"Do you not like money?"
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It's a huge downer all around and reduces my ability to enjoy life. But, such is life. I'm forced to deal with it, so I do. But I yearn for a better way.
It doesn't have to be this way, it can change. Maybe not in our lifetimes but we plant the seeds so future generations can live better lives.
I'll just say this... if you actually believe AI will make money obsolete, I'd be happy to take all your obsolete currency off your hands.
What we actually need is another luddite revolution.
Unfortunately, the world has been turning in the wrong direction - basic human decency is considered "woke" and "leftism". Any attempt to make a just society is called "communism" and shouted down aggressively by the people who would most benefit from it.
We need to change these things.
Something Gorbachev said on the fall of the Soviet Union stuck with me for the past couple decades, that they "failed because they tried to make a better man".
Are we that doomed?
Further, the notion that the USSR failed because "they tried to make a better man" is an absurd whitewashing of Soviet history.
Isn't he referring specifically to the notion of the 'New Soviet Man' here, the idea that a communist economic model would produce fundamentally different humans as a result? I can see why he would describe that as a flawed approach, but you're right that it'd be an odd thing to blame for the fall of the Soviet Union over the other factors which contributed to it.
You seem to be of the belief that if you "tweak the nobs" just right, things will be magically be fixed, this is naive. The law of unintended consequences has been observed countless times throughout history when people have tried to do exactly that. This is extremely naive.
Even Star Trek itself that you appear to be a fan of. The Earth is post scarcity, they show that the Federation isn't the benevolent force that they pretend to be (This is hinted multiple times in TNG and shown outright in DS9) and that there are others that are negatively affected by the Federation and its policies e.g the Marquis.
That's hard to believe. It's such an obvious outcome.
Star Trek's a cool show. The bible's a cool book. They are guides on how to do better, not reality, not true events. That doesn't change that they can be used to reflect on ourselves/our society to improve them, nor does that condemn us to accept immorality/lower standards as inevitable.
1) People take zero hour jobs for various reasons. I worked on minimum wage for 8 years, I wasn't condemned to a life of poverty.
2) You have no proof of it being "designed in" because zero hour contracts exist. Repeating the statement does not make it true. The fact is that the law of unintended consequences is a thing that has been observed repeatedly.
3) I don't view it as "our" society. I don't even really know what people mean by that. I don't see it like that at all. I live in a country (England) and I see the government/state as adversarial to my interests generally. Many of the people in England and the UK don't share many of the same values as I do.
> Star Trek's a cool show. The bible's a cool book. They are guides on how to do better, not reality, not true events.
The fact that you equate Star Trek with the Bible is very troubling. Star Trek is an entertainment show with a fanbase, it is not a guide to do better. The Bible on the hand is much more important (even if many here don't recognise its importance) and this is coming from someone that is an Atheist.
> That doesn't change that they can be used to reflect on ourselves/our society to improve them, nor does that condemn us to accept immorality/lower standards as inevitable.
The point I was making that many people don't agree on what the improvement should be. What you believe is an improvement / moral etc. maybe seen by others as regressions and/or immoral. The writers in DS9 understood there were those that had this different point of view.
2. It is baked in at this point. People with zero hour jobs are at an extreme disadvantage. It's not adversarial government, it's business choice. There are many countries with larger burdens placed on business that have businesses that aren't forced into the zero hour practice. There companies that chose not to adopt zero hour practices. Stating that the government forced business into it doesn't make it true, and the fact the above businesses exist observably shows it's not a direct law of unintended consequences but a choice by business.
3. This position is outside the norm.
Both Star Trek and the bible are moral parables used to shape people's ideas. I'm guessing you are younger and don't understand the 90s tech ethos around Trek. Where I worked Trek was always playing in some room during lunch. Zero people were reading the bible. But I'm from the 80s/90s bay area (ish, Santa Cruz). Trek was definitely a parable that gave people something to aspire to.
Yes, differing views exist. You are the one that seems hostile to them, writing off your entire society because of your personal interests ("I don't view it as "our" society""). Most people agree on what improvement should be (people should be able to afford to raise families and live in some level of dignity and freedom from scarcity, people should not have to fear crime, education should be encouraged) they just don't agree how to fund it nor make it happen.
