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Comment by kangnkodos | Hacker News Reader

He wants everyone to suddenly stop using money. If that happened, who would wash the dishes?

Many communes have failed over this exact issue. They go on for several years with several people, usually women, making the sacrifice and doing what needs to be done. But eventually, the people who do the dishes get fed up and stop, or leave. And then the whole thing collapses.

The alternative is for the leaders to have some type of power to compel people to do the dishes, and some type of punishment to mete out.

There are certain tasks in society that no one wants to do. In order to get them done, you have to choose the carrot or the stick. Money or punishment.

If the society has no money, there's going to be a whole lot of punishment going on. It can work in theory, but in practice, a society based on punishment tends to snowball out of control, with the people in charge of punishment going too far. The people in charge make a small mistake in the size of punishment relative to the transgression. With money, small mistakes like this happen constantly, and they are constantly being adjusted by changing prices and salaries. The garbage man makes a higher salary than other manual laborers. But without money, the process has more steps, and is harder to get right. People protest, the leaders listen to the protests, go through the rule changing process, and eventually adjust the punishment to fit the transgression. Without money, more people are involved in the process. Some are removed from the actual issue. It takes longer for the adjustment to be made. With only the tool of punishment available, it's more difficult to fine tune every mismatch. In practice, it's really, really hard to get a punishment based society just right.

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>If that happened, who would wash the dishes?

I'm genuinely shocked to see so many people disagreeing with this premise. Very few people will voluntarily perform shitty, low-status jobs unless you motivate them. Everyone wants to hand out toys to sick kids and pose for photos, nobody wants to clean up their chemo-smelling shit and puke.

It's been a real issue in every single volunteer-run organisation I've been a part of, from local churches and clubs right up to multi-million-line open source software projects.

Have none of these commenters ever participated in a real-world community setting like this?

But we are special, so naturally it'd be we who get the interesting exciting jobs in the post-money society. It'd be all the non-special people who'd be cleaning shit off the sidewalk, though of course they'd enjoy it since they would no longer be burdened by money.

A great many people here have not.

The really crappy jobs are invisible.

I don’t really know anyone who hates their line of work or lacks interest in their field (plenty in their job, but not their field).

That’s probably because I only know salaried professionals/soon to be professionals (interns).I suspect many others are in the same boat.

Not really invisible, they're just not in your social circle. In other social circles, people (I've spoken to such people, it's not a made up example), claim that well-paying or non-horrible jobs don't exist, as they've never met anyone who has such job.

> Have none of these commenters ever participated in a real-world community setting like this?

You’ve hit the crux of the issue. Most people who push for these types of social changes have rarely been involved in the hard work.

They’re the “ideas” person. Same people who wanna give you 5% of their amazing idea so you can implement it.

> I'm genuinely shocked to see so many people disagreeing with this premise. Very few people will voluntarily perform shitty, low-status jobs unless you motivate them.

Motivating them is the key word. Right now we depend on people being forced into stressful, precarious or life threatening situations in order to coerce them into doing jobs those of us in more stable circumstances would never do voluntarily. As a result, desperate people are paid far less than the work is actually worth. Personally I find the approach morally repugnant, we should instead guarantee a decent standard of living and allow wages for undesirable jobs to rise to their correct price. The crowd that thinks they're above cleaning their own toilet might be a bit put out but fuck them.

You can read my past comments - I agree with you completely.

Toilet cleaners, garbage men and fruit pickers should not just be paid well for the important work they do; they should be given respect for it as well.

Taking advantage of their desperation is absolutely unjust.

> Very few people will voluntarily perform shitty, low-status jobs unless you motivate them

Is that a bad thing?

One might wonder if our society is all about motivating people to do things they don't want. How many of our modern conveniences could theoretically be traded away in return for a 15 hour work week? Instead we have saddle young adults with student loads, the cost of housing has been inflated by greedy investors, having a car is just about mandatory, a century of very materialistic consumer culture, regulatory penalties for being poor, etc. I'm shocked that people don't question more of this stuff.

(Speaking of motivating people, governors of many states recently cut unemployment benefits to get people back to those low status jobs, instead of giving them more money. Funny how many people objected to those handouts but are fine with all the tax breaks that investors get on empty properties.)

>One might wonder if our society is all about motivating people to do things they don't want. How many of our modern conveniences could theoretically be traded away in return for a 15 hour work week?

Easy, look at US's GDP ($68k) and compare it against a country that's proportionately lower (to 15 hours). That gets you around $25k, around the GDP of Bulgaria and Chile.

That's a neat way to compare! I've spend a couple of months in countries in that 25k GDP range. I could tell the difference in some ways, but there's so much more I don't know.

However, that gave me the idea to see what that same math was like using historical U.S. inflation adjusted per-capita GDP numbers [0].

That $25k number is what U.S. per-capita GDP was in 1991/1992.

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/gdp-...

Before money people traded favors. You help me butcher my cow, I help you rebuild your house (which was more work then the cow), so maybe later on your brother helps fix my plow knowing he'll eventually get something in return, and now I am trading favors with you and your brother, etc. This bonded people. It would have been insulting to say "here are two chickens for your lamb, we are now even, I owe you nothing evermore!"

Money originated as a way for kings to pay troops, who operated outside these village economies.

Money has made it possible for us to build impersonal systems at gigantic scale. It seems to have paved the way for more stuff, but it does come with some downsides.

Debt, The First 5,000 Years [0] by David Graeber talks about this stuff.

[0] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-debt

It’s amazing how money actually came to be:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money

Before money, people traded services and power. In this sense, money is just an accounting tool to track the same

Not exactly the same. Money changed a lot of things, much more than just an accounting tool.

The use of money drastically changed the scale in which goods and services could be traded.

Before money people kept track of who owed who a favor amongst the people they dealt with. Family, friends, and others learned who they could trust not to be a mooch.

Money made possible much larger scale projects, enabling the industrial revolution to proceed at breakneck speed, the ability to wage world wars, and a modern global finance system treating everyone and everything as fungible, with credit scores replacing personal bonds of trust, billionaire leveraged buyouts and market manipulations, consumer/debt culture, sanctions, etc.

