natural?

Societies are not "based on" money. Money is a technology that helps civilization function.

In the Neolithic era, before civilization, people lived in small farming villages where everybody knew everybody. Very nearly all work was oriented toward some aspect of survival: caring for cultivated plants and domesticated animals, taking up the nutritional slack with hunting and gathering expeditions, standing watch to keep the predators and scavengers away, building dwellings and their spartan furnishings, tanning hides, preserving meat, setting broken bones, caring for the sick, making clothes, cooking utensils and tools.

There was no concept of "income" and "expense." Everyone pitched in to help everyone survive. The tiny surplus of resources made possible by the modest division of labor and economy of scale of the "economics" of the village was lavished on community-oriented "discretionary spending," such as brewing beer or wine, making and playing musical instruments, decorating clothes and other artifacts and carving a few art objects.

No one "traded" goods and services; it was basically one gigantic extended family. Everyone worked as hard as they could and hoped that, in aggregate, the villagers could produce enough to satisfy everyone's basic needs with an occasional frivolity.

The invention of civilization, literally "the technology of city-building," enormously increased the effectiveness of economy of scale and division of labor. There was now a significant surplus of labor and other resources, and discretionary spending could now be allocated to personal pleasures such as bathing, travel, theater. City life also presented its inhabitants with new levels of practical products that were not quite necessities but not quite luxuries, such as more comfortable furniture, warmer clothing, sturdier shoes, tastier food, glass windows, animals for riding and not just eating and plowing, and professional instructors in the crafts. The multi-stage processes of building houses, clothing and other artifacts added an additional complexity to the city "economy."

People were no longer simply taking their shoes from the village cobbler or dipping their mug in the village beer barrel under the watchful eyes of their village-mates. Several craftsmen collaborated on the building of a house or wagon. When it was done, the mason needed a new parka, the carpenter needed to refill his wine jug, and the glazier wanted to give his musically talented daughter a lute. The chain of supply and demand became complicated, so they couldn't just walk into the bazaar on Saturday morning and efficiently exchange their goods and services directly for goods and services of equivalent value. Record-keeping became necessary, and the earliest writing systems were often devised for accounting records.

But something else happened. People began stockpiling inventories of their goods, and scheduling future uses of their services. At the same time, the tanner or the luther might complete a project and not need anything from the bazaar just yet. This is the definition of surplus wealth or "capital": the existence of more productivity than can be traded at the current time for the existing surplus of product. The city needed to maintain records of the surplus owned by each individual, so they could trade it for something they wanted at a later time. And it would make life much easier if the value of all goods and services could be standardized so that each person would not have to remember how many pairs of boots had the equivalent value of a house of a particular size.

Voilà, money was invented. Conveniently-sized bits of metal were inscribed with the number of "pounds" or yuan ("circles") of surplus wealth they represented. As the technology of metallurgy spread and it became possible to create counterfeit brass coins, they started making them out of silver or gold, which are so rare that they were not easy to obtain for counterfitting purposes. Later on, paper money was invented that was less cumbersome to store and even harder to counterfeit.

So, civilization is not based on money. Every dollar of money represents a dollar's worth of goods or services that are more-or-less readily available to purchase with it. It's the fantastic amount of surplus productivity that defines modern industrial and post-industrial civilization, the fact that more than half the human race can practice "discretionary spending" and trade their labor for more than the basic necessities of life.

It's commonly stated that many people live on less than a dollar a day, but that's a deliberately misleading statistic. Many of those people produce their own food and other survival necessities, so their dollar can be used for what their Stone Age ancestors would have clearly recognized as discretionary spending. The actual percentage of the human race that are unable to provide for themselves a life as good as the pre-civilized Neolithic people--no windows, plumbing, writing, schools, medicine, etc.--is a figure I've never seen estimated.

Which leads us to the notion that the technology of civilization has brought about great inequities. Perhaps it has. But money is not the cause, money is simply the tool we use to measure those inequities--and as I've noted above, we don't even measure them very honestly.

People in power have always been able to accrue more of the fruits of civilization to themselves and deny them to others. This happened long before there was a banking industry to provide them with yet another way to do that via the technology of money.

The basis of what? I'm not sure what the pronoun "it" refers to in your question. Some societies are losing the connection between their leaders and their constituents. This has been exacerbated in the twilight of the Industrial Era--as the Chinese curse goes, "May you live during interesting times." We'll see some major corrections over the next few generations as the post-industrial era takes shape. I predict that there won't be as many large corporations in an information-based economy, and that should do wonders for a more equitable distribution of wealth.

