Could we survive without Money?

Civilization and money are inseparable.

"Civilization" has a very specific, important meaning that is the key to the issue. Civilization literally means "the building of cities" and that's what it's about. The transition from living in tribes of two or three hundred people who know each other more or less personally and are even related by blood, to dealing with people every day who are anonymous faces.

We are social creatures, but like our closest primate relatives we have to keep our social group small enough that we actually know everybody in order to instinctively care about them. As long as we stick to that we don't need formal economics. Nobody's going to hoard food during a famine, hog the extra blankets during winter, or be envious of the most skillful hunter who brings home more meat, if all those other people in the camp or village are our own extended family. Sure we'll have a few fist fights and an occasional banishment and not be on speaking terms with Aunt Oooga, but by and large we'll share and make nice. And if we don't the patriarch and matriarch, whom we love and respect, will have a long talk with us.

We are incapable of extending those feelings to strangers. Our Neanderthal instincts scream at us that their tribe is competing with our tribe for scarce resources. Deep inside us there's something telling us to make them go away, the last thing we want to do is share or cooperate with them.

After four or five thousand years of civilization (we were able to start building cities when we learned how to work iron, bronze tools aren't any better than flint for a stonemason) we've managed to tame those instincts to a certain extent. People actually are capable of living together and getting along pretty well, treating each other almost like family, in small cities of ten or twenty thousand. That is a truly remarkable achievement when you think about our history. I live in one of those and it really does work, just barely. A lot of people don't lock their doors, people feel free to discipline each other's kids if they get out of line, and when somebody is broke their neighbors give them some food and a lecture about getting off the booze and finding a job.

But when "communities" grew into the hundreds of thousands, much less hundreds of millions, it was impossible for people who'd only been out of their caves for thirty or forty thousand generations to internalize the idea that all of those other people, whom they never even see and don't even know their names, are part of the same tribe.

Humans have no ingrained sense of obligation to be fair to people that they can't see, to repay debts, to manage resources so there are enough to go around. And that's where money comes in. That's why civilizations always invent money. Sure barter can work but you eventually end up choosing one standard commodity like beads or gold to be the universal currency for simplicity's sake.

So the answer is No, we can't get along without money. We won't be able to do that until we evolve for several thousand more years and develop an instinct no other animal has, which is to feel kinship with an abstraction: a person we'll never meet.

If you think we can do better, here's an analogy I've posted before. Consider our dear companions, our dogs. They get sixty or seventy generations to a century instead of our three or four. They have more chromosomes that mutate more readily. We've been selective-breeding them for at least five thousand years, only allowing bloodlines to survive that have the traits we value. And after all that, watch what happens when humans hit hard times and let their dogs run off to fend for themselves. They form into packs that are just about twice as big as the packs their original wolf ancestors ran in, maybe thirty or forty. That's all they feel comfortable with after all that work. No "nations" of three hundred million dogs, no "united nations" of several billion dogs.

We've done far better in the same time, without as much selective breeding. We can form "packs" of ten or twenty thousand. We should be grateful for that stupendous progress, instead of feeling bad that we all can't quite feel empathy for the people on the other side of the world. If it means we have to use money to keep each other honest, so be it. It works!

Civilization created money, and money keeps civilization together.

 

Restate the question: How could we survive without money?

I ran out of patience after about five minutes of trying to find something substantive on their website that we all don't already know from reading sci fi.

But in general there are two scenarios for building a civilization without money.

1. We are all highly responsible people who care about our fellow man. We would never dream of shirking our duty. Each of us will work hard and produce to the reasonable limits of our talent and training. And each of us will be content to have all of our reasonable needs tended to. All of this will be administered by a very benevolent government that exists only to help us.

Nice idea. In real life a huge portion of the people will not work very hard if they don't see a good reason for it. In real life a good portion of the people will demand more than they "need," if they don't readily see that it hampers someone else's ability to meet their basic "needs." And in real life as a government becomes more powerful it invariably becomes more corrupt. An ever larger portion of the resources and production end up being taken by the government, leaving less for the citizens. We saw this play itself out in the USSR, while they still had human workers. Imagine an automated soviet state!

