This is a good and thought-provoking read. Like many people, I've often pondered the Star Trek concept of a society without money, or salaries, where all needs in life are just available, w/o...
This is a good and thought-provoking read.
Like many people, I've often pondered the Star Trek concept of a society without money, or salaries, where all needs in life are just available, w/o question. However, how humanity would get to that magic society from where we are now, always seemed about as feasible as a transporter.
This article delves into a lot of details and examples of how, bit by bit, we could get to that society, or at least, something similar, how in many ways, we are already headed that way.
I shared this because I have often wondered what socialists think about money and the author gives a partial answer. (Though, he passes over a lot of questions about decision-making in the supply...
I shared this because I have often wondered what socialists think about money and the author gives a partial answer. (Though, he passes over a lot of questions about decision-making in the supply chain.)
I sometimes miss having lunch at Google, though it wasn’t always great and declined somewhat over time.
Good read, thanks for posting :) I actually wrote my own article about this a few months back. The crux of my argument is that money creates new issues without solving existing ones, and that...
Good read, thanks for posting :) I actually wrote my own article about this a few months back. The crux of my argument is that money creates new issues without solving existing ones, and that markets and other economic models can work more effectively without money by removing that extra level of abstraction.
Although you’ve touched on it, I would like to see more detail about decision-making with respect to stores. I could see a public network of free soup kitchens mostly working as an alternative...
Although you’ve touched on it, I would like to see more detail about decision-making with respect to stores. I could see a public network of free soup kitchens mostly working as an alternative food supply, with people who don’t want to stand in line for soup going somewhere else. I don’t see a grocery store working without being perpetually out of the best-quality stuff. The problem is even worse for a large hardware store like Home Depot or Lowes with supplies of lots of different kinds of stuff that people mostly use rarely. It’s not at all clear how you decide who gets the best-quality lumber and for what purpose. Similarly for tools.
It seems to me that some kind of point system quite similar to money would end up being needed to decide such things.
Pretty tired at the moment but I want to reply to your comment before I forget, at the least just to thank you for your input. :) I don't really think variation in quality is well-addressed by...
Pretty tired at the moment but I want to reply to your comment before I forget, at the least just to thank you for your input. :)
I don't really think variation in quality is well-addressed by money as the exchange mechanism. As you become less constrained by your budget, your options to buy higher-quality lumber and tools which exceed your requirements go up, but if you decide to purchase beyond your requirements is a function of your attitude and your knowledge. A few examples:
I have a tight budget, I can only buy the cheapest lumber and tools which will fit my requirements -> I buy the cheapest which fit my requirements
I have ample budget to buy higher-quality, but I am frugal, meaning I know I don't need the highest-quality tools and lumber and would rather purchase by requirement -> I buy the cheapest which fit my requirements
I have ample budget but I don't know enough about my requirements for lumber or tools, but I'm usually frugal -> I buy a grade or two up on the products to make sure I won't have any problems with my project
I have ample budget and I'm not frugal, I like buying cool lumber and tools, but I also know my requirements -> I buy maybe medium to high end stuff cos it's fun
I have ample budget and I have no idea what I need, I just like having the best stuff so I can show off to my neighbour -> I buy the top end stuff
I think these are fair examples and cover a range of real behaviours for this scenario. 'Ample' is a vague identifier for a budget, and I agree that having a monetary cost imposes an upper-limit on what each person can buy, but it doesn't actually solve the problem of who should get the high quality stuff. The allocation is an ethical problem. If you asked me where the high-quality stuff should go between a public project (some sculpture or kids play area in a park) and a private project (my gazebo in my back garden), I would choose the public project -- keep in mind this is my personal subjective ethical judgement. Money doesn't really help with that reasoning, it actually abstracts that reasoning away because if you have the money, you can buy the stuff, no questions asked.
Obviously if every checkout had a Stasi agent trying to figure out what project you're getting your lumber and tools for and evaluating if that was a good use of your fellow comrades' time and effort then that would totally suck, and it's not a satisfying solution to the problem either. But I do think that if people have access to information to be mindful of their requirements, and if the drive to always have 'the best' or 'better than the rest' as an individual is eliminated or reduced, then conspicuous consumption of this type would be reduced. Rather than using money as a shitty proxy to sweep the problem under the rug, let's solve the real problem!
There are other changes that go hand-in-hand with this kind of socialist moneyless world I envision as well, such as:
reduced quality gradient for mass produced goods -- if only input materials are relevant for deciding what to make, and consumers are no longer driven by cost, then companies do not need to produce as wide a range of quality of goods; baseline quality of good goes up
reduced need for marketing and sales -- companies produce to fulfil needs, they do not need to create artificial needs, so there is less advertising trying to convince people that X is the best lumber or that they need the best lumber
promotion of sharing economy -- borrow the saw instead of 'buying' it
Yes, even putting aside the extreme unfairness of how much money people have in the first place, there are a lot of ways people have different attitudes towards money and spending. People can be...