It was just me. However it works for people who aren't single and do have kids e.g I know a woman who does deliveries and she can work as little or as much as she wants, while her husband has a full time job. You can't do that with mandated hours. She prefers it and thinks it is great.
You are making a bunch of assumptions about people's needs. People are individuals and they know what is best for them and not you.
> 2. It is baked in at this point. People with zero hour jobs are at an extreme disadvantage. It's not adversarial government, it's business choice. There are many countries with larger burdens placed on business that have businesses that aren't forced into the zero hour practice.
You keep on asserting this as a truism, I know plenty of people doing zero hour jobs and they do just ok. Most of these people are Students, Younger people or people who wish to work part time.
As for burdens. In the UK and Europe economic growth is dead because of these large burdens.
> There companies that chose not to adopt zero hour practices. Stating that the government forced business into it doesn't make it true, and the fact the above businesses exist observably shows it's not a direct law of unintended consequences but a choice by business.
I never claimed that governments forced business. I said government regulation could have created the incentive. I made no definitive statement. People constantly put words in your mouth in these discussions. Businesses will generally follow incentives. Not all will adopt the same practices if it doesn't fit in with it business model.
> 3. This position is outside the norm.
Yes I am aware. That doesn't mean that the norm is correct. I can explain exactly why I think this and give exhaustive examples to back up what I believe.
> Both Star Trek and the bible are moral parables used to shape people's ideas. I'm guessing you are younger and don't understand the 90s tech ethos around Trek. Where I worked Trek was always playing in some room during lunch. Zero people were reading the bible. But I'm from the 80s/90s bay area (ish, Santa Cruz). Trek was definitely a parable that gave people something to aspire to.
You make a lot of assumptions. I am in my early 40s. I understand the feeling at the time. I've moved on from the 90s, I didn't stop evolving my beliefs, they changed when I realised my previous beliefs about how the world operated was incorrect.
Just because people aren't reading the Bible in your break room doesn't mean it isn't important. Star Trek just isn't and will be all but a curiosity in a generation or two. The Bible I wager won't.
> Yes, differing views exist. You are the one that seems hostile to them, writing off your entire society because of your personal interests ("I don't view it as "our" society"").
No I am not hostile to the normal people. You have no idea what I think. Taking one phrase I said and then turning that into how I view everyone is disingenuous.
I had previously lived outside of the UK for many years and it isn't unusual for expats to have a bit of a culture shock when coming home. Travel tends to open your mind to new ideas and when you come back home you see everything with a new set of eyes.
> Most people agree on what improvement should be (people should be able to afford to raise families and live in some level of dignity and freedom from scarcity, people should not have to fear crime, education should be encouraged) they just don't agree how to fund it nor make it happen.
No they don't. That the entire divide in both the US, The UK and Europe. There also will never be freedom from scarcity.
Liking that fictional universal star trek, all you would have to do is eradicate pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttoney, envy, and sloth. Then we could all have nice things.
Or if you don't like that set - eradicate acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power.
Then with those easy changes, we could eradicate poverty
Total bs. But helps certain groups explain away/wave away that they are crappy human beings.
Not much. The rules have emerged, there's only small amounts of deliberate interference with that natural process.* Deliberate societal rules (statute laws, rulings) have to fit to what's politically viable, which is to say, what people in general like: and people in general are incoherent, only diffidently cooperative, and run on intuition, so mostly we get accidental rules instead of deliberately designed ones.
* Interesting instance of when the word "natural" applies to things created by humans.
I wouldn't want to make out with my neighbors to solve conflicts anyway.
You clearly need to move ;-)
Your life would be better if you devoted so much time to food, clothing, and shelter? That's what money is. If you dislike money, a mere change in attitude such that you believe you're pursuing the essentials should suffice.
>I hate that its used as a weapon by those
This seems doubtful. Those in warzones have my sympathy, but I think that it's pretty likely that you live in a place where it's not used as a weapon at all. Your family remains unstarved, no one's burning your crops or confiscating famine relief off the UN trucks.
>But I yearn for a better way.