I think we agree that the accounting tool changed the possible scale, but we are still trading the same thing. For example, I use currency to track and buy favors from some laborer in China I have never met.

I don't think it's the scale, but the specialization. When what you need is unspecialized manual labor, favors work great because those kinds of favors are fungible. It starts to fall apart when you need specialized work. I.e. I'm a farmer and I need to see a doctor. The doctor doesn't want to see me, though, because 134 other farmers already owe him/her favors and he/she doesn't know what to do with the favors he/she already has.

The doctor needs a way to convert all those favors they don't need into favors they do need. You could trade them, but then you need an exchange rate. There's 400 farmers in the town and only one electrician; is a favor from the electrician worth the same as a favor from a farmer? At a certain point, it makes sense to just exchange stores of value rather than try to manage favors like assets.

> but we are still trading the same thing

I don't really think they are. Favors are closer to an asset. $5 is $5, regardless of the holder. Favors have bearer-specific value, such that one might be near-worthless to me but priceless to you.

> For example, I use currency to track and buy favors from some laborer in China I have never met.

To me, this demonstrates the above premise. That laborer in China would rightly value your favor at near-zero. You're too far away for them to meaningfully cash in on that favor. Your favor behaves like an asset that they have no use for. Money is distinct in that it allows you to crystalize the labor that would have been done into a physical form, and allows you to do it ahead of time. No more worrying about fungibility, and no more worrying about whether the other party will actually honor the favor.

100% agree, fungibility is key advantage of currency over personal IOUs, and that it enabled specialization and scale.

My point was more that serves the same purpose: purchasing services and power. It just does it better.

My post was more a reaction to the moral sentiment that prior to currency, transactions were more equitable and somehow less coercive.

> Money originated as a way for kings to pay troops, who operated outside these village economies.

That’s one theory, and it’s not even the one Graeber preferred. According to him (and supporting evidence) money originated as a way to “keep score” of debts.

The question of the origin of money is an interesting one, but that will be probably be unsolvable, since some of the alternative theories (like barter) would leave little to no evidence.

Yes, money is just a token to keep track of your balance sheet intuitively. Given a secure enough institution we could do it entirely on paper.

This is one of the fundamental principles behind Satoshi's white-paper and all of crypto currency.

“No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money,” wrote the Cambridge anthropology professor Caroline Humphrey in a 1985 paper. “All available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-...

The source I quoted agrees, saying favors, not barter.

People did something before money was invented, right? Parent's raised kids, kids helped parent's when they were older, families banded together, items were traded between villages, across continents, etc.

Money in a broad sense is as old as anatomically modern humans, so, no.

80,000 year old grave goods have been discovered, consisting of shells of a consistent size, with holes drilled in them, a few hundred kilometers from the ocean. We know from ethnography of societies which existed until very recently that these collectibles served the same purpose as money.

A good complement to Graeber's book is the work of Nick Szabo, I would start here:

https://fermatslibrary.com/s/shelling-out-the-origins-of-mon...

You can find most of the rest of his writing on the subject on his blog: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com

But the first source you quoted, the Atlantic article [0], quotes Graeber describing economies which don't depend on money or barter:

> Communities of Iroquois Native Americans, for instance, stockpiled their goods in longhouses. Female councils then allocated the goods, explains Graeber. Other indigenous communities relied on “gift economies,” which went something like this: If you were a baker who needed meat, you didn’t offer your bagels for the butcher’s steaks. Instead, you got your wife to hint to the butcher’s wife that you two were low on iron, and she’d say something like “Oh really? Have a hamburger, we’ve got plenty!” Down the line, the butcher might want a birthday cake, or help moving to a new apartment, and you’d help him out.

> On paper, this sounds a bit like delayed barter, but it bears some significant differences. For one thing, it’s much more efficient than Smith’s idea of a barter system, since it doesn’t depend on each person simultaneously having what the other wants. It’s also not tit for tat: No one ever assigns a specific value to the meat or cake or house-building labor, meaning debts can’t be transferred.

> And, in a gift economy, exchange isn’t impersonal.

My original reply in this thread was to mention that there have been functioning societies that don't use money. I was replying to a post that couldn't imagine such things. Maybe I'm misunderstanding why you brought up barter economies?

I'll have to get back to your first Nick Szabo reference, it doesn't format readable in the browser I'm in front of at the moment (overlapping text). The second link, the blog post, seems to discuss the history of money as opposed to alternatives (like the Iroquois and gift economies mentioned above).

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-...

This "gift economy" sounds someone trying to put a nobel spin on a debt based economy.

I bet in many cases if someone got a reputation for not reciprocating "gifts" they'd soon find themselves not receiving anything. Hardly a gift.

And why are people "hinting" at things in this economy, and why this is presented as something different from a direct request. How often have you come across people "hinting" at what they really want, when really they are demanding. Sounds like something out of a cliche mobster scene, "lovely tanks you have there Colonel, it would be a shame for anything to happen to them".

> No one ever assigns a specific value to the meat or cake or house-building labor, meaning debts can’t be transferred.

If the bakers wife were to "hint" to the butcher that their friend could do with some extra "iron", whilst simultaneously saying "did you enjoy those scones i gave you" (wink), then the debt is transferred. We can pretend that it wouldn't have happened, but people are people the world over. Some would be nice and help others because they like to help, others would use what leverage they have to get ahead in life.

This gift based economy just sounds like a passive aggressive debt based economy, and it doesn't sound real.

> This "gift economy" sounds someone trying to put a nobel spin on a debt based economy.

I saw that same connection myself. Gifts, aka favors, aka "you owe me one", aka debts.

> This gift based economy just sounds like a passive aggressive debt based economy, and it doesn't sound real.

I brought this up initially (near the top of this thread) in response to someone who couldn't imagine an economy without without money. Such things have existed, as per anthropologists.