Yes, even putting aside the extreme unfairness of how much money people have in the first place, there are a lot of ways people have different attitudes towards money and spending. People can be downright weird about buying decisions, depending on cultural background, previous good or bad experiences, and even psychological needs. People will sometimes be frugal out of need and sometimes out of habit. A lot of waste comes from exploiting psychological quirks about money. (See Las Vegas and high-end shopping districts.)
But I disagree that prices don’t tell us anything, since it seems like they tell us about stuff we wouldn’t know any other way? Cost is invisible. It’s not the thing itself, but a number attached to the thing via a social process, and sometimes a price tag. There are a lot disputes over these numbers and they are often wrong, but we’d lose some important information for making decisions without them.
There are very indirect costs, like the amount of carbon emitted when manufacturing something, the amount of pollution caused and cleanup that has to be done, and the risks workers took while making it. Often these costs aren’t taken sufficiently into account, and they should be - with higher prices. A price is a summary of a lot of costs throughout the supply chain, most of which as a consumer we know hardly anything about, but at least we have a number.
There is a lot of nonsense about prices, but in the end we do need some way to know what efficiency means as part of the design process. You don’t need top-end supplies for something nobody is going to see. It takes experience to know when cutting corners is perfectly fine and will reduce costs and when it might cause problems. It’s also not an objective question, because it depends on tastes.
Some simple examples might be not spending a lot on kids clothing that they’re going to outgrow pretty quickly, or that vegetables don’t need to look good if you’re going to make soup out of them. There are a zillion things like this, little ways of being frugal that people are rarely consistent about, but there is a tendency towards reducing costs.
An extreme example might be building a house where there are thousands of choices to be made about design, materials, and fixtures to be optimized. Even the fairly-rich people who might pay for a new house to be built for themselves usually don’t have unlimited funds. Developers building houses or apartments for others are still going to be trying to maximize the appeal of the housing without unnecessary costs. Cost-cutting can be done well or badly (it is often done badly) but it’s a real problem to confront.
Incentives are a blunt instrument and sometimes result in bad choices, but without some quantitative idea of cost, it seems like we would have little clue about how much waste and environmental damage we are causing and little reason to care. It seems like, if you care about the environment, wanting to be liberated from thinking about costs is kind of irresponsible?
This is a good and thought-provoking read.
Like many people, I've often pondered the Star Trek concept of a society without money, or salaries, where all needs in life are just available, w/o question. However, how humanity would get to that magic society from where we are now, always seemed about as feasible as a transporter.
This article delves into a lot of details and examples of how, bit by bit, we could get to that society, or at least, something similar, how in many ways, we are already headed that way.
I shared this because I have often wondered what socialists think about money and the author gives a partial answer. (Though, he passes over a lot of questions about decision-making in the supply chain.)
I sometimes miss having lunch at Google, though it wasn’t always great and declined somewhat over time.
I’m already living that life! Ain’t so bad...
So much culture is based on the accumulation of wealth. Take that away, and what’s left?
Sex, Drugs, and Rock N Roll?
Good read, thanks for posting :) I actually wrote my own article about this a few months back. The crux of my argument is that money creates new issues without solving existing ones, and that markets and other economic models can work more effectively without money by removing that extra level of abstraction.
https://jpreston.xyz/2020/05/07/abolish-money.html
Although you’ve touched on it, I would like to see more detail about decision-making with respect to stores. I could see a public network of free soup kitchens mostly working as an alternative food supply, with people who don’t want to stand in line for soup going somewhere else. I don’t see a grocery store working without being perpetually out of the best-quality stuff. The problem is even worse for a large hardware store like Home Depot or Lowes with supplies of lots of different kinds of stuff that people mostly use rarely. It’s not at all clear how you decide who gets the best-quality lumber and for what purpose. Similarly for tools.
It seems to me that some kind of point system quite similar to money would end up being needed to decide such things.
Pretty tired at the moment but I want to reply to your comment before I forget, at the least just to thank you for your input. :)
I don't really think variation in quality is well-addressed by money as the exchange mechanism. As you become less constrained by your budget, your options to buy higher-quality lumber and tools which exceed your requirements go up, but if you decide to purchase beyond your requirements is a function of your attitude and your knowledge. A few examples:
I think these are fair examples and cover a range of real behaviours for this scenario. 'Ample' is a vague identifier for a budget, and I agree that having a monetary cost imposes an upper-limit on what each person can buy, but it doesn't actually solve the problem of who should get the high quality stuff. The allocation is an ethical problem. If you asked me where the high-quality stuff should go between a public project (some sculpture or kids play area in a park) and