2. We can create a technology so advanced that it automates all the "routine" parts of life. Collecting natural resources, using them to create consumer goods, feeding the livestock and watering the plants, harvesting the meat and vegetables, bringing it all to market. The citizens will have no responsibilities because the computers will take care of them. So they can spend all of their time in creative pursuits, or if they don't feel like doing that or have no talent, plain old decadence. Bonbons from automated factories and computer-generated sitcoms all day every day.

Nice idea. My bank's computer still can't get our credit card statement right two months in a rwo. It will be a long time before I personally, or anyone who's attended one of my IT classes, will have the guts to turn the management of the entire world's means of production and distribution over to a giant computer network. If someone tries to do that, I personally, Mister Software Process Guru, will become a Luddite and smash the damn things. (Besides, who among us gets the immensely powerful job of tending the computers!)

So unless somebody has a third idea that isn't just a rehash or combination of 1 and 2, we still need to do our own work and keep each other honest. That requires money.

 

Yes, yes, yes. We already know that it works just fine for a village. That was called the Neolithic Era. A few hundred people living together, it's a small enough population that everybody more or less knows everybody else, and everybody is everybody else's cousin.

It's called a "tribe," and it works. Humans have the instinctive ability to care about people they know, who are distant members of their family. They don't always get along famously, sometimes they even beat each other up, but basically they work together when it matters. They share food, blankets, take their turn on sentry duty to keep the hyenas away. (Or at least they did that until they and dogs discovered each other and created the world's first multi-species community, but that topic is on another thread.) They don't cheat each other out of food and tools, they don't let one sleep out in the cold while another has fifty blankets and a mammoth-hide tent big enough to hold twelve people.

That worked really well until human habitations got so big that people no longer actually did know each other and didn't count each other as family members. They stopped caring about each other because that's the way their brains are wired.

Actually, though, we've made a lot of progress on that score since we started building cities around 9,000 years ago. Your village doesn't need to be small enough to be called a "village." Small cities with as many as ten or twenty thousand people work pretty well. We live in one and there's a surprising sense of community. It's even multi-racial, we're obviously not closely related, and still people help each other out, go off with their doors unlocked, and feel free to scold each other's children if they catch them doing something naughty. We go to the high school baseball games and have a good time because our neighbor's kid is the pitcher, and we fucking hate sports!

But that's about the limit of our ability to feel a sense of tribal connection and care about other people out of sheer instinct and sense of honor. When cities get bigger than that, with populations up into six figures, it becomes us versus those other guys. Why should we pay taxes for their kids to go to school when they sit around all day and collect welfare? Why should my father have to clean floors for a living when yours is a banker? Why shouldn't I rip off a couple of six packs from your store -- you've got a brand new car and I'm riding a ratted out Honda.

Money is what we invented, not too long after the creation of cities actually, to make order out of all this. We put a monetary value on what he have to offer and what we want to get, haggle it out in a chaotic network called the marketplace, and we use little green rectangular IOUs to keep track of who owes how much to whom.

It's the only thing that's ever worked. Without a free market, civilization (literally "the building of cities") dissipates into feudalism or something almost as bad like Mafia-era Sicily, where the strongest and luckiest and meanest people seize power and everybody else gets sloppy seconds.

It's not Right or Wrong, it just Is. It's human nature, but by the goddess we actually have developed a way to conquer our human nature and get along more or less peacefully and share the wealth more or less equally. It's called: Money.

As Joseph Campbell said, money is the myth of our era. It's no more real than Zeus or Vishnu or the Holy Ghost, but our belief in it takes over where our natural instinct fails us, and causes us to be able to tolerate an overgrown "village" full of people who don't look like us, don't speak the same language, and don't share the same belief system. The only belief we share is money, and fortunately that works for us.

We should be proud of the fact that we invented something that works as well as money does, while in fact being totally imaginary. What could be more quintessentially human? It's just like religion, only it seems to work better.

We tamed our baser nature in a way that only the human animal can, by inventing a myth and using it to control ourselves.