@Jonny7892 Systems without money are possible only in the sense that memory can facilitate an evaluative function. Money and memory are essentially the same thing ( i believe). In small social systems money is equivlent with reputational gains, or social currency or concepts like honor, respect etc. As you scale the social order in complexity and size human memory limitations begin disrupt the ability to assign value to agents within society who are engaging in cooperation( i can't knowing reward or punish a person in china for the good or bad products he's provided because i'm not aware of their existence as i am aware of the tribal hunter i see daily in a simple tribal commune). Money presents an image of past dealings which game theory illustrates is the foundation of cooperation with one of the more stable strategies the "tit for tat" strategy.
http://minneapolisfed.org/research/sr/sr218.pdf
If you can cull back society to a simple pre-industrial tribal relations money simply becomes internalized within our own heads. Also this puts into perspective that the components necessary for the proto-economy like honor or respect might have a limited horizon of usability in a global exchange system where billions are cooperating and we might want to rethink their usage in extended social orders. Social currencies may still be rather effective in limited and non-complex interactions where we have proximity and continuous dealings with individuals.
If we really consider money and it's neurological/psychological analogues it seems we have never really been without it, it has just changed in substance.
No, I don't believe it would work. Even the barter system could not mix with modern technology; trading a rock for another rock is a little different than trading a weapon for another weapon, isn't it?
A local tribe with about 100-200 people can operate sans money if we consider money to be a standard form of currency. In a tribe they would utilize a barter system. As the society gets larger, bartering is no longer efficient, hence the invention of fiat currency.
Don't be stupid, of course it wouldn't. Like people have said, we'd just barter. Then, the most easily divisible, most in demand, and most portable resource would become the standard object to barter. Usually some sort of rare metal, but in this day and age it could be fucking ram. Then that'd just become the new money.
I don't believe bartering would work nowadays. Let's say you want a car. What would you need to exchange for it? Probably a very large amount that you could either not produce or "afford" yourself. Basically we would have to trade with companies for mostly everything, which doesn't make much sense. Even a computer, for example, would require you to give compensation to different companies that make components that require machines, materials and particular skills that a small amount of people simply cannot have. The demand for those different technologies would go down, and we would probably stall.
We are much too big and diverse as a civilization. Our products are way too intricate, unique and "big" for us to manage that kind of system in a proper manner that would benefit everyone equally.
Anyway, I don't know if that makes any sense, but that's what I believe. I'm no economist or anything close to that, so take it with a grain of salt.
Even if you managed to "abolish" money in society...currency would naturally occur. To bring in games as an example I'll use TF2 and Diablo 2. In TF2 items are commonly "priced" by using other items such as metal or Max's Severed Heads. In Diablo 2 on the multiplayer side, gold lost its value rapidly and was replaced by Stones of Jordan. Currency naturally evolves from the barter system. As a student of History, I see it as inevitable.
In a society with very scarce resources were labor is necessary, like ours, it wouldn't work. However, if at some point in the very, very, very distant future, there's an excess of resources and labor isn't necessary to sustain society, then it might be conceivable.
maybe but there are people that are greedy so they would change things into currency. i would say people would have to trade things, or work their way with them. my brother did something like that before. i worked on a farm for like two hours for something to buy something. he said he got water and lunch for free, and there were other people doing the same thing. i think it would be cool to do that.
" . George Orwell describes a scene in Aragon during this time period, in his book, Homage to Catalonia:
"I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life--snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.--had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master.""
"
It is a nice quote, but I think Orwell himself provides the best refutation of this utopian ideal in Animal Farm.
Well, it wouldn't work well. Money is what we use to trade. Trading is something that is essential in a society. Society was able to function without money before because everyone had a trade, made products, and traded those products. Let's say I work on a farm in a world without currency. Then I would be rewarded with crops. But now let's say I need a new pair of shoes. I would need to find a shoemaker that needs my specific crop. Currency makes trading much easier.
But.,..how else will i know who i'm better than? Who gets to drive the nice cars? Own the big homes? Why would I work hard and go to school and get an education if i'm only going to get as much out of it as the high school drop out?
I'd rather have some form of money because I don't have all day to haggle/trade the physical stuff I have in order to get things like food/petrol/video games/ect.
"The economics of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century... The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of Humanity." Captain Jean-Luc Picard - First Contact (1996).