Weird, I thought i deleted this comment. I deleted it because I took the time to read the article mentioned above a bit closer. I believe it was arguing that gift-based economies were the origin of debt based economies (aka money) instead of money originating from bartering.

Stupidly I had misunderstood what was being written, and then I attacked that imagined position by making the same argument as they were actually making :facepalm:

> Communities of Iroquois Native Americans

Had wampum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wampum

Which was absolutely used as trade goods between Iroquois bands, between the Iroquois and other natives, and between the Iroquois and settler colonialists. Standardized trade goods, portable and of a broadly recognized value: in other words, money.

Money which was good enough that the English, being kept short of coin by the Crown, adopted it for their own internal trade. Leading to the expression "shelling out", and the slang term "clams" for the dollar.

Single Iroquois bands may not have done much if any internal trade, but the same is true of my nuclear family. I would expect some wampum changed hands for things like marriages, though I don't have a source on that and it might not be true in this specific case.

Like I said, the original post I replied to seemed to say they couldn't imagine the dishes getting done without money: "He wants everyone to suddenly stop using money. If that happened, who would wash the dishes?"

I'm fairly certain the Iroquois didn't need to trade wampum with other bands to get the dishes washed? Just like you said you don't need to pay someone in your family to do the dishes, families (and friends, and Iroquois villages, etc) help each other without needing money.

I didn't say that one can construct a modern economy without money, just that the dishes could still get washed, like a lot of other small scale transactions, in response to someone who may have thought that such things are not possible.

Are you trying to prove me wrong, that humans cannot possibly organize activities amongst themselves without wampum of some sort? You mentioned families doing things for each other, which might be a better example than I brought up.

(I do appreciate the discussion though, I've learned a couple things along the way. But I'm not sure if we disagree, or are going on tangents.)

I think scale is the key here. You can do that within a family, you might do that within a village, perhaps in some perfect circumstances you will be able to do that within a group of a few 1000's people, but never at the scale of our societies. It's not about the type of society or people, it really has to do with the number. You'll have a much harder time convincing someone to work for someone else he doesn't know at all...

Agreed. I never said that no-money would work at the scale our modern society is used to working at. I brought up the idea that smaller scale societies have functioned without money, though.

My thinking is that lack of money wouldn't stop the dishes from being washed, but would stop bigger projects.

> humans cannot possibly organize activities amongst themselves without wampum of some sort

Yes, insofar as every band of humans has edges, and on those edges money is a hard prerequisite. We've coevolved with it since the dawn of anatomical modernity, the burden of proof is very much on anyone who wishes to claim that that we can get along without it.

I guess I consider the existence of activities, even economic ones which don't involved the exchange of money, to be trivial? Like it's obvious they exist, it isn't saying very much to point them out?

I spent a lot of my youth in an ashram with up to about 10,000 people in it, and the dishes got washed. The breakdown of that kind of basic uncompensated labor in small (usually flat/anarchist) communes says more about their inability to escape atomization than about the possibility of doing so.

I don't get the sense we're disagreeing about much if anything here, though. Perhaps choosing to emphasize different pieces of the puzzle.

The book (Debt, The First 5,000 Years) goes over this (IIRC it's in the Games with Sex and Death chapter). It says that these kinds of "weird money" examples like stone wheels in Micronesia, where not really used to trade for goods, but more or less to trade in social favors / honor systems.

The early mesopotamian cilivilazations got debt and credit before there was coinage. Farmers bought goods on credit, the debt set in grain for example, to be payed on harvest season. Grain, would be as good as money since that's what you paid your taxes in. The whole region had a sophisticated credit culture and the effects of debt were pervasive. That's why the old testament has provisions against usury, the jubilee, etc.

Debt, the First 5,000 Years is not the only text on this subject and it isn't canon.

He's meaningfully wrong about a lot of things, and he's missing the 75,000 years prior to his story beginning completely.

I strongly suggest reading some Szabo to fill that picture in. Shell money (ivory money sometimes) was a lot more money-like than Yap stones are.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ian-Keen-2/publication/...

Has some information relating to Australian Aborigines.

13 Distribution and consumption

Fundamentals of distribution were also quite similar in the seven regions, especially in the contrast between the distribution of women’s product to their immediate camp and to certain other relatives such as sons and mothers, and of men’s product to the wider residence group and to wives’ and potential wives’ parents. Specific obligations to certain relatives, processes of ‘demand sharing’ (Peterson 1993), and generalised reciprocity combined to determine patterns of distri- bution (see Keen, in press, chapter 11). In spite of the similarities, the study has revealed some variation in patterns of distribution. Kûnai and Ngarinyin men had specific obligations to provide meat to their parents as well as wife’s kin. Yuwaaliyaay and Pitjantjatjara men provided food to the prospective wife to ‘grow her up’. Obligations on the part of sister’s son to mother’s brother have been recorded in only in two cases (Kûnai and Yolngu); among Sandbeach people the senior of a MB-ZS pair did the giving (including senior sister’s son to junior mother’s brother). Kûnai and Pitjantjatjara husbands gave food to their wives indirectly through the wife’s parent. Consumption prohibitions according to age, gender, initiation and reproductive status were wide- spread, although the uneven data make comparisons difficult. Senior Yolngu men could impose ad hoc pro- hibitions by making production implements (such as canoes) or food itself sacred, and to make certain resources available only to them.

