Hacker News Reader

It seems like you're focusing on a loss of money as a "stick" (punishment) and saying we could ignore that and just keep operating as usual. But it's also the "carrot" (motivation) signalling the demand and value placed on the activity by others.

In the end, aren't all the money and ledgers are just a way to simplify the ridiculously complex trades required to make modern society work? We don't want to have to exchange sacks of rice and live chickens when we see the doctor and he doesn't want to have to get those chickens converted into barley or whatever it is the medical supply company owner wants this week.

If you remove this signal, you don't just remove a threat of stagnation. You also remove efficiency signals to curtail under-valued work. Just as easily, the participants could do other absurd things instead. The grocer could keep performing shelf-stocking actions while the shelves and back storage area are empty. The doctor could decide they prefer to drive around in an empty delivery truck, while the truck driver decides to sit in the clinic and talk to patients about the weather. Etc.

>You also remove efficiency signals to curtail under-valued work.

I'd argue that the typical diffuse ownership structures you find in most consumer-facing businesses today has the same effect, if not as absolute. The people who see the economic signals and they people with on-the-ground knowledge are split up: a sort of business logic hemispherectomy.

Money itself isn't the bug. It's the ability to abuse money to disconnect yourself from the real economy. How easy it is to abuse money depends on how it is designed. When people save money perishable goods like food are sitting on the shelves waiting to be bought, then money will outstay its welcome. The food is gone but the money is still there.

“Only money that goes out of date like a newspaper, rots like potatoes, rusts like iron, evaporates like ether, is capable of standing the test as an instrument for the exchange of potatoes, newspapers, iron and ether. For such money is not preferred to goods either by the purchaser or the seller. We then part with our goods for money only because we need the money as a means of exchange, not because we expect an advantage from possession of the money. So we must make money worse as a commodity if we wish to make it better as a medium of exchange." — Silvio Gesell, “The Natural Economic Order”

> make money worse as a commodity if we wish to make it better as a medium of exchange

This describes inflation, in so many words. That's why central banks targeting a low level inflation is an excellent idea - it makes people spend money, rather than save. Spending can include investment to stave off inflation's effects - which, in turn, makes for increases in productivity over all.

Inflation incentivizes debt, debt leads to fragility, and then we're surprised when things break.

> But the "market's invisible hand" relies on people being more motivated by their wealth stash than their behavior.

Nobody has found a better way, though they often try.

> "The economy" is in reality a giant standoff where every member of the standoff would just stop maintaining society unless they get paid for it.

That's an immutable fact of human nature. Even cradle to grave propaganda doesn't change it. It's much better to swim with that current than against it.

> Nobody has found a better way, though they often try.

This I agree with.

> That's an immutable fact of human nature. Even cradle to grave propaganda doesn't change it.

This I disagree with. Past societies saw far more social cohesion at points than our modern one. Especially on certain smaller scales, people were more willing to assist one another in the act of remaining alive without being compensated financially.

For instance- many people now think it would be unreasonable to help a friend move without some form of reward (money, food, etc.) This sort of value exchange for reward would be considered disrespectful in many past cultures and even some present cultures. Unwillingness to work without immediate reward not an immutable fact of human nature.

Helping out your friends and locals now and then is also normal human behavior. But it does not extend to running a society that way, and never has. It is rooted in building a network of mutual obligation, a common trait in small communities. It's not really considered a "reward" or payment.

> Unwillingness to work without immediate reward not an immutable fact of human nature.

Yeah, it is, as no society has managed to make that work as an organizing principle. Even the Israeli kibbutzen have failed. Altruism rarely extends beyond family and close friends, and even then, it isn't reliable.

Altruism basically means you are working for favors instead of money. However, people are much more likely to default on favors owed to you because it is harder to compare the value of one favor to another, and this creates opportunity to return a favor that is worth less than the one you were given.

>” However, people are much more likely to default on favors owed to you”

I’ve never thought about it this way before, and it’s a pretty profound quote.

The weird thing about reciprocity (exchanging favors) is the value of the favor is rarely considered. For example, the exchange of pizza for help in moving.

Of course, if you're too cheap over too long a period, people may stop doing favors for you.

Better ways have been found a long time ago in ancient egypt:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_%28currency%29

The great thing about using ancient Egypt to support social theories is that there's no evidence there.

For example, we still don't know if the workers who build the pyramids were slaves or freemen. Kind of a big deal for that society.

This is sort of a reply to several of your comments in this thread about how we could still do all the things we do if money didn't exist. Your point reminds me of something a co-worker once said; he pointed out that "profit" is another name for "inefficiency." That is, in another context or agnostic of value-judgements, the difference between input and output which forms "profit" would be looked at as an inefficiency or defect in any other system.

On the one hand, yes of course the economy is all about specialization and then exchanging the fruits of specialized production between people. This last can happen via money, or barter, or a dictator (benevolent or not) confiscating everything and redistributing it, or some mix of the above, and maybe other methods.

One of the hard problems here is what to specialize in and to what extent. This is a hard problem to solve even in a static economy, and even harder if circumstances keep changing...

The "standoff" description seems to assume a static economy. If circumstances change, maybe we as a society need a grocer for only 4 hours a day but could use an extra half-shift truck driver. But how to discover that?

I have absolutely no idea how or even if that could be discovered, which is why my original comment was more about expressing frustration than offering a solution.

I do know that several things going on currently will make it more impossible to discover: increased financialization of commodities, outsourcing, destruction of culture via removal of differentiating markers, etc. If any society is going to discover the half-shift truck driver economy, they're going to be one that is almost entirely self-sustaining and committed to perpetuation of itself, not one that is leveraged up to the eyeballs, suffers from a total lack of manufacturing expertise within its component citizens, and relies on cheap foreign labor to make everything.

>notice how weakened this entire process is as a result of revolving around money

>not necessarily saying that I think money is a bug. It might be a feature.

Yup, looks to me like the problem is not the existence of money, rather its nonexistence.

Financial problems don't actually occur when there is no lack of money.