A great many societies have lost, or never built, the connection with neighboring societies. Anyone familiar with my posts knows that I place most of the blame for that major social evil on the so-called "great" religions which teach their members that they are better than their neighbors.

Who decides what someone else needs? I'm a musician in my free time. I need a bass guitar, the electronic equipment to make it audible, and various other technology for learning and practicing songs. Many people regard music as one of the things that makes life worth living, so they need a stereo at home, one in their car, and one to take to the gym--because many people want to be stronger and healthier than they can get from their sedentary lives. Most people in the Western cultures need pets, and I have often opined that people and cultures who don't live with dogs often descend into barbarity.

Besides, some needs are more important than others. Surely by now everyone is familiar with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: survival-security-love-esteem-fulfillment. Some people are not as strongly motivated and settle for a lower place on the hierarchy that doesn't require working very hard. Other people are driven to work harder and achieve more. How can anyone else measure those people's needs, particularly defining "fulfillment" for each of them?

You don't understand the technology of money. Money is nothing but a convenient, standardized record of goods and/or services you have provided to others, for which you have not yet demanded something in return. Money is your ability to satisfy a future need, even if that future is merely tomorrow, when you convert the labor you expended selling machinery (or whatever you do) into next week's rent, groceries and electricity. At the very minimum, some day you will no longer be able to work and you'll use that money to provide the basic needs at the very bottom of Maslow's hierarchy: food and shelter. But as a person who was raised in the era of civilization, surely you will one day identify needs that today are not obvious to you because they are not survival- and security-level needs.

Every new technology has brought its share of grief. We're pack-social animals by instinct, and civilization itself forced us to learn to live in harmony and cooperation with total strangers, like a herd-social species. While most of us are happy to make that accommodation, the caveman inside us rebels against it often enough that a substantial segment of our government exists for the purpose of dealing with cavemen.

In aggregate, the average person lives far better today than he did five or six thousand years ago before civilizations became so prosperous that money was invented to keep track of obligations and deferred exchanges.

You could conceivably go live among one of the last remaining Stone Age tribes who don't need money because they don't produce a surplus large enough to need managing. Perhaps you should contemplate that and it can help you make peace with the concept. The technology of money was invented because humans were able to produce goods and services in excess of their basic needs for survival and security. Most of us think that was a great idea.

I'm sure Baron Max will jump into this thread shortly and try to convince you that the Stone Age was better, and knowing him he'll come up with a clever argument to convince you that money is evil. When you read his post, keep in mind that he's typing it on an electronic computer, sitting inside a weatherproof house with climate control, with a cup of coffee made from a bean that once only grew in Ethiopia, sitting in a luxurious chair made in a factory, with a domesticated predatory animal lying peacefully at his feet, and the only reason he has the time to do this is that he's not working 100 hours a week on a farm or chasing game through the jungle. In other words, he's made it to one of the higher steps on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs because he was fortunate enough to be born in a civilization.

No. You do that. Money is simply a tool that makes it easier to do fairly.

People work because everyone must give back to civilization at least as much as they take from it, and hopefully a little bit more, or else civilization will collapse. It's a conspiracy in which we all willingly participate. (Again, Max will claim that it's not voluntary, but he's contributed plenty and done it happily.) Sure, some people were not raised right, or they are simply weak, and they need a reminder to motivate them to work. But the basic reason we work, whether we're conscious of it or not, is that we like living this way and don't want to lose it.

No. This is a difficult topic which is not often discussed coherently. The engine that has driven mankind to progress through successive Paradigm Shifts of new technologies--to agriculture, then cities, then metallurgy, then industry, and now electronics and computers--is not one that was even recognized with any clarity and organization until the last century. Very few people could even chart that course, and very few people could tell you why we wanted to travel it.

I'm doing my best.

 

The Cree were one of the many Mesolithic tribes in North America, i.e., hunter-gatherers. They had not even invented the technology of agriculture and begun to live in permanent settlements, much less civilization. Civilization arose very late in the Western Hemisphere, and had not yet spread north of the Rio Grande when the Europeans arrived, although there were some Neolithic farming villages in what is now the eastern USA.

