Money is just a medium of exchange. If I'm most productive as a fisherman, and currently I want a new wooden table more than anything else, I'm much better off if I can spend three hours fishing in exchange for enough money to buy a table, rather than spend 10 hours trying to come up with something I can trade the table-maker directly, or spending 20 hours trying to make a table myself.<p>The author made the association between working for money and dissociation from the actual value of the products your using. So he might say that since you didn't spend so much time making the table yourself, you would be too distanced from the impact of throwing that table out or from the amount of resources and labor that are going to be needed for making a new table.<p>I don't think that makes sense, whether it costs you a week of labor to build a table, or a day to go fishing for a table, the cost to you isn't any less precise. All you really get by doing away with money is inefficiency and less free time. If that's how you enjoy spending your time, so be it, but that doesn't have anything to do with the way millions of other people prefer to spend their time.<p>The real factor that leads to dissociation from the actual cost/impact of stuff in consumers' minds isn't money, it's any of the costs/expenses that for political reasons are prevented from influencing the price of the final product. So for example if farmers are given subsidies and are protected by tariffs against competing goods, people are going to be a lot more wasteful with their food than they should be, or if people are allowed to spread pollution without having to pay for it, the environmental costs are not going to be accurately reflected in the price of their products.<p>But I guess trying to crack that problem is a lot harder than living in a trailer and making your own bread.