14 Exchange

People were able to produce various kinds of valued items which they exchanged for other valued items, according to gender, age, and structural position (such as birth order). In all regions ‘inalienable pos- sessions’ (Weiner 1992; Godelier 1999) included land, waters and related sacra. Inalienable posses- sions had a ‘sacred’ character which enhances their value, making them immune from exchange. In at least some regions inalienable possessions were related to ‘inalienable gifts’ in the forms of sacred objects and ceremonies. These are gifts that retain a connection with the donor such that the gift creates a relationship between donor and recipient (Gregory 1982; Godelier 1999). People exchange inalienable gifts for everyday objects, and in marriage exchange. Movement through the field of exchange relations varied between kinds of society and between individ- uals. Older brothers in the highly polygynous soci- eties had greater opportunities than their younger brothers to accrue control of resources associated with marriage. (see Keen, in press, chapter 12). Marriage exchange articulated both with produc- tion and distribution through marriage gifts and the reproduction of kin networks, and highlights the most obvious contrasts in exchange networks among the seven regions. In contrast to the shifting webs of Kûnai, Pitjantjatjara, and Sandbeach people, and reciprocal exchange among Yuwaaliyaay and Wiil/Minong people, the asymmetrical forms of mar- riage among Ngarinyin and their neighbours, and to an extent Yolngu people, reproduced very structured regional systems of exchange. In the wurnan exchange system of Ngarinyin people and their neighbours, marriage exchanges joined the exchange of foods, raw materials and sacred objects along ‘paths’ linking patri-groups in established sequences. Yolngu probably did not have quite such a neat and tidy system, but they did think in terms of paths of exchange, and items moved in customary directions. The high and very high levels of polygyny among Ngarinyin people and their neighbours and Yolngu people placed certain men at the nodes of exchange networks where they received gifts from intending and actual daughters’ and sisters’ husbands, and made gifts to intended and actual wives’ relatives. These same men (or some of them) led powerful and growing patri-groups, and controlled patri-group sacra.

I can’t tell if you’re disagreeing or adding context to the parent with this quote.

2 chickens for a lamb would be bartering, but that doesn’t happen.

It's been a while since I read that book but I believe the message was also that money allowed groups to grow larger than the Dunbar number. In a small community, you can keep track of the favours with everyone. It's also highly likely that you'll see someone you help out with again so there is a good chance you'll get paid back.

Haven't you ever done your own dishes? I use something so that it gets dirty, so I'll wash it off.

The jobs "no one wants to do" is usually work people are happy to do for themselves or occasionally their friends and family. The idea that "no one wants to do them" embeds the presumption that you spend eight hours a day doing just that. Of course no one wants to do that!

> Haven't you ever done your own dishes? I use something so that it gets dirty, so I'll wash it off.

Dishes is just one example. You may wash your own dishes, but did you buy those dishes from someone who was selling them as their job?

Do you grow all of your own food? Do you also sew your own clothes? Build your own shelter? Engineer your own transportation and manufacture your own iPhone?

The truth is that a society in which everyone is self-sufficient can’t look anything like modern society. Most of the advancements we take for granted are made possible by monetary exchange and people working in specialized roles in focused industries.

And for what it’s worth, back in college I had several roommates who clearly demonstrated that not everyone is willing to do their own dishes.

In the case of a small community, it can be left to volunteers (optionally offer them a meal/beer) or simply rotation so everyone does the unwanted jobs. It's a fair system and people will do it.

Every office, multi-tenant household and often times families themselves fight over this.

People will not do tasks merely because it's "fair". Otherwise crime would have evaporated, life would be harmonious, and judges would be bored.

Well, then it's back to violence. Truly the ultimate force.

On the other hand I think being bunced up with people I don't know, don't really care about or outright dislike is, at least to some extent, a side effect of the extreme centralization of work opportunities since the industrial revolution. Functionally, in terms of production, apartment complexes and offices are to people what coops are to chickens.

Practically, that doesn't work. Some people will do a half-arsed, terrible job and it's better for the community that they stay out of the way and contribute otherwise.

> simply rotation so everyone does the unwanted jobs. It's a fair system and people will do it.

I think that what would end up happening is that in even in a small group of people, it would naturally emerge that there are variations in quality, efficient, economies of scale, etc. Even in my immediate family, there are some menial jobs that my wife does 90-100% of and some menial jobs that I do 90-100% of. If we tried to make if 50-50 or have some type of rotation, we would both lose.

> If we tried to make if 50-50 or have some type of rotation, we would both lose.

Because you recognize this and aren't completely inflexible, you don't. Some degree of self-organization for mutual convenience can be relied on in much larger groups of people than two. For example, I often hear of shift workers trading shifts.

Exactly. And because we don't usually see all this work happening firsthand, we tend to severely underestimate the difficulty involved in meeting our many needs and desires.

Modern society makes it look easy, but it's extremely challenging for a 'Dunbar's number' sized tribe to meet all its members' needs at anything resembling the quality of life we're all used to. The healthcare/pharmaceutical needs alone would be borderline impossible. You'd have to be willing to tolerate much lower life expectancy, much higher mortality for infants and mothers, etc. etc.

We're veering from the topic of jobs no one wants to do. No, I didn't make any of my dishes (actually, maybe a butter knife) or make my own clothes, but I don't think these obviously qualify as jobs no one wants to do. I'd love to build my own home. There are people that enjoy woodworking, pottery, metal working, engineering...

> The truth is that a society in which everyone is self-sufficient can’t look anything like modern society.

That much I agree with. I don't propose total self sufficiency. I just think that dishes is a very bad example of a job that wouldn't get done if we didn't pay someone to do it and, more constructively, that a lot of jobs fall into this category. There is an obvious incentive for me to wash my dishes: I want my dishes to be clean before I use them. No one has ever paid me to wash dishes. I've washed dishes for myself, for friends and for family.

Dishwashing is a good example of an ubiquitous chore that almost everyone does without any market incentive, which strikes me as the exact opposite of a job no one wants to do and which therefore has to be paid for.

Work that most people actually really don't want to do is usually well paid for this reason. If you'd said hyperbaric welding instead of dishwashing I might be more inclined to agree that it needs more of an incentive than the mere satisfaction of meaningful work.

> Most of the advancements we take for granted are made possible by monetary exchange

It should not be a surprise that money plays an important part in a society where the allocation of labor is governed by money and those that have it. It does not follow from this observation that there can't be other sources of incentives to innovate and produce.

It should also be mentioned in any discussion where the current state of production is touted as something we should aspire to that there are indications that the current mode and level of production is undustainable and harmful to the environment. It's perhaps something we should change, but the market evidently isn't creating effective incentives to do so.