You live in an era of material abundance beyond the wildest imaginations of your ancestors. Even poor people are fat. Clothing is so cheap we throw it away if it gets a cheeseburger stain... your grandma didn't slave away for years to gift you that roughspun, sackcloth shirt. Etc etc.
That's a very serious oversimplification of the reality, in my opinion. Money, in our society, is much more than a means for survival.
> This seems doubtful.
I'm not sure how that seems doubtful. All you have to do is pay attention to the news, or (even though this is hardly a modern phenomenon) pay attention to what today's ultrawealthy are saying and doing to see the truth of it.
You don't even have to look at the ultrawealthy. For a more common, low-level, example, look at the spying that marketers engage in. They use money to engage in those attacks, and they do it in order to get more money.
> You live in an era of material abundance beyond the wildest imaginations of your ancestors.
Absolutely true, but irrelevant to my point.
> Even poor people are fat.
Not because of abundance, but because eating well is too expensive.
No it isn't. Eating poorly is often (much) more expensive that eating properly. Non-processed food is actually reasonably priced for the most part. Fruit and Veg is reasonably cheap. Premium cuts of meat can be expensive.
Just looking at my recent trip to the supermarket:
* A 6 pack bag of apples (Pink Ladies) was less than £1.50
* A bag of easy peeler oranges was less than £1.50
* A bag of new potatoes £2
* Large Bunch of Bananas are about ~£2
* 12 Pack of Large Eggs - ~£2.50
* 12 Rashers of Bacon - ~£2.50-4
* 1kg packet of Chicken Thighs (Raw) are ~£3.50 (2 chicken thighs a day).
* Broccoli ~£1
* Spouts ~£1
* Beans ~£1
* Berry flavoured Tea Bags ~£2
* Bag of Italian Ground Coffee ~£3-4
* 240 Pack of Yorkshire Tea Bags (will last me a month or two) ~£6
* Store brand Olive oil based Margarine ~£2
* Premium Wholemeal Loaf of Bread ~£2-3
* 4 pints of Semi Skimmed Milk £2.50
* Various table Sauces ~£1-2
That is less than £50 and I don't need to buy some of those weekly. Each day I am eating about 1800-2000 calories (I've put myself on a calorie controlled diet to lose weight) and this will last me most of the week if not the entire week.
If I buy ready meals they are £3-6 each. Premade Pizza is £4-6. So much more expensive and objectively worse for your health than cooking yourself.
One takeaway meal from the local Chinese will cost me £22 (a main and a side), Noodles will cost £7-11 depending on the dish. A pizza from the local pizza shop is £8-10. This excludes delivery. The local deli will charge me £4-5 for a meal deal (Chicken Wrap, Snack and Drink).
McDonalds is about £7 for a Big Mac Meal. KFC is similar for one of their Box Meals.
Eating well and making someone else do the work is expensive. For the lazy, this means eating well really is expensive.
Most kitchen equipment except for the white goods is dirt cheap and even the really cheap stuff can last for years. Most meals take me 30-40 minutes to cook maximum.
In any-event. It is objectively more expensive to buy junk food, that includes the cheaper junk. Once I cut out the trips to the takeaway and the deli, I was surprised at how much more money I had per month.
The fact is that people tend to want to eat junk.
* Bananas, a fine inexpensive convenient snack.
* Buy bread and sandwich fillers, add sliced tomato, not awful for you and not time consuming.
* Tea is cheap, I like tea.
* Cereal can be good if you can find one that hits the sweet spot between a bowl of chocolate and a bowl of chaff. Some sort of granola maybe.
A weapon is just a tool that can be applied to give a person negative consequences by the wielder.
Most people experience money being used as a weapon, on a regular basis.
Sure, people can be histrionic and hyperbolic.
Other people refusing to give you money isn't "weaponizing money". It's called "sane boundaries".
>Most people experience money being used as a weapon, on a regular basis.
Few people in western nations ever experience that in their entire lives. You couldn't even come up with an anecdote that would pass the smell test.
The question is whether you'd continue to do what you do if you didn't have to. I love my work - I find it challenging and engaging, I have great colleagues, furiously creative and smart, who also love what they do, but how much of our work is only accounting for overhead? At which point keeping track of all money flowing through the economy becomes the objective of the economy?
