery medium be--whether books, film, or TV? Is it high quality well plotted, well written, oft read and loved, can't-put-it-down-and-must-have-more uplifting literature that bids to be a defining literary hallmark of an era, or is it yet another formulistic "action adventure" yarn, sword and sorcery, impossible historical, a mystery, western, or romance that get tossed in a trash bin after one view or read, or at worst, in-your-face particularly prurient pornography? The latter categories crowd bookstore sales (whether brick and mortar or virtual) and the former can be commended as much for their rarity as their quality. To re-target the question, does the story, poem, production, or series deliver something timelessly uplifting, or at least harmlessly entertaining, a good story well told, or is it just another minor variation on a hackneyed theme? The Spy's next AH-F novel, be it ever finished, has a main sympathetic character who is a member of an oft-despised small minority--a story told to put a microscope on injustice, its perpetrators victims, and its remedies. Is publishing it risking painting a target on his back for the professional haters that so abound these days? Perhaps he is wrestling with trying to understand hatred. The whole idea baffles him. Oh, the book's other two themes are quantum computing and AI.

What about technology?

Is it also a maxim that bad technology drives out good? The Spy's thoughtful, well-considered answer: "It's complicated." A deeper and far more careful answer: "It depends." What on? Weasily answer: On one's judgement of and tolerance for risk, for manufacturer reputation, for appropriateness, for tradeoffs among quality, performance, and price, and whether hardware and software misses, meets, or exceeds functionality requirements. For much of the small computing era, low end, low price, low quality, short lived PC boxes have dominated consumer sales. OTOH, those who make a living with their computers require better, and in that marketplace the generally higher end, more expensive, better made, and more reliable Macs have a much larger share of the market. "Generally' because Apple has a few goofs marring its track record.

What really happens in the technology sector, from the days of hunter gatherers to those of the agriculturists, to the smoke breathing denizens of the industrial age, to the chained-to-a-desk hustlers of the information age of today, is thatnew technology drives out something old". Each technological iteration along the major historical spectrum (The Four Civilizations), whether defining and implementing the new age (plough, steam engine, computer), or merely refining the current one, shoves out something extant, thus changing all that comes after. A few fer instances: eBooks have largely replaced p-books, even though, for textbooks at least, low price for the electronic version trumps only the very low quality e-reading experience. Lazy reliance on all-consuming AI has replaced actual learning with...nothing of value...even though it is anti-thinking and anti-education. Sorry, but this one really is an instance of bad tech drives out good.Overall, though, the issue here is perhaps more about change, the pace, quality, quantity of same, related ethical issues, and the direction thereof rather than, for now at least, only "bad" versus "good" tech. Yup. Complicated until and if things settle down.

hethinks QES--quite enough said, and given how late it is in jolly jolly January, until March. Lots to do meanwhile. Perhaps a final word though, especially in view of the comments on technology, religion, money, etc. It's all really up to usage. It may be most accurate to put the maxim as "Bad use of xxx drives out good."

--The Northern Spy

Opinions expressed here are entirely the author's own, and no endorsement is implied by any community or organization to which he may be attached. Rick Sutcliffe (a.k.a. The Northern Spy) is Professor of Computing Science and Mathematics and Assistant Dean of Science at Canada's Trinity Western University. He completed his fifty-fifth year as a high school and university teacher in 2025. He has been involved as a member of or consultant with the boards of several commercial, nonprofit, and/or educational organizations and participated in developing industry computing and educational standards both nationally and internationally. He is a long-time technology author and has written two textbooks and ten alternate history SF novels, one named the best ePublished SF novel for 2003. His various columns have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers (both dead tree and online formats) since the early 1980s, and he's been a regular participant and speaker at churches, schools, and academic meetings and conferences. He is a half-century-long member of the IEEE (life member), ACM, and MAA. He and his wife Joyce celebrated their fiftieth anniversary in 2019 and lived in the Langley/Aldergrove/Bradner area of B.C. from 1969 to 2021 when cancer happened and she left for heaven, so he latterly continues, depending heavily on family and friends to manage.

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