> And for what it’s worth, back in college I had several roommates who clearly demonstrated that not everyone is willing to do their own dishes.

There's an important difference between jobs no one wants to do and jobs not everyone wants to do.

> They go on for several years with several people, usually women, making the sacrifice and doing what needs to be done.

While I agree with most of what's said above, the proposition about "usually women, making the sacrifice" is dubious at best, if not untrue.

In any society or commune few will lead - the rest will be workers or followers. These will be both men and women, and they will both suffer from necessary sacrifices. Women are not a special class of people in those societies, and to claim that they suffer more prejudice is the usual sort of feminist-speak that has nothing to do with the reality of such communes.

Especially given that men have taken on tasks far more dangerous and difficult than doing the dishes and have always died sooner.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-men-often-die-earlie...

And the same is still true. Something that I hear no feminist talking about is the gap in occupational injury deaths, which is massive. We should really start working on it for more equal society.

I have seen feminists to push for women to be allowed in combat roles. I have seen them also promoting less gendered toys and occupations in child stories. Meaning also more cars for girls. Meaning driving, being cop as occupation for women too.

More equality here would mean exactly that - women driving and being on the streets more, women working in late money handling shifts, women in combat positions.

Then there are hazards in occupations where physical force is an actual factor - construction and some farming jobs. Hazard here is mostly from overextending people. There, I dont see employers running for someone physically weaker. But then again, there is feminist push to promote technological/construction interests to girls.

Tho in the latter category of jobs, unionization and regulation would do a lot for safety on itself. Then again, same can be said about driving. Driving jobs often push people toward a lot of hours and risk, whether you are tired or not. More regulation about how much you can drive would do a lot.

> More regulation about how much you can drive would do a lot.

Isn’t there already a ton of quite stringent regulation around how long you can drive? Or do you mean outside of the context of activities regulated by the FMCSA in the US?

I know you're joking— but I wish you wouldn't.

Encouraging women to become, say, crab fisherwomen, would just result in more humans being maimed and killed. For the same reason that female soccer players tear their ACL at shockingly higher rates than male ones.

This is kind of complicated, because men die sooner even if they don't do dangerous tasks. And in contemporary communes, there pretty often are not all that many super dangerous tasks to do. These communes dont have soldiers going into wars nor miners spending days in dust and dark.

There used to be difference in terms of men drinking and smoking much more then women, but that is equalizing too.

Basically, even if men dont do anything dangerous, dont drink nor smoke more, they still tend to die sooner.

And if we are talking about past, it gets complicated too due to huge amount of childbirth deaths and poverty affecting women and men differently (in some periods, prostitution being only realistic employment for single women basically which comes with its own risks). Meaning, it was not always the idylic family situation people tend to imagine when making these comparisons.

My source is https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-men-often-die-earlie...

What is yours?

The article you sent literally confirms what I said. It lists multiple reasons, more dangerous jobs being only one. The rest are mix of lifestyle and genetics.

As for smoking and alcohol, those statistics are easy to find too. Both contemporary and past ones.

Also, article starts with premise that author expects to live shorter then his wife - but he has extraordinary safe job.

The smoking and alcohol are copes for stress that they wouldn’t have without the added risk to their health and emotional well being.

"nor miners spending days in dust and dark"

Then how do they get metal?

I’ve never lived in or studied commune living but do you or the GP have nonfiction sources? I’m hesitant to take either of your claims as truth without them given my own lack of knowledge. Thank you!

I wondered about that, also. I'm pretty sure that some societies and communes are democratic, where the people make choices as a group, not having specific leaders that they are obligated to follow. I think that Quakers would be an example of one such society, they govern by what some call consensus based decision making.

I'm the last person to be charged with "feminist-speak" and I actually agree that it's usually women who end up in these undesired jobs.

Most communes and cults that give up money end up using some other form of control. NXIVM is a recent example, but most of these fringe movements discover women are more useful and less trouble than men.

I know it's anecdata, but from my experience cooking at a local church it was almost always the women who would come and help clean up after service. Not just women, of course, but they were definitely over-represented on that front.

Have you ever been a dinner party? Perhaps several? Observe who clears away the dishes.

> If the society has no money, there's going to be a whole lot of punishment going on

The mostly uncontacted hunter-gatherer bands in the Amazon jungle have no money, and not much punishment. Men all go out and hunt. If they are old or young or sick, the hunters give them food. If they are fine and refuse to go out on a hunt, they tend not to eat.

There is not much coercion. The women gather berries and the men hunt. If you don't go out and get food, you don't eat, unless you are gifted food as the young, old and infirm are. There's no coercion other than a hungry stomach.

Of course in civilized society, there are a class of rentier heirs who do not work, who have a relationship with those who do work, of expropriating their surplus labor time. Obviously this is done with coercion and punishment.

Are there examples of that in groups larger than Dunbar's number?

I don't know of any, but does it need to?

Yes, unless you'd like our current society, which is astronomically larger than dunbar's number, to collapse, in a most likely very violent manner.

This is an excellent point. The scaling of social accountability is a difficult problem. In my opinion it is a root problem of humanity and our current solutions are due for disruption.

It depends how groups are defined. Agriculture is a precondition for a society divided into classes (for social, not practical reasons). Groups from the beginning of human behavioral modernity to the rise of agricultural slave empires in Sumeria etc. 10,000 years back worked this way.

So from the drawing of cave paintings in El Castillo onward through the next 30,000 years, all humans lived like this. You could say it is human nature. Then class-divided society spread - 2000 years ago the modern Stockholm area was a classed society, whereas 200km north were hunter-gather bands. By modern day, hunter-gatherer areas have dwindled to remote areas.

The urge to have large numbers of people all under one grouping seems to be the impetus of a ruling class or ruler, from Alexander the Great to modern times. There are signs of hunter-gatherer bands in relations of mutual aid with other bands, for marriage and other things. One of the earliest pieces of literature, instructions of shuruppak, instructs rulers to get new slaves from far away lands.