Let's think about means-tested financial assistance: seems reasonable to make sure money doesn't go to people who actually don't need it, but we also need to be careful not to invest too much in fraud detection that we spend more on it than we would covering for fraud. Wouldn't the incentives to get money you don't need vanish if you had something like UBI covering the basics of food, clothing, and shelter?
Most people wouldn't. People prefer leisure. While I like programming, most of the work I do is tedious. I would rather spend my time riding my mountain bike, working on my Land Rover, or programming a video game.
> Wouldn't the incentives to get money you don't need vanish if you had something like UBI covering the basics of food, clothing, and shelter?
No. The vast majority of people don't just want the bare basics in life. Thinking otherwise is simply naive.
It's a dumb question. Would I want to continue to eat, to be warm in the winter, and have the basic tools needed to live? Your question sounds like juvenile fantasy.
>I love my work - I find it challenging and engaging,
My work is a paycheck. I don't have to love it. I don't need it as a lifestyle, or a hobby, or a religion. It's mildly lucrative, long-term, and they seem to get something out of the deal too. If I wanted a family, I've got one at home and those are the people I love.
>Let's think about means-tested financial assistance: seems reasonable to make sure money doesn't go to people who actually don't need it,
Half the people in this thread don't even know what money is. It's been abstracted away beyond their monkey brained ability to understand it's nature. They think billionaires have billions.
>Wouldn't the incentives to get money you don't need vanish if you had something like UBI covering the basics of food, clothing, and shelter?
Never ceases to amaze me that those who grew up comfortably in middle class homes are in such a hurry to go on welfare. "Please, give me the Medicare for everyone". No, I have no great desire to ever be on welfare, and I say in all seriousness that I would prefer to starve to death, slowly and in great pain.
I don't need money for its own sake, but being fungible, it is virtually everything I do need. It is food, it is clothing, it is heat, fuel, tools, household furnishings, shelter, insurance against disaster, security, etc. To hear people talk about "money they don't need" sounds like mental illness. I suspect it actually is.
This does not appear to be making people any happier than they ever have been. Rather, the isolation implicit in an increasingly transactional society is creating a lot of loneliness, which generally has a greater impact on life satisfaction than material comfort.
The only thing that has changed is the type of "currency".
No more so than today. How much time was devoted to survival varies a lot depending on where in the world we're talking about, but a surprisingly large portion of our hunter-gatherer ancestors spent less time devoted to these activities than we do today.
You are making an excuse for poor behavior so that you can feel better or at least not look as bad to others. There is no reason society can't change. We no longer crap our pants, we no longer dump piss/crap in the streets, even though modern plumbing comes with a monthly expense.
Instead, I would suggest what you hate is Capitalism, which is different from money. A "market" is a concept that allows everyone to trade their products and services with each other. A Free Market is an academic ideal, that allows every actor in the market to participate with perfect information and without coercion.
Capitalism exploits the fact that there's no such thing as a free market, and perverts the market in favor those actors with lots of money and power to exploit and subjugate those who don't.
We could tax the wealthy enough that everyone could be given enough money to live on, and do whatever they wanted. Be an artist or a musician, or a programmer. They could work for themselves, or band together with others to produce things and sell them for a profit, and be better off than the minimum. But if they end up working for someone who tries to exploit, subjugate or harm them, then they can just leave without risk, since they'll always have enough money for housing, food and healthcare.
But of course, the billionaires would hate this, since it removes the source of their power. They're willing to spend billions of dollars corrupting politicians, generating propaganda, and convincing the rest of us that being exploited is what's best. We as a society could decide fix this, but we have to figure out how to organize with each other, and overcome the billions of dollars spent to prevent it.
Sometimes I think the confounding is intentional, as well.
what if you love your pro-social company or your gadget that allows you to do a more effective activism that helps people? what if loving your gadget makes you not treat them as an ephemeral thing, thus making you stay with them longer and contributing to the enviroment with less e-waste?
in 99.99999999% of cases people loving a company or a gadget is bad and it's not particularly nuanced or complicated. Why must people (or just engineers?) fixate on some weird imaginary possibility edge case instead of just accepting the statement as "true".