The Cree had an "economy" with virtually no surplus; everyone labored for the goal of survival almost all of the time. Without a surplus to manage, they did not need to invent the technology of money.

They were rudely introduced to civilization by the good Christian people from Europe, who marginalized them, displaced them, disrupted their ability to survive by their own well-practiced ways, and killed tens of thousands of them. They didn't even intermarry with them or assimilate them in various other time-honored ways, to any large extent. It's no surprise that the Cree developed a jaundiced view of civilization and its technologies.

Money is an accounting record of surplus goods and services that have not yet been redeemed. The value of a unit of money is the proportional fraction of the value of the entirety of the surplus.

To postulate a world in which there is no surplus is to postulate the value of any unit of money as zero. To postulate a world in which there are not even any means of production--no rivers to fish, no plants to eat or to be grazed on by game animals--is to postulate a civilization that has collapsed, leaving not only no surplus, but not even a subsistence to survive on. By citing "poison" the Cree suggest that this collapse of civilization will be brought about by mismanaging it. Although some of our people also worry about this, most of us think it more likely that civilization will be destroyed by a reversion to our tribal instincts: war between the huge "tribes" of the modern world.

After nine thousand years of civilization, we still fight to the death over petroleum and other scarce resources, like our Mesolithic forerunners fighting over hunting and gathering territory, or over a tiny cache of surplus food during a famine. In addition, we've invented monotheistic religions--a step backward from the polytheism of the Ancients which was a richer, more accurate and more useful model of the human spirit--and let that single god we all claim to worship inspire us to kill off the neighboring tribe that worships him in a different way.

Technology will solve the resource problem. Mankind will eventually have no choice but to accept the fact that the only clean, renewable, adequate source of energy is solar, and will build those giant orbiting solar collectors.

The religion problem is something else. I don't know what the answer to that one is.

 

Solar energy, collected on high-orbit installations with an aggregate surface area many times greater than the planet itself and beamed down as microwaves, will power virtually everything on earth. Its abundance will make the preposterous inefficiencies of conversion of energy between its various forms--electrical, kinetic, heat, chemical, etc.--unimportant. We'll probably keep our wind and hydroelectric turbines spinning, and anything else we've invented along the way like tidal and geothermal, because once we've expended the capital to build them they'll be pretty cheap but minor sources.

Nuclear energy will surely be frowned upon for terrestrial applications. We'll already have plenty of nuclear waste to dispose of. There will be something like a two-hundred-year lapse between the exhaustion of cheap petroleum and the completion of the orbiting solar array. This includes the lag time while earth's governments and corporations get their act together after putting it off to the last minute. This will be the Y2K computer crisis writ extremely large, not something that can be fixed in a year by luring a few hundred thousand Cobol programmers out of retirement. During that lag we'll have no choice but to build nuclear plants and worry about the consequences later, and "later" will only come when a significant and powerful segment of the population becomes uneasy with the buildup of waste.

Obviously on a space mission you can dump your nuclear waste in the vast midden between the planets. Maybe send it on a slow trajectory into the sun or put it in orbit around Pluto.

 

Well what would you suggest as a better way to survive? Everyone is supposed to contribute their share to the support and improvement of civilization. That won't happen if everybody goes off and does stuff they enjoy but doesn't add any value to the world. The communists experimented with paying people enough to live on regardless of how much or how little they produced. The result was an economy with a "negative surplus"; it consumed more than it produced. Eventually it collapsed.

This is not universally true. Over time people have learned to care about people they don't know. First in cities, then in nations. Now it's transcended that. A considerable portion of the American people are outraged over the suffering of people on the other side of the planet... people whom we not only don't know personally, but who are nothing more than abstractions to us.

This is simply not true. Of course there will always be people who don't care about the plight of others, but not everyone is like that. I see people handing money to homeless people every day and I do the same. People contribute to charities that help the poor in a more organized way, and so do I. People support government programs that institutionalize charity in forms like welfare, public hospitals and job training; in every single election for more than seventy years Americans have voted for politicians who keep those programs funded.

Man builds these societies and man supports and administers them. Of course this requires education and there are places where education is not what it should be, so it's our job, as the people who keep civilization running, to improve their education. My wife and I give a fortune to a charity that builds schools in Central Asia where the problem is especially bad.

Indeed. One of the many responsibilites that comprise "the maintenance and advancement of civilization" is for us to make sure the good outweighs the bad. It doesn't always come out that way so then we try doing it differently.