(To reiterate a point from before - there is no evidence of class societies before 10,000 years ago. It is possible some tried to be a non-working ruling class, but the methods of production of migratory hunter gather bands made this difficult, and over a span of time impossible. Whereas with the rise of agriculture 10000 years ago, we have a mass of evidence of class societies.)

> Agriculture is a precondition for a society divided into classes (for social, not practical reasons).

I would completely reverse this... a society divided into classes is a precondition for agricultural society (for practical, not social reasons).

In the period of early civilization, convincing people to work 16 hours in the fields or in the mines is very difficult if they have any other viable option, including migrant hunter/gathering. Therefore, it is necessary to create a class of people that have no other viable options, either by slavery or other forms of inequality. The social structures surrounding inequality evolved as a method of maintaining this practical class stratification.

Indigenous Americans, prior to colonists’ arrival.

This might had been the case in only low density areas (same as in all other continents), the majority of indigenous Americans did not live in classless societies.

Nobody said no classes. There wasn’t money like there was in Europe. There were by some intellectually honest estimates 50m people living in N and S America at the time of arrival, a huge number of people were living day to day without money.

[source] Disney

Indigenous Americans practiced warfare, rape, slavery, and cannibalism no different than other peoples around the world.

"There's no coercion other than a hungry stomach."

This sounds like the classic punishment of being sent to your room without dinner, right? Removing the basic necessity of food is about as coercive as it gets. Even in civilized society we feed prisoners, give food to the hungry, etc.

A better way to phrase it would be "compelled by reality".

Maybe there's an even better way to phrase it... Other types of coercion are also part of reality.

Reality being land owners backed by the state who don't allow people to wander off and grow their own food?

During the depression, some governments actually had areas in the government land, like parks, that people could sign up for a garden plot. You could grow your own food. This allowed people in the towns and city land to grow on.

That's interesting to hear! I guess it matters how many people are struggling whether they might allow such things. (The group protects itself more than it protects low-status individuals in the group?)

>There is not much coercion. The women gather berries and the men hunt.

Are you sure about this, or are you treating a "noble savage" fantasy as if it were fact?

I've read some early settler accounts of Australian Aboriginals, and they would beat the living shit out of the lower-status members of their society (especially women) on a regular basis.

Sometimes the beatings would be followed up with rape, and the perpetrators would get away with it Scot free because they were high-status.

> Australian Aboriginals, and they would beat the living shit out of the lower-status members of their society

As I said, there are societies where women gather berries and men hunt. There aren't really "lower status members" of those societies. Including the Aboriginal Australians who lived this way. As the book Dark Emu shows, some Aboriginals lived as hunter-gatherers, some as farmers. The aboriginal farmers did not live this way, and certainly may have had lower status members who were mistreated.

I should point out some people have qualms over portions of Dark Emu, but generally not over this. Even a critic of this point like Ian Keen admits there was some form of farming by some Aboriginals.

Modern society has problems with violence and sex crimes against women, too.

The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker makes a compelling case that violence (including rape) are dramatically lower in modern societies all around the world.

I'd buy that. I just didn't know that it was relevant or comparable to modern state backing of the rentier rich. wasn't sure how to judge such a comparison. I know that modern governemnts will send uniformed guys with guns if you mess with a rich persons property. But I wondered if aborigines beat low status members and women for economic reasons, or for mating reasons, or for something else?

>But I wondered if aborigines beat low status members and women for economic reasons, or for mating reasons, or for something else?

I'm not sure if you're Aussie, but please understand that problems like domestic violence and incest/rape still exist in Aboriginal communities to a large extent.

There are also an army of "nice" middle class, urban white people performing the most mind-bending mental gymnastics possible to shift the blame away from the perpetrators and onto white society in general (who, to be fair, brutally mistreated the Aboriginal population for the better part of two centuries during a colonial campaign of conquest).

To me, within that context, the more interesting question is not whether or not there were economic/mating pressures on aboriginal populations that lead to the brutal behviour, but why a middle-class 21st century professional is looking to excuse it.

Ah, I wasn't thinking about any of that stuff. I was thinking of whether small economies could exist without economic coercion backed by violence, where this thread started. The Yanamamo were mentioned as a group that doesn't do that, the men and women carry about their work without the need for coercion. You replied that there's violence against low-status members in Aborigines communities, and wondered if the Yanamamo really were non-violent.

I don't know that it's relevant that the Aborigines are violent. Nor, I admit in hindsight, was my reply about modern people also being violent. I intuited that your comment was irrelevant, but didn't do a good job of putting that into words.

The question was whether the proverbial dishes could get done without violence, and if the Yanamamo do it then the answer is "yes", it is possible, regardless of whatever Aborigines or modern people do. I don't think that white guilt over the treatment of Aborigines is relevant to that question, either.

I'm a bit familiar with the Yanamamo. I had a class that focused on them specifically. I know that they have graduations of violence, mostly to do with mating, which can boil over between villages, but I don't remember there being any economic coercion, men and women do their different jobs without any punishment/violence that I can recall.

(A discussion like this could morph into the idea of "women's work", asking why do the Yanamamo men hunt and the women work. But societies using money have the same concept of women's work, so that would be a separate conversation form money vs no-money societies.)

Until someone shows me different, I think the the Yanamamo comment is right, based on my knowledge of them they don't use economic coercion that I know of to proverbially get the dishes washed.

Apologies for bringing white guilt into it. I misread your comment and reacted.

Regarding the aborigines, the impression I got from the accounts was that these acts of violence were more about dominance than strict economic coercion. I get where you're coming from in that regard.

I would be interested to hear what an anthropologist has to say, but until then it seems like your evidence is stronger.

Citation needed. This would certainly be atypical. Uncontacted tribes in other parts of the world (e.g. the Sentinelese) are famously violent.

It's easy to imagine paradise in cultures we don't understand but reality is rarely that pretty.

> Uncontacted tribes in other parts of the world (e.g. the Sentinelese) are famously violent.

In the Amazon loggers and miners, often illegally, encroach on indigenous areas and kill members of the hunter-gatherer bands. Yes, the bands sometimes react in a "famously violent" response to these massacres.