Is it pedantry, cope or something else i'm missing?
When you “love” a company, it’s not the same as “loving” your wife.
And “loving” your wife is different, still, than “loving” your brother or best friend.
I don’t see the connection, sorry.
Because you’re right, fandom toward products and enterprise is objectively bad. It’s taking the same hooks actively exploited by religion and cults, but now towards iPhones and B-Corps. They are being exploited, and choose not to recognize it because their identity is tied to their fandom.
Yeah, life is a lot harder being the wet blanket in the conference room, asking pointed and specific questions about why we do things this way, could we do them better, etc, but it’s also liberating to see just how much of the world is blind momentum built on fear of literally any other alternative.
fandom from the HN crowd is (usually) excessively bad but there's much more than the Silicon Valley Rainbow, AI and millionaire CEOs essays out there... and this group has better tech education than amazed ordinary people buying yearly new devices to call an API on a server or open Instagram/X with faster processors and higher pixel values on an ant's larvae sized camera sensor with fixed F-stop lens
The salesman comes to my home. wife and kids are around. He sits at my dinner table and begins with asking me "is your family important to you?"
to which i replied "please leave now". needless to say i didn't buy anything from him.
I have no time with shady sales tactics and manipulation. i can totally relate to this article.
I'm not in a position where I deal with actual human salespeople that often, but we're all products of the culture we're embedded in. So I assume that's gotten more masks-off crazy and feral too.. just very openly trying to find your anxieties and squeeze.
Sometimes I recommend people to go to high pressure sales meetings, such as the ones where they try to sell time-shares (is that still a thing?). They'll pick you up at the hotel on a limo, and offer you free tickets to some shows if you go. It is insanely annoying, but it's a great exercise on your ability to say no under psychological pressure. They will try to attack you at your most core values and the moment you realize it is an attempt to manipulate you, you develop some immunity to it - the said ability to say "leave now".
On the time-share, the poor third (!) salesperson who tried to convince me surrendered to the math - US$100K for a week, for a ~300K apartment was about US$ 5 million, which was the going price for apartments in the very fancy building next to it. At that point they relented, gave us the tickets (they were sold out at the venue) and drove us back to our hotel.
There was a Reeses commercial about "your devices are listening to you" for example, and other stuff that I probably should not boost by describing specifically. But basically there's a new form that's pretty openly self-aware about "yeah this is unpleasant to watch, but what are you going to do, actually turn off your TV? just give us your money." When this stuff first appeared I thought the writing was just subpar, or that maybe the idea was that the public just can't parse anything more subtle. But it's more that anxiety still sells even if you're being blatant about stuff, and if you can create anxiety that isn't actually present yet, then you might be making society sicker but you're still making your ads more effective
I don’t like or love money. Or capital. Or wealth. I enjoy the things money can acquire, sure. I enjoy my photography hobby, which isn’t cheap by any stretch. I enjoy my home theater, with games on a big OLED screen and my surround sound speakers filling my ears with crisp, clear audio. I enjoy building a gaming PC ($$$), I enjoy taking trips ($$$$), I enjoy eating out with friends ($$).
But money? No, I do not like it. In fact, I dislike it because it, as a concept, is so easily exploited. I understand that it’s the best system we have to store the value of labor within, but I’m also smart enough to realize that isn’t how it’s presently used. Those with the most money have not saved the most time, or created the most output, or labored harder and longer than those with less, and that irritates me. I am forced to engage in a society where money’s definition as a value of labor is highly duplicitous at best, and it’s nauseating.
And thus I circle back to the root question again: Do I like money?
No. I do not.
I tolerate money. I have a finite tolerance for money, where should I have any surplus amount above that threshold I would donate it to others, for my life - and the lives of my dozen or so family and friends - would be stable, in equilibrium with society and the environment until our inevitable deaths.
But no, I do not like money. I do not like having to spend time managing gambling - sorry, investment accounts - to ensure I can maybe retire or buy a home. I do not like having to learn rulesets to different games - sorry, payment cards - to ensure I’m not squandering my finite resources on fees or penalties. I do not like having to juggle multiple accounts across multiple institutions with different governance structures, rules, taxes, fees, and schedules. I do not like any of this because I know their core function is to more easily funnel my finite money to those with infinite sums.
