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[Levi]

All I know is I can't see anybody ever giving me a taco without receiving some kind of money.  And I'm not making anyone else a taco unless they provide the means to for me to get more tacos.

I think money is here to stay, so you might as well learn to like it.

[Angle]

Some concept of exchange, yes, but not necessarily money. When you get right down to it, the basis of society s a bunch of agreements that "If you do X, I'll do Y", whether that's "Not kick you in the shins" and "Not punch you in the face", or whether it's "Make you a taco" and "Give you the raw materials for 10 tacos". But there are other ways of managing exchange besides money. Like the one I just posted, for example.

[Levi]

That one still took a kind of currency though.  Otherwise what is to prevent me from subscribing and then doing almost no work for lots of tacos?  Even if you don't call it money, there has to be some tracked number somewhere that tracks my work and rewards me with the means to buy N tacos.

[Angle]

We're saying the same thing, except that I think that money is a particular form of managed exchange, while you think that any form of managed exchange is a form of money.

[Levi]

Fair enough. 

[Loud Whispers]

The bottom line is if you think money will be gone at any point you should begin to exchange all your earned dollars into silver coinage.
Atleast that's what I'm doing, and not just because I like a lockbox of dubloons.

I'm always tempted to at some point turn all of my money into British coinage.
1. Nothing happens, still have the sterling.
2. Economic apocalypse happens, still have the sterling.
3. Pirates attack, I can bribe them with my sterling.

[Frumple]

Silly LW, pirates of the future will only accept bribes in wenches of appropriately varied gender. Sterling will mean nothing to them.

[Loud Whispers]

3. Revised plan, use sterling to acquire wenches of appropriately varied gender to bribe future pirates.

[mainiac]

While you wouldn't strictly need money, you'd need something similar. Otherwise, whats to keep people from just grabbing whatever they want and putting in no work whatsoever?

Boredom, mostly.  People like to be productive.

It should be noted that money does have a social benefit over tally-debts that proceeded it, wealth that you can store regardless of the state succeeding or not makes saving less of a gamble and in turn promotes the state, allowing for the emergence of complex commercial entities and eventually industrial capitalism.  And of course it has a benefit over the informal gift networks that proceeded tally systems in that it allows people to combine efforts in groups bigger then 50, although there might be a way around that.

Money succeeds in the global sense though because there is a meritocracy of bankers that sees fit to carefully balance the supply of it in order to stabilize the rate of consumption/investment and it turns out that the world really likes having that be stabilized.

[BlindKitty]

While you wouldn't strictly need money, you'd need something similar. Otherwise, whats to keep people from just grabbing whatever they want and putting in no work whatsoever? There are various other solutions, though. The biggest other example would be the soviet planned economy. That one didn't work out very well for a number of reasons. For one thing, they didn't have a very good political system, so corruption and terrible decisions were endemic. This also meant they had a hard time getting accurate information about what they had and didn't have and what they could and couldn't do. They also had trouble because they're planned economy wasn't very responsive- it was just too big and unwieldy too work well, even without the Kleptocrats.

It does bring an interesting idea to mind, though- Perhaps a system of small enterprises, operating without money. Instead, they "Subscribe" to a Logistics Enterprise, that takes care of distributing goods between them. If you don't like the Logistics enterprise you've been working with, switch to a different one. The logistics can even trade amongst themselves, or an enterprise could subscribe to two different ones. In essence, a number of parallel, competing and cooperating planned economies. This system would need very thorough transparency, so that everyone involved can be sure no one else is cheating. And there would be additional challenges, particularly when it comes to paying your workers- perhaps a limited form of currency would be useful there. I'm thinking something that would be created on the spot by the people paying, and then consumed completely when a worker spends it. There would be regulations to how much a company can pay their workers, to encourage efficiency.

Anyway, it's an interesting idea. It needs a lot of work, and would be complicated and difficult to implement, but it's interesting to think about.

Well, not really. First of all, Soviet planned economy was all half about just setting prices for various industries. And second, your idea can be upgraded to much easier and more efficient system by one little addition. And this addition is, of course, money. Why? Because it is like subscribing to all the logistics enterprises all at once; it allows you to distribute your good and get other goods in return, usually with someone in the middle distributing them.

[mainiac]

Soviets had money.

[LordBucket]

I can't see anybody ever giving me a taco without receiving some kind of money.

There are plenty of instances of food being used as a marketing gimmick. Churches, auto dealerships, timeshare seminars, etc. Show up and listen to the sales pitch and the food is complementary whether or not you buy.

