Comment by komali2
4 days ago
> would recommend Yuval Harari's "Sapiens" for you, you would probably like it. It talks about the history of "shared delusions" as you call them, as a critical piece for development of society.
Already read it. Counter: read "Debt, the first 5000 years" by Graeber for, finally, a non- "Chicago school of economics" take on the history of trade amongst humans.
Thanks for the tip.
Just to be clear, I agree the money abstraction is not working particularly well. And that in the age of computers something that is more directly linked to the underlying economy could have worked better. But what needs to replace it is a better and improved "delusion", not a lack of it.
But, why? Regarding your farmer example, there are examples throughout history of farming that fed many without the involvement of currency or the paying off of debt. Take a look into syndicalized Spain if you ever get a chance (~1936-1939). Farms were collectivized and worked on by volunteers, distributions done by need with some bookkeeping to track how many people were in certain regions. Worked pretty well until the communists decided it needed to be centrally controlled and kicked out the anarchists!
Everyone always starts every future speculation assuming capitalism, or at least, currency. Isn't it worth challenging these core baseline assumptions? At the very least, the other ground is well covered, so we might come up with a little more interesting.
Currency (or IOU's, handshakes, pieces of green paper, bits on a disc, etc) is just an abstraction allows one to have choice.
The political systems that get built on top of that are just a downstream effect of the incentives that arise. Communisim thinking it would be good to centralize the control, capitalism thinking it would be good allow the incentives to rule, marxism thinking the labor rules, etc.
What I do for work is SO far away from any sort of tangible production, it makes sense to have a way to just straight from Work -> Food, rather than 50-100 trades so I can eat everyday. Again, the choice to to have to trade at all, or to trade exactly what I want, when I want, is enable by currency.
You can make the argument things shouldn't be so easy, that I shouldn't be able to choose to go to play pinball and drink a vanilla milkshake at 11am, but if that's possible, currency (in whatever form you want) has to exist.