But I tolerate money, because there is no alternative.
The aunt from Grave of the Fireflies who convinces the kid to sell his parents' stuff for food money and then complains he did nothing to deserve the food she made was a piece of work though.
Also less freezing than Toronto.
Oh… that kind of midge. Yes, but they don’t try to bleed me at least. And they are somewhat rare. I see them mostly by a nearby creek, in summer.
The article is about money. The OP made a comment about giving up luxury for health security in a heartbeat. Both countries have a strong safety nets and multinationals have branch offices there. For many people it's as simple as asking for a transfer. For others making high tech salaries, it's just a matter of buying a citizenship. They are for sale and relative to high tech pay, don't cost that much. Less than $1M USD to buy a Canadian citizenship.
But they won't. Why? Because the pay is less. And that's the harsh truth. Migration patterns are driven by economics. It really is about money most of the time.
Never thought 'love it or leave it' would be presented as a valid argument on HN.
Personally, I like that I have options about what insurance to buy.
The problem is this modern (very American) idea that having money in someway is a sign of human value.
But saying money is evil is as problematic as saying having money is good. It makes it hard to use the technology to solve hard problems, that it’s good at solving, when the technology itself is attributed with those moral judgements.
I used to believe so too but after reading this I'm no longer so sure: https://meltingasphalt.com/wealth-the-toxic-byproduct/
I like cake, but I don't want limitless cake to the exclusion of every other concern.
.
You know who else liked money? King Midas.
(*) Ignoring things that happened with money directly, of course, like the financial “industry”.
Money is a necessary tool to make modern life possible. Other ways of life are possible, but not my current one.
What if you just went to the grocery store and got what you need, without paying money in return? What if everybody continued doing what they do, except that no payment took place? People would deliver groceries from the farm to the market, would write software for ensuring the right deliveries get where they are needed, and so on. Bank clerks would probably not have much to do, but, if they wanted, they could still go to the bank and play cards with their colleagues.
Wouldn't that be a better world?
> Money is a necessary tool to make modern life possible.
It's so because we seem to have, as a society, it is.
Only if your world is small enough that you can trust nobody is cheating. If everybody is doing their share to ensure there is always food in the store it works great. If only a few people are cheating it still works well enough. (I'm going to include the disabled in the cheating category for this discussion, because this is complex enough without trying to fit everything into the mold). As your world gets larger eventually more and more people start to realize that they can get by without working until there is no food in the store for anyone.
Note that getting food includes not just the easy stuff, but the gross stuff. If you can trust the store has what you need, you need some way to incentivize someone to get rid of the trash anyway. Money provides a good abstraction for some jobs being worth more - nearly anyone can haul trash to the dump, but because of the "gross factor" it pays more than other jobs that nearly anyone can do. Very few people can pass medical or engineering school - it is known as a hard study for good reason, so we incentivize people to go that route with more pay, if you can get everything you need, does your society have the right incentives to ensure it gets better?
History is full of societies that work similar to what you say. They all have their own ways of dealing with the above problems. One thing they all have in common is most people only contact a limited number of people and so they can crack down on cheaters because they learn who they are and so reputation matters. (the few travelers paid for their food via stories or barter, and often were looked down on anyway. Or often travelers were military and just took by force)
Again, money makes modern society possible and everyone who proposes otherwise normally just handwaves away real problems with their proposal. A few are willing to accept that downside, but when I look at those downsides I conclude I'm not and I think most will agree once they understand them.
If everyone has everything they need, is this a problem?
The function of money is simply to help humans collectively decide what happens, of all the things that could happen.
And I’m not arguing against the existence of money at all — it’s an incredibly useful control mechanism. It’s not the only one, of course, we also have social norms (aka peer pressure), altruism, threats of violence, laws enforced by threats of violence, etc. etc. (Much evil and stupidity is perpetrated by people who seem to believe money is the only control mechanism that should matter.)
Much evil and stupidity is perpetrated by people who believe the strawman idea that some think money is the only control mechanism that should matter.