I don't really see the connection in how these 50 person bands act together with their "famously violent" response to outsiders who are killing them.

Also the people I am speaking if are living in bands, not tribes.

I highly encourage you to read some ethnography of the Yanomani, to purge this ludicrous and incorrect vision of noble savagery from your mind.

I don't understand why the dishwashers leaving needs to cause societal breakdown, though. After they leave, surely someone thinks "Hm, we have no clean dishes any more and nobody's volunteering, so I guess I'll need to clean some dishes, if only for myself, but then once I'm in dishwashing mode it's efficient to clean more dishes than I personally need, and even better if someone decides to reward me for cleaning their dishes by doing my laundry since they realized someone needs to do that".

I mean, isn't this "the invisible hand of the market" at play, just without the intermediate medium of exchange?

It is true, though, as the end of the article points out, living this way defies pretty much any kind of planning, and that can be scary for people.

You'd be fine with doing a number of people's dishes every single day, dishes that are never cleaned by their user, for multiple hours with no pay because you're in dishwashing mode?

Is it "usually women" who do the unglamorous jobs that no one else wants to do? This doesn't really seem true, but maybe you have a source that shows it?

> From cooking and cleaning, to fetching water and firewood or taking care of children and the elderly, women carry out at least two and a half times more unpaid household and care work than men.

https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/csw61/redistribute-...

If one is in a commune, all work is unpaid, so how is this relatable?

If referencing modern society in the west, who is fetching wood and water?!

Is this stat from 1870?

> If referencing modern society in the west, who is fetching wood and water?!

There's more to unpaid labour than fetching wood and water. Women still do significantly more housework than men, even if both hold full time employment.

That may be true, or untrue.

However, citing a stat from before anyone was born, isn't helpful in a modern context.

Replying to this with "it is still true, because", now that your citation fell flat on its face, may not be the best strategy.

Unpaid doesn't always mean that it's the least glamorous (in the absence of compensation for anyone). Take anything on Dirty Jobs, for example. If you're talking the difference between washing laundry and cleaning out septic tanks most people would prefer one over the other in the absence of other pay.

From what I’ve seen, men get stuck with the jobs women don’t want to do. Just look at our current society. Who are the miners, the garbage workers, the delivery people?

You’ll notice there’s a push to get women into comfy office jobs like programmer and not strenuous jobs like oil rig worker.

Someone can reply to me and cherry pick to show counter examples but for the most part it’s men doing these jobs.

Maybe if it was only the people who did the jobs that no one wants to do who get paid then people wouldn’t be trying to get rid of the money system. How many thousands of years would a dishwasher need to work in order to earn what someone does in one year from making 100 million in a year as a corporate fat cat, a sports player, movie star or a business owner

If you can wash dishes for a billion people in the world, freeing everyone from the burden of taking, sorting, drying, washing dishes, putting all dish washers out of work, i guess, you can become pretty rich too. People will have time to do something else.

How much money should the modern inventor of the electric dishwasher receive, given the labour saved by the invention?

And as much as I utterly fail to get spectator sports in general, footballers get their money specifically because people pay to watch their teams and the teams are more popular when they win and therefore the teams directly bid against each other for the best players. Similar logic for movies and their stars, and in both cases there are a lot of people at the bottom who do similar things for approximately nothing as it’s fun — but they’re not the best in the world at what they do, and only the best can compete with the best.

The connection in sports and media is a lot more direct than asking if (and how much) a corporation’s overall performance can be attributed to the skills of given fat cat acting as a multiplier on the work done by those under them.

And then you have the last question: what is the stuff which must be done? Most individuals could live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, yet no city (UK definition rather than USA) can survive everyone trying that at the same time, let alone the whole world. Is shipping in the “must have” list? If just shipping stopped, much of the UK would starve even if everyone turned their gardens into personal farms like in WW2. Who makes the ships? Who digs up the raw materials for the ship?

You seem to think I don’t understand why these people get paid large sums. That is not so. I merely said these people/“jobs” are the reason many are for doing away with the current money system as a means for ensuring essential work that no one wants to do is done. Personally I am for federal laws that impose a logarithmic tax scaling system where anything over $2 million personal income in owned assets is taxed at an 75% rate and an emigration tax of 95%. The only rights are what the people decide is right. I’m so tired of hearing about how people are entitled to this and that unquestionably. No one is entitled to anything but what everyone else is willing to let them have and what they are able to keep everyone else from taking. Right and wrong are about as real as the shapes and animals we are in clouds and smoke.

Societies can work without money, or without using them that often, there used to be many self-sufficient peasant communities (villages and even entire mountain valleys) that used to manage just fine without actually using (much) money. Of course that modernity and the industrial revolution put a stop to that but it can be done.

>They go on for several years with several people... making the sacrifice and doing what needs to be done.

That sounds like modern retail workers who have spouses to supplement earnings to house & feed themselves.

Yeah. With money, there are lots of problems such as this too. I agree that money is evil. But I think a system with money is slightly less evil than a system with no money.

> I agree that money is evil. But I think a system with money is slightly less evil than a system with no money.

Sounds quite not-evil to me.

I do my own dishes now, I'll do my own dishes then.

Your thesis is non-sequitur, and speaking frankly, degenerate and extraordinarily cynical. Communes are experimental, experiments often fail, that's just the way shit works. Out of those failures, there are communes that have succeeded - you fail to mention them. You don't need gods, or leaders, or governance just the instinctual wanting for both community and self-preservation. Government is reactionary, not preventative,[1] and coercion is endemic to the human population it's tit-for-tat, and even more so in the modern era the great equalizer is among us and widely proliferated. It's not a question of genetic lottery anymore.

