My year of living without money
guardian.co.uk
guardian.co.uk
The author made the association between working for money and dissociation from the actual value of the products your using. So he might say that since you didn't spend so much time making the table yourself, you would be too distanced from the impact of throwing that table out or from the amount of resources and labor that are going to be needed for making a new table.
I don't think that makes sense, whether it costs you a week of labor to build a table, or a day to go fishing for a table, the cost to you isn't any less precise. All you really get by doing away with money is inefficiency and less free time. If that's how you enjoy spending your time, so be it, but that doesn't have anything to do with the way millions of other people prefer to spend their time.
The real factor that leads to dissociation from the actual cost/impact of stuff in consumers' minds isn't money, it's any of the costs/expenses that for political reasons are prevented from influencing the price of the final product. So for example if farmers are given subsidies and are protected by tariffs against competing goods, people are going to be a lot more wasteful with their food than they should be, or if people are allowed to spread pollution without having to pay for it, the environmental costs are not going to be accurately reflected in the price of their products.
But I guess trying to crack that problem is a lot harder than living in a trailer and making your own bread.
Good luck with that, it's a lot harder than it seems. Probably you'd have to move to greenland or a place like it to be sure that you actually can achieve the goal.
Living without touching money is not the same as living without money.
I think it is good to try to reduce waste, but what does it have to do with money?
> If we grew our own food, we wouldn't waste a third of it as we do today. If we made our own tables and chairs, we wouldn't throw them out the moment we changed the interior decor. If we had to clean our own drinking water, we wouldn't waste it so freely.
We also wouldn't have time to do things like cure malaria, build fortifications against natural disasters, and share information across great distances.
If you were born 100 years ago in 1909, you'd expect to die in 1961. Current life expectancy is 78 years, and there's a good chance babies born in 2009 will average living to 2109. That's frigging marvelous, despite wasting some food and furniture.
This shouldn't automatically be considered a positive...
Huh, interesting. I was going to write that I think it's straightup awesome, but maybe there are some downsides. Are you thinking of any specifically?
Not that I disagree with the gist of your point.
The fundamental concepts are really different ... previously owning $10 bill would mean that your bank stores an equivalent quantity in gold for you. Now $10 just means someone owes the bank $10 ... and it's really a useless piece of paper with an unrealistic value. That's really the reason behind an economic crisis.
I wouldn't ever go and live cashless simply because it's like swimming against the tide, but it's true that money disconnects people from the goods they are buying, from the real cost of manufacturing, and ultimately ... from other people.
What stops you? If the gun manufacturer wants honey you can trade. If that direct trade doesn't work you could do some intermediate ones till you got to the gun and that is the same as just issuing money, just more difficult to do. Why do people like bartering so much? Money is a better solution for the same problem.
The fundamental concepts are really different ... previously owning $10 bill would mean that your bank stores an equivalent quantity in gold for you. Now $10 just means someone owes the bank $10 ... and it's really a useless piece of paper with an unrealistic value. That's really the reason behind an economic crisis.
All money is debt, be it gold or not. All it means for me to have $10 is that society has agreed to give me that amount of goods or services in return for giving it back. It is always a debt, if it is represented in gold, paper or a number in a computer. In the previous model where the bank held $10 worth of gold for your bill if you redeem the bill for the gold what can you do with it now? There are industrial and decorative purposes but for you as an individual, what good does it do?
I don't understand these arguments that gold is some kind of one-true-currency. The only thing having a gold standard does is set a fixed monetary policy. The monetary base cannot be expanded as the amount of gold is fixed. But the Fed could set the same policy without having to handle gold. Having the physical metal is just an implementation detail that used to be important but isn't anymore. If it's the monetary policy you don't like fight against that.
Putting value in gold also motivates people to go digging around looking for this largely useless metal. That in itself is a drag on the economy as those people could be doing something more productive with their time.
It's more complicated than that: of course if somebody asks you to give you something in return for a debt (a ka money), trust enters the picture. The less you trust that person, the less the money is worth. If a a person/bank says "tee he, I am not giving you anything in return for your debt/money anymore", you will not do any transactions with that entity anymore in the future.
In that sense the system regulates itself - there is a risk attached to money, just like to anything else. People just took too much risk in the current crisis, powered by greed. Also of course because the risks were cleverly hidden, but it is not true that nobody had doubts.
As for honey, of course you can exchange it for guns.
Disconnecting from goods: it is not possible to manufacture everything yourself anymore. Of course that might be the real point of simple living: trying to only rely on stuff that you can manufacture yourself. But what if you get sick and need expensive medical equipment?
I am very connected to the cost of "manufacturing" software atm...
Unlike a lot of similar stories you read I don't think he was really trying to prove anything.
If anybody is _really_ interested in independent living, I cannot recommend highly enough "Primitive Wilderness Living & Survival Skills: Naked into the Wilderness " - by John Mcpherson.
Any book that starts off with "In the spring of 1986 I, John, first published a 48 page book on brain tanning. I had spent years searching for - mostly thru trial and error - a recipe for this project. I had found nothing in print that was to be of much help." you just _know_ is going to draw you in.
This is "having people for that", albeit having less expensive people. He received compensation in kind from an agribusiness for services rendered -- they handled the cash, not him, crisis of conscience at being employed averted (he describes it as "volunteering", which apparently means "employment in an industry I like"). He used the telephone, but through the magic of creative spiritual accounting, only other people got charged eco-karma for the calls.
His goal was never the off-grid cabin-in-the-woods situation. That much should have been apparent because he was interacting with his local community in many ways.
Well, yeah, that's what he did. That is the point. He forced himself to deeply - even intimately - engage with the markets for every good he used, on a level that is unattainable through the largely anonymous transactions made with money. Money only communicates price. Barter tells you about the other dependencies.
Since his purpose was to learn about forms of waste in society, I think his strategy is quite good.