Thus things would be different absent money and given the long complex supply chains required to make most things today, like say plows, it is hard to argue things wouldn't be significantly different.
However, capital need not be binary: exclusively personal or otherwise. Sometimes capital can be community based: allocated via cooperative governance or democratic means via municipality.
The big problem is that money provides little recourse for the rest of us in the case that a person provides a lot of value, accumulates a lot of money, and then turns around and acts like a jerk. Having money allows one to destroy value indiscriminately, to a large degree. I can't think of a better system, really, however, besides a robust system allowing democratic regulation of commerce.
But it doesn't change the fact that mosquitoes are personally, deeply offensive to my day-to-day experience living in a place where they exist.
(That being said, I have a lot of money and love it. But I'd give a ton of it away if it meant there were whole classes of problems I never had to think about again, like paying for my children's university, or making sure I can afford health care. I'd certainly give that amount away if it meant nobody needed to.)
I was so wrong lol; find philosophical satisfaction when you don't have to work on anything you don't want to do. Seems really obvious now haha... ah well.
John Maynard Keynes 1930 Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren
Imagine if money did not exist, and things were decided on actual merit? "Poor" people with good ideas might - dare I say it - do things that improved the world for everyone! ;)
There'd be many ways of achieving this, so I'll not bait people with C or S words.
Money is a tool, it's not something that's natural to "love".
And then I go to the local farmer's market and while now pretty much everyone takes cards via an app on their phone that tithes a few percent of every transaction to a credit card company, ultimately making one of those rich idiots wealthier, there was a period where the best way to pay besides cash was to visit a little tent that would take a credit card transaction and give you a handful of wooden coins with various denominations screen-printed upon them; shoppers can't cash them out but vendors can; if you pay with food stamps then you get extra tokens in different colors that can only be used for certain classes of items; it's very pleasing to reach into my pocket and pull out a couple $5 tokens to pay for something, and get a few $1 tokens back, no fussing with the infinitestimal value of pennies, rounding everything off to $1 is really just fine even though I'm kinda broke.
And I keep on thinking about just... taking a bunch of those tokens, and seeing who around town I can persuade to accept these instead of US$.
But the thing is that US$ is also valuable for exchanges outside of my community, if I go to a coffee shop they're not going to be able to use these to pay the Brazillian farmers who grow those beans, I'm not going to want to accept payment for a private art commission in farmer's market tokens. And I know that if people start solving this problem with exchange policies for farmer's market tokens, then there will be problems with counterfeiting, and eventually the government will want to step in and enforce its monopoly on being the one who controls the medium of exchange.
And then I look at the amount of grinding poverty around me, and the immense inefficiencies of the attempts to fix that (sure, let's get all these homeless people out of downtown before the Superbowl and stick them in a warehouse that's rented out from a private owner for more money than it'd cost to pay all these folks's rent for a couple years) and I wonder if the whole idea of capitalism is just completely fucked from the bottom up.
So no. I don't really like money either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettone
They didn't have enough currency, so they improvised extra.
Thing is, it's hard to see what you're against - it's not really money, or capitalism: you just want your own money system and your own capitalism, and for it all to be grass roots and community and farmer's-market lovely. A cute money system instead of the threatening one we live with.
Money did not originate as a mediator in a barter system, but rather as a unit of account to keep track of who owes whom, at least that's the predominant theory amongst monetary theorists nowadays. [1]
If I take you out for a beer, "This one's on me", but there's an implication that you "owe me one", and you buy me a beer next time. Do this amongst many people and many scenarios, and eventually you need to keep track of who owes whom by tallying it on some bone or giving a shiny rock in return to a neighbor that gave you some eggs.
And/or, a king raises an army, invades your village and orders you to pay tax by sending your grain to the temple. The king needs this surplus because maybe the Euphrates won't flood as much this year, and he will lose power if his soldiers and priests starve.
So, you bring your grain to the temple, the priest tallies your contribution on a clay tablet, and gives you receipts. Soldiers later stop by your house and you give them some receipts to prove you paid your debt.
At least this one conception of how things went.
Looking at money as an IOU really causes you to look at it differently.