I realize that's not exactly what you mean, but it's an obvious example of somebody literally "giving you tacos" without receiving money from you in exchange. More relevantly, the internet is full of examples of people providing non physical goods and services without direct financial recompense. You can download ubuntu, openoffice, google earth for free...you can play flash games on kongregate, listen to music and watch movies on youtube...there's a lot of value that's available without monetary payment. These things are easy enough to provide and there are enough providers that it's possible for these things to be provided without the end user directly paying for them.

It's not such a leap to imagine physical goods like tacos becoming easy enough to provide that a similar arrangement could exist.

whats to keep people from just grabbing whatever they want and putting in no work whatsoever?

Who cares if they do? If you, for example, download some php scripts from a script library, do you think the authors of those scripts lose any sleep that you didn't "put in work" for it? Of course not. They made them freely available specifically for the purpose of enabling other people to use them without putting in the work to build them themselves.

I suggest we overcome this limiting notion that "work has value" and try to adapt to the idea that results are what matter. If it simply becomes easy enough to provide physical goods, then physical goods can become available without the exchange of money just like so many non-physical goods already are.

The sooner we, as a society, adapt to this idea, the better. It's not going to be too many more years before an awful lot of work becomes irrelevant. If people remain stuck in the "must work for money to buy food!" mindset, there may come a time when an awful lot of people go hungry.

Some concept of exchange, yes, but not necessarily money.

there are other ways of managing exchange besides money.

Exchange only works when both parties in the exchange have something the other party wants. That might not always be the case. Even if the case of money, there comes a point where I simply have no incentive to give you money for anything you have to provide in return. I can only use so many servants.


Article relevant to topic: The economics of Star Trek

[Levi]

I can't see anybody ever giving me a taco without receiving some kind of money.

There are plenty of instances of food being used as a marketing gimmick. Churches, auto dealerships, timeshare seminars, etc. Show up and listen to the sales pitch and the food is complementary whether or not you buy.

I realize that's not exactly what you mean, but it's an obvious example of somebody literally "giving you tacos" without receiving money from you in exchange. More relevantly, the internet is full of examples of people providing non physical goods and services without direct financial recompense. You can download ubuntu, openoffice, google earth for free...you can play flash games on kongregate, listen to music and watch movies on youtube...there's a lot of value that's available without monetary payment. These things are easy enough to provide and there are enough providers that it's possible for these things to be provided without the end user directly paying for them.

It's not such a leap to imagine physical goods like tacos becoming easy enough to provide that a similar arrangement could exist.

I might be able to score some free tacos from somebody(Hey, some people are generous), but I can't see a global taco exchange happening.  There simply isn't enough generous people with enough time & resources to make tacos for everybody without exchanging anything in return.

Non-physical goods are easier to be generous with, as its essentially free to give out unlimited copies once you've done the hard work, which is part of the reason there is so much free stuff on the internet.  I mean, I'd totally put in the effort to make a taco if I could then somehow give it to everybody at the same time. 

-----

I figure at this point I should say that I absolutely believe we could live in a utopian world where most stuff is free.  If robots did all the work and all non-luxury (and some luxuries) commodities were distributed fairly, most of us could probably get through our lives doing virtually no work at all.  I still think there would be money though, even if we didn't need it for survival.  There will always be some enterprising individual who wants to build a death-star and society can't rationalize the expensive to let them make it, so he'd have to work for it.  And money is a great way to track work.

[mainiac]

I might be able to score some free tacos from somebody(Hey, some people are generous), but I can't see a global taco exchange happening.  There simply isn't enough generous people with enough time & resources to make tacos for everybody without exchanging anything in return.

The thing is that stuff scales really well and the efficiency of labor keeps rising.  The stuff that's available for free right now is worth more then people could get through back breaking labor hundreds of years ago.  At some point people are going to be satisfied.

[Levi]

The thing is that stuff scales really well and the efficiency of labor keeps rising.  The stuff that's available for free right now is worth more then people could get through back breaking labor hundreds of years ago.  At some point people are going to be satisfied.

I agree with that(apart from Mr. Makeadeathstar at least).  I still think there will be money though, because people will always want more, even if their every desire is being satisfied.  Money will go from something we need to survive, to being a restriction to prevent excessive decadence. 


(Goddamn it, I need 5 WHOLE dollars to get a Taco delivered to my house on the moon!?!  Grr, maybe I'll contribute to society for an hour so I can get my Moon-taco!)