Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Jboy2000000]

I was just wondering something, and I thought it might be fun to bounce it off other people, so I came here. What I was thinking was, "Why does money exist?" Now I know the fairly obvious answer is "So you can buy things." But if there was no money, there would be no reason to sell anything, and if there were no money, and therefore no selling, wouldn't that also solve the employment problems all over the world? With no need for money, there would also be no reason for anyone to pay workers, so we could just start handing out jobs like candy. I assume if there were no money, there would also be no ownership, so there would probably be a big storage that anyone would take some, so having seemingly endless jobs would probably mean we would have more things to distribute to. So, why do we have money? Any opposing ideas, or just something I have plan wrong that Im not seeing?

[Cheeetar]

No money = barter system = (more) inefficient economy.

[Glowcat]

What Cheeetar said. Money is a representation of labor that can be universally applied whereas barter system breaks down easily, especially for societies of a contemporary scale.

[Cheeetar]

No, I've thought about it some more, and I'm pretty sure Jboy2000000 has unequivocally solved the economy.

[MonkeyHead]

Is the answer not fairly obvious?

There was ownership before money. People will consider things as theirs regardless of if it has absolute or abstract value, and are not likely to be altruistic with their time or material goods without incentive. Money is an abstract means of exchange which arose to facilitate the trade of goods and peoples labour, and has arisen as a neat solution to a problem in a number of independent cultures over time. People have always had property, skills, and goods that are produced as a function of time that they "valued" as some kind of commodity. Directly trading these goods or skills as a barter-like system was often impractical due to supply and demand issues, so we began assigning a more abstract value to things, and representing said value as first coins whose value was inherent in their material, and later as fiat money whose value was promissory.

What you are not seeing is that someone will not farm the land for no personal gain. They would not give away what they produced without personal gain, and might not want what the people who want sheep have to offer. If they were to break their tractor while farming, a mechanic would not help them without personal gain, and might not want the sheep produced by the farmer. Human nature is in general not to do things for the benefit of everyone else.

[Cthulhu]

Not really.  The whole barter thing is mostly an idealized concept that never actually happened.  While barter sometimes occurs between two separate societies, as far as I know anthropologists have never found an actual single society that functions on barter.  It certainly never happened in the evolution of our own currency.  Even in the "dark ages" when coinage was scarce people used virtual forms of currency, tabulated in the old coinage even when very little of it still circulated

There are different schools of thought on what money actually means.  Sumer's money was very similar to ours, mostly a medium for tabulating debt relationships.  Early coinage was used to pay mercenaries and taxes helped cement the coinage and the markets that grew up around them as institutions (why would you make metal disks, give them to people, and then take them back?  Taxes meant citizens had to participate in the markets)

The barter thing is relevant to the discussion, part of what money does is create an equivalency, a something of barley is equal to a whatever of iron which is equal to X hours labor as a basket-weaver and so on.

[martinuzz]

Where things went wrong, is where currency changed from being a measure of exchange, to being a commodity itself.

[Jelle]

Where things went wrong, is where currency changed from being a measure of exchange, to being a commodity itself.

My thought exactly.

[tuypo1]

Where things went wrong, is where currency changed from being a measure of exchange, to being a commodity itself.

so very much correct

[BlindKitty]

The problem with this thinking is that unemployment is only a problem if you need money earned working to buy stuff. Having one big stockpile to take whatever you need will lead to everybody taking and nobody putting it, which is obviously non-sustainable. And the money itself, as stated above, is should be abstract representation of other commodities, from hours of work through food to right to sit at a front seat during a Super Bowl; if you are a teacher, it is hard to exchange X hours of work for a ticket, but it is relatively easy to exchange dollars for ticket, because everybody can then use those dollars to get what they need.
Money is the retail sector of the economy.

[Loud Whispers]

Where things went wrong, is where currency changed from being a measure of exchange, to being a commodity itself.

forex dolla dolla get mo pips

[Cthulhu]

I'm not sure why people seem to immediately think that a non-monetary system wouldn't work.  We do communist stuff all the time.

It's like, if we're building a birdhouse and I have a hammer and don't need one, and you don't have a hammer and need one, I'm not gonna charge you for it.  I let you use it.  That's communism and also basic human decency.

We have corporations now to dodge human decency though.  A corporation, by design, only cares about profit, and it's designed so no one person's morality can hamper that drive.

[Loud Whispers]

It's like, if we're building a birdhouse and I have a hammer and don't need one, and you have a hammer and need one, I'm not gonna charge you for it.  I let you use it.  That's communism and also human decency.

I'll let you use my sickle whilst I borrow your hammer.

[Cthulhu]

Debt: The First 5000 Years is a good book on the subject.  It deals a lot with that barter narrative.  The traditional idea is that our earliest economic systems were barter and we started using money as an exchange medium for convenience, mostly scarce metals at first but eventually progressing to the modern system where currency is virtual.

But in reality it's mostly been a cycle.  Sumer was virtual where debts were engraved into clay tablets with money embedded into them.  Generally hard metal currency arises in times of strife (Among other things, it creates wealth that can be stolen or extracted from conquered parties) and in times of peace we go back to virtual currency.

That parenthetical note is pretty important.  Money has historically been intrinsically linked with violence.  In Sumer and Judea they had jubilees where debts were forgiven and debt peons released.  America is the first debt society where we make laws to protect the creditor.  I think if you described our system to ancient peoples, many of them would see it as an entire population in debt bondage.

My favorite is still the tally sticks.  A flat piece of wood with lines carved into it to represent debts, tabulated by Charlemagne's currency long after his empire had crumbled and his money was no longer circulating, then they broke it in half lengthwise.  Since the break was unique, it was pretty much impossible to commit fraud.

[tuypo1]

Debt: The First 5000 Years is a good book on the subject.  It deals a lot with that barter narrative.  The traditional idea is that our earliest economic systems were barter and we started using money as an exchange medium for convenience, mostly scarce metals at first but eventually progressing to the modern system where currency is virtual.

But in reality it's mostly been a cycle.  Sumer was virtual where debts were engraved into clay tablets with money embedded into them.  Generally hard metal currency arises in times of strife (Among other things, it creates wealth that can be stolen or extracted from conquered parties) and in times of peace we go back to virtual currency.

My favorite is still the tally sticks.  A flat piece of wood with lines carved into it to represent debts, tabulated by Charlemagne's currency long after his empire had crumbled and his money was no longer circulating, then they broke it in half lengthwise.  Since the break was unique, it was pretty much impossible to commit fraud.

welp it seems we found the next bay12 book of the month