The amount of money you have is really a measure of how much trust and value you have put into your society.
If I repair someone's roof for $1,000, I spend hours of my day doing it, and I'll never get that time back. I get money, which I trust will let me buy food tomorrow. It's a measure of the debt society owes to me for the value I have provided. Hopefully society doesn't deem that measure worthless by then.
Interestingly, this is basically why the dollar is the world's reserve currency. People trust it a lot. It's also one theory as to what led to the deindustrialization of the USA. When the dollar became the gold standard in 1971, everyone wanted dollars, and so we exported our dollars, which we can just print, and imported cheap manufactured goods.
Who benefits? The people that make dollars, Washington and Wall St. Who loses? People who manufactured goods in the USA. This shrunk our manufacturing base and caused the enormous wealth inequality in America today.
Anyways, if money really is a measure of how much trust and value I've put into a society, then it's interesting why we pursue it so much, beyond the fact that (usually) it gets us food and shelter. Perhaps it's just because a side effect of having put in so much trust and value into a society is that society will give you status symbols in return, so you can attract a mate.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money#Prehistory:_p...
I agree with your concept of money, but extend it slightly: I see money in its ideal form as a token that says "I pleased somebody". By passing it on, you can get somebody to please you. That's equivalent to saying it's all about debt, but shifts the focus by introducing a connection to happiness.
There's a push and pull to it though too, because when you accumulate money, it's not just that you may have pleased someone, but that you have placed your trust into that money, that it will be worth something tomorrow, and thereby you have placed your trust into society at large.
So money is not just tracking how much value you have added, but also how much trust you have put in.
Especially since the world really wants these dollars. Any other country would see rampant inflation immediately.
Instead, we've exported these dollars worldwide, enriched the money printers and destroyed our middle class.
Understanding how this works made me think that reforming international trade is the way to ameliorate wealth inequality in the USA, rather than progressive taxation. This is basically JD Vance's stance.
He notes that the dollar's status is a tax on producing and a subsidy on consuming. He also notes it's a national security risk if we need to buy bullets from our adversaries.
This is basically the position the current administration is taking. Weaken the dollar and encourage onshoring manufacturing by imposing tariffs, or even just the threat of tariffs. You strengthen the middle class and our military position at the same time.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-...
Money of some sort allows larger economies to become the norm. Sure there was always a little trade, but in a gift economy it wasn't significant to most people.
And realistically we just don’t have records going back to the time that we would expect most barter systems to have existed. It doesn’t really prove they didn’t.
Sure, gift economies were also prominent, perhaps more than barter. But it’s hard to believe that you would use them on outsiders.
TL;DR the concept of money and the concept of coinage are separate, with the former significantly predating the latter. Even after coins were a thing, most accounting was still done without them, especially for peasants:
> So let’s say you live in a small community – like a peasant village working beneath a large landholder’s manor – and you need to transact some things, but you don’t have any actual silver because coins are scarce and valuable (and being a subsistence farmer, you grow most of what you need yourself), how do you do it? Well, one way is to do it ‘on accounts’ – you need wool and so when the shepherds come down from the hills, you trade for some of their wool during the shearing with a family you know and both you and they make a mental note that you owe them for the wool. You might express that amount of debt in silver (as a unit weight – see how we get to coinage as a pre-measured weight of silver?) but there’s no reason to measure out silver (even if you had any) because you see these folks every year and next time they’ll ask you for some grain and so on.
> Note that this is not the same as the concept of ‘barter’ – there is, in fact, a notional ‘money’ intermediary, it’s just not a physical coin or bill, its expressed as an account, a purely notional unit of value.
The money is just expressed as debt that we all keep track of (some of us worse than others), and if we express the amounts in modern monetary units that's only because there's little else we could agree on to quantify it.
Nothing's changed really.
> I imagine a peasant of old moving from bartering to coins would 'like' money - would that be allowed by this author or be too gauche?
The idea of there being a solely barter-based economy is not well supported in general, and the idea that they switched from that to coins is also not correct.
I also think it likely that pre-modern people were also dissatisfied with the concept of money, whether coinage or not, in the same way we are now, while also recognizing its utility as a means of exchanging goods fairly over time.