Money isn't actually the problem, it is disproportion and, duly, the concentration. That concentration equates to leverage, which is influence. Influence has been used to commit atrocities from times immemorial, it is, if not the foremost then among the foremost elements of human oppression. Historically this has been aceded to by the mass population through various modes of manipulation. It is actually exploitative predation which is founded on artifice, suppression and innate blind spots in social and economic cognition.[2] Worker owned cooperatives, at least superficially, seem to be the only structure that isn't human-perverse which promote both autonomy and community without being disruptively disproportionate in their allotment of power - Mondragon Corporation for example.

[1] Think of how often laws are violated despite the possible consequences: murder, neglect, speeding, embezzlement, bribery... [2] Artifice being the hard work fallacy, which is actually predominately luck with lottery ticket odds and personal delusions of exceptionalism. Suppression being the ceaseless toil the masses necessarily endeavor in to support their livelihood. Blind spots in being inherently biased towards trust, economic blind spots emerging out of ignorance promulgated by that status quo and the nigh-complete opacity presented to workers.

Devil's advocate here. Failing sufficient encouragement to do tasks (psychological/sociological rewards as got through volunteering), most of those tasks can be automated or replaced by an alternative.

Not in a reasonable time frame. Do you really believe we could fully automate all dishwashing over the next decade?

Plausible it could be automated. No idea how much it would cost, and while electric dishwashers have been a thing for longer than I’ve been alive, there’s not enough room in my current place to install one, and a humanoid cleaning robot would also have nowhere to stow itself.

Who's going to do it until it's automated?

Who's going to pay to automate it?

Didn’t groups of people live without money just fine for most of human existence? We worked together. Money only entered the equation when the groups we lived and interacted with started getting too big and impersonal. Generosity is easier when you know the people benefiting from your work. Greed and freeloading are easier when you don’t.

I would argue that we are living in a all time high of human generosity, on a scale previously unimaginable. It just isn't carried out on a personal and emotional level.

Does human generosity scale though? I’m not so sure. Because we’re also living in a time of human hunger, human thirst, and human displacement previously unimaginable. The generosity doesn’t seem able to keep pace.

>we’re also living in a time of human hunger, human thirst, and human displacement previously unimaginable.

I fundamentally disagree. I think the percent of humans suffering from hunger, thirst, sickness, and displacement is also at an all time low.

Uh yeah this is totally wrong. Life has never been better for the vast majority of the world's population.

I feel you are presenting a false dichotomy. If this was true, why are the most boring jobs not paid the best? It seems that capitalist money is just hidden punishment: do something you don't want to do for a pittance, because you have no leverage. In a family, in a community there are also ways to incentivise prosocial behaviour just by culture, which is why e.g. most of German emergency operations are volunteer based. And in most associations, people are if not happy then perfectly willing to do the boring job if that's the way they become a part of the association. Social norms and customs and their establishment are a whole lot more complicated than "punishment from leaders"

> If this was true, why are the most boring jobs not paid the best?

Likely because many of those boring jobs have many more people qualified/capable to do them than there are spots to be filled. Even though we seem to need a lot of people to take goods out of totes and put them into cardboard boxes, there are a lot more people who are able to do that work than spots needed.

So what's motivating them? The post is responded to implied it's something else than punishment.

Maybe a sense of accomplishment, a feeling that they've done something with their day, some structure, a place to be that isn't their house, something to do besides watch TV all day, some interaction with their co-workers, a bit of exercise?

Do you not feel any sense of accomplishment from mundane things that you do well once they're done? It doesn't have to solely be that they prefer food with their meals.

...but the post claimed it's either money or punishment, and I pointed out a false dichotomy in that. I'm with you, but GP isn't

> why are the most boring jobs not paid the best?

Because most boring jobs require skills that everyone has. Specialization makes the other jobs have higher salaries, not because they are less boring, but because they can only be done by a smaller amount of people.

I agree that in small situations you can bring social pressure to solve this problem. Sometimes. Some families break up over issues like this.

As you scale up, it gets harder and harder. You get a few people who are intentional free riders. The hard workers see the free riders sitting right next to them stop. Then more and more hard workers defect.

That system of emergency operations is a great counter example. You correctly point out that it's good to have a system with more than just monetary incentives. You have to have a mix of monetary incentives, punishments and other incentives such as just the feeling that you're helping out, or perhaps prestige.

I'm not arguing to get rid of all incentives except money. Those other levers are vital. I'm arguing against a system with no money.

The Victoria man is a radical, he's there to start an interesting conversation, he's succeeding.

> power to compel people to do the dishes... and some type of punishment to mete out.

Moneyed, Adam Smith style capitalist economies still had slaves, colonies, wars of plunder.

It's tough. I see from your other commenters you're rooting for the guy. The mainstream opinion that executives should be paid less, that the lowest wages should rise, these are freebies and could be implemented in an afternoon, with no consequences. All the changes in a person's day to day life would be for the better. Mainstream people advocate against inequality not the elimination of money, but yes, there is a transfer, a "handout," as part of those goals.

> Who would wash the dishes?

Presumably the person who dirtied them. So they can use clean dishes and not get sick from mold growing from the old food?

Science has given us plenty of evidence to do as we do in a number of contexts.

Deferring to the politically empowered is an unscientific basis for economic activity.

We need not rely on the superstitions of dead men who were less educated than us.

I hate arguments like this. People who want clean dishes will do dishes. And no there's no free-rider problem because they don't have to do dishes for anyone else.

> People who want clean dishes will do dishes.

And people who want to eat will farm their own food? And people who want medicine will craft their own medications?

Self-sufficiency and moneyless societies are pure fantasy, unless they include giving up all modern amenities. I don’t think these people really want to return to the days of hunter gatherer lifestyles or even the days of homesteading.

It’s an extreme amount of work to be self-sufficient.

To add to that it isn't even legal to be self sufficient. I know how to make several prescription drugs but the moment I provide them to anyone else or anyone finds out I make them I will be put in a cage.

It also almost always requires a lot of land. You could not feed the globe if everyone was self-sufficient.

You're moving the goalpost while also adding the artificial restriction that people can't cooperate.

> I don’t think these people really want to return to the days of hunter gatherer lifestyles or even the days of homesteading.

Some people do, but we pretty much made it illegal.

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