Depends on how you define "money". Before there were coins and credit cards and what have you there were simply goods and services that were exchanged. Even small, ancient communities had a system of trade like "Build my fucking house or I won't give you any of my rice and you'll starve biatch"...or something like that. But really, if there were no money how would everyday life function? Would each person/family have to run their own farm to keep themselves fed? Why would farmers make more food than they themselves need if they aren't getting paid for it, ya know? Or are you talking about a society where individual citizens don't have any money, are all on completely equal terms, and are provided for and controlled by some sort of government? That last one sounds like a bad scifi movie to me and it doesn't take a greedy person to see why it's a bad idea. We don't need money because we're greedy and materialistic; we need money because we're smarter than animals and do more with our lives than eat, shit, and fuck. Well...a good portion of us do anyway =P
Society as it is now? No, cause it's based around it. However, if somehow human society had devleoped in a different way in some alternate timeline where money never existed? Sure, maybe. You can't just atke it away and expect out current society to function though, it's too centered around it. Damn capitalists.
Money is just the Universal Currency... if a baker wants to buy wood, but the lumberjack doesn't want any bread... the baker will have to go through a cycle of exchanges to get what the lumberjack wants, thanks to currency(or bank notes) this process is simplified... Don't be ridiculous with that greedy and hippy stuff, greed existed before money.
@Wrighteous86 said:
" Could and can a society work without money? Yes. There are some that still do, in remote areas of the world.
@Shirogane said:
" Society as it is now? No, cause it's based around it. However, if somehow human society had devleoped in a different way in some alternate timeline where money never existed? Sure, maybe. You can't just atke it away and expect out current society to function though, it's too centered around it. Damn capitalists. "
Some societies have tried it... and they ran into something called Moral hazard... people cannot function when they are not individually driven... unless privacy and individuality is completely disintegrated by a moral code that instantly puts an end to everyone who does not follow it.
@Jonny7892: Yes, society use to function in a Barter system before currency was invented. "How Stuff Works" actually addressed the very same topic in their podcast episode: "How Bartering works." Well worth a listen. Look it up!
@gamefreak9: They're called hunter-gatherer groups. Very egalitarian. They also traditionally have had more leisure time than we do in modernized nations. It's also a healthier lifestyle, since we spent about 500,000 years slowly evolving into that lifestyle, and about 10,000 evolving into the lifestyle we have now.
But yeah, we can totally ignore them, because they don't have iPods.
Societies without money still exist today, and they work just fine.
" @gamefreak9: They're called hunter-gatherer groups. Very egalitarian. They also traditionally have had more leisure time than we do in modernized nations. It's also a healthier lifestyle, since we spent about 500,000 years slowly evolving into that lifestyle, and about 10,000 evolving into the lifestyle we have now.
But yeah, we can totally ignore them, because they don't have iPods.
Societies without money still exist today, and they work just fine.
"
Find me a society today that works just fine without money... they all went to shit... i can name a few but i want you to name some for me and i guarantee i can tell you exactly why its gone to shit. hunter gatherer groups are egalitarian... is that supposed to be funny?... the very basis of their morals destroy the egalitarian principle, in fact their moral goes something like this "survival of the fittest". Our lifestyle allows for MUCH more efficient living, we can do today in seconds what took days to accomplish.
I am not trolling here, i have studied this subject very thoroughly, and i am trying to make you understand before you spread this ideology any further. Yes we have very little leisure time, but thats more of a development that has happened in the last 30-40 years, average time spent at work went up like 4-5 hours. Thats not a flaw in the system, its just a loophole in it, and eventually we will close all of these gaps. Sadly we are still the generation whom must go through Capitalism's evolutionary processes. But once solid legislation is ready, leisure will start being an option.
Besides if you are not up to the intellectual challenge that is poised in front of us now, you can just pick up your stuff and go join a tribe, nothing is stopping you. Whining won't help you or the world. If you don't mind not living without a roof or technology then there should be nothing stopping you... but the fact that you are in forums complaining about it tells me you either just want attention or you have too weak a will to leave.
