Monetising beyond Mastercard

"There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's Mastercard"

This was the marketing campaign that Mastercard ran a long time ago. Being a millennial in India, I witnessed the transformation of life with the advent of Credit cards as a kid. I wasn't even a teenager when my parents got their first card. Since my mum worked in a bank, we were one of the early adopters of that technology. I witnessed its growth from a point where its only function was to withdraw money from the ATM to the point where people couldn't even imagine leaving their houses without it. 

The only money that you have is the money in your bank account

There was a certain unspoken nuance in these advertisements. The advertisements that Mastercard ran in India seemed to express this statement in a unique fashion. While they expressed that some things in life are indeed priceless, they made sure to let you know that you're going to need money to reach the point when the priceless things happen. 

In economics, this view of assigning a monetary value is known as the utilitarian view. The point is that everything that a person needs can be measured in terms of the utility that the person derives from consuming that item or service. 

Monetising merely means assigning a dollar value to that utility. Say a person is thirsty and wants water. They're going to derive utility by drinking water. The price that they're willing to pay for that water is the monetary value of water at that point in time. If this person is only mildly thirsty, they might be willing to spend $1 but not more than that. Another significantly thirsty person might even be down to pay $5. That is the monetary value of the utility that the latter person will derive from drinking that bottle of water. 

Anything in this world is only as valuable as the price that someone is willing to pay for it. 

Similarly, everything can't be converted to money. Money has this unique ability, that in some form or another, everything is often expressed in terms of money. It is often expressed in phrases like "everything has a price" or "everyone's got a price". Someone told me once "If you could charge any price, at what price would you be willing to have sex with someone? THAT is the price tag you give to yourself." 

Over time, we've actually become really good at monetizing things. To the point that we've even got people putting price tags on other people's lives. We've got insurance companies hiring the smartest number crunchers to determine what is the fair value of a life lost. Essentially, the question they're trying to answer is: if the person lived their full life, as opposed to dying when they did, what price tag would you put on the life that they would've hypothetically lived? What is the fair value of the contributions that they would've made, monetary or otherwise, to their friends, family, and society in general? That dollar number is the compensation that the person's closest ones deserve to have. 

However,  there's a fine line between monetizing something versus the actual value of that thing. Just because you can put a price tag on something doesn't mean they're exchangeable. Consider the price tag of a relationship - if you could charge any price, at what price would you be willing to break up with your girlfriend and move out of their lives entirely? Let that hypothetical number be X. Just because there's a monetary value to it, doesn't mean that a person will actually take that amount of money. In most cases, if the love is real enough, the person will actually refuse that amount. 

Just because the life of a man can be expressed as worth $25M on an insurance policy, that doesn't mean that his wife would gladly be willing to take that money in lieu of his life, or his mother would exchange her son for that price, or his son would take that money in exchange for his dad.  

It's this fine line that one can often forget. If you're someone who has worked with numbers and with money long enough, it's easy to lose this line. You have a tendency to put a price tag on things, without realizing that the price tag may or may not be the true cost. 

There are things in life for which the true cost is the very fact that they have no substitutes. However, those things are also the things that hold infinite power over you, the power to blind you and make you irrational. 

The mere fact that we're humans means that we'll always have these few things with no trade-off options. The only thing we can do is to make sure that these things are really worth it, in real terms, if not in monetized terms at least.