Bruce Middleton

The concept of chrono-lucropia Chrono-lucropia is my word for a trait, and a cognitive defect: mistaken faith in money measure as though it measured value, over time spans long enough for significant variation in the value of money. A premise of its diagnosis as a defect is the definition of value: the measure of how much things matter to people. People manifesting chrono-lucropia make bad decisions, by their own criteria, without noticing: tricked by faith in an unstable ruler (always shrinking, in our era, though that hasn't always been the case). The defect does have another name: "money illusion", coined by Irving Fisher. However, that term is a century old, and has become neutered over time; as will be shown, whole populations think they understand it, while being themselves massively chrono-lucropic. (Also it lacks mention of time, which makes it structurally illucid: it might be a deprecation of undue concern about wealth where experience is what really matters, for example.) 1626: Sir Henry Spelman Exactly 400 years ago, in 1626, Sir Henry Spelman published the first part of his Glossarium Archaiologicum - a dictionary of the mongrel usages which had evolved in the British Isles in preceding centuries. It was in Latin, and has never been translated - but a striking sentence was, in 1769, by William Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England: > Our ancient Saxon laws nominally punished theft with death, if above the value of twelvepence... in the ninth year of Henry the First... all persons guilty of larceny above the value of twelvepence were directed to be hanged; which law continues in force to this day... the punishment of grand larceny, or the stealing above the value of twelvepence (which sum was the standard in the time of king Athelstan, eight hundred years ago) is at common law regularly death. Which, considering the great intermediate alteration in the price or denomination of money, is undoubtedly a very rigorous constitution, and ma