Depends, that's either a socialist market or a bartering one. You either trade goods craiglist style (with no defined worth) or one where everyone shares everything. Think rationed country. Socialist wise growth would be slower and we wouldn't have the stuff we commonly have. Bartering wise not much would change. Some people would make good trades, others bad ones. Wall street would be dead and the country would move slower because of the difficulty to determine the worth of things through many trades. Both would work, but choosing one is questionable.
@gamefreak9: I just don't even feel like discussing this with you, because you don't have even the slightest fucking clue as to what you're talking about. Like, you literally don't even have the most basic grasp of the position you're trying to argue, and I don't feel like writing a fucking essay just to help your ignorant ass.
I'll leave this link here, because hopefully after you read some of it, you'll realize just how ignorant you are on this subject.
Please don't reply again. I don't want to see another message in my inbox from you about this thread, because if you had your head any further up your ass right now it'd be coming out of your neck.
Oh so your literally saying that the whole world should be hunter gatherers... you realize the drawback of such a system is lack of technology, as it requires maintenance. So basically your talking about us leaving technology aside, i would use the word tribe next time, nonetheless i am pretty sure the question was directed to our own society, which implies technology and our standard of living, which would not be possible without it.
Also relax, i don't see why you got your pannies in a bunch.
@gamefreak9: Well, you tried to correct me, except that your post was about as wrong as it could be, factually.
Also, the question asked was "can society exist without money", not "can our society exist without money", or "can society exist without money in the context of modern technology and innovation", both of which would've elicited a different answer.
I also never said that we should be hunter-gatherers. I said it was a perfectly viable way of living, that actually came with some distinct benefits that we've lost in modern society. Which is factual information, not a value judgment.
My strong reaction wasn't against your statements regarding non-monetary systems in a society similar to ours. My reaction was against your clueless attempts to correct me on the issues of hunter-gatherer society and the evolution of the workday and work-week, plus the words you put into my mouth, since I never made any value judgments regarding our society versus hunter-gatherer society.
If someone walked into the room and started spouting blatantly incorrect information as if they knew exactly what they were talking about in a class you know a lot about, that wouldn't bug you?
I hate to go into little details like this but w/e, i am sure he is aware that currency is an invention, so... it didn't always exist, therefore society did exist without money, so that pretty much answers itself...
Also your right, you didn't actually say that its a better way of living. So on that note i apologize, though i think its perfectly normal to assume you did. Well i think it falls back to what falls under the "society", as this would hop into my specialization if it was with technology and out of it if wasn't.
Also how is their lifestyle healthier? I dno about you, but generally life expectancy is usually the best measure of health, and i am pretty sure modernized(for the most part) have the highest statistics on this... except some place i heard about where some people supposedly live to 150 but i don't think its confirmed.
@gamefreak9: The only reason modern life expectancy is so long is because of our medicine. It's certainly not diet or lifestyle choices, because our bodies are built to hunt and gather. We've only had a few thousand years to begin to adapt to "sedentary" (meaning not nomadic) lifestyle, while we had hundreds of thousands of years to adapt to nomadic, hunting lifestyle. Thus our physiology is still designed for just that purpose.
Also, reproductively, there's no advantage to living past like your 60's, and thus our bodies aren't designed to live past that age (which is why even in countries with modernized medicine we often start dying around that time).
Life expectancy isn't exactly the best measure of health, because we still don't know how changes in medicine and diet 50 years ago will affect life expectancy, and we won't until the baby boomers reach the age where they start dying at higher rates. Their life expectancy will tell us a lot about modern diet, medicine, and lifestyle in general, and its effects on health. Think about this: almost all of my family members who died over the past 10 years didn't use fluoride on their teeth when they were kids, because that was before toothpaste and fluorinated water came about.
Impossible. Even if we were to erase all memory of money and such from the minds of every individual, material things are limited; people would have and want different things, and trade would begin, eventually leading all the way back to... Yeah, you get the idea. @slightconfuse said:
" well society did exist with out money before so i don't see why not "
Don't think of it as "money," but rather "trade," which has been around since the beginning of man. And you'd have to go FAR back anyway if you were to change what you said to currency.
I was discussing this with my sister recently and I am doubtful, but do you guys think a society without money could work? The reason I am not so sure is that human nature almost dictates that it's impossible, people are greedy and lazy and want material things but what do I know?
"
It has worked in the past. It was called bartering. But ultimately, you were still trading something of value for something of value. Even this would not survive as the lone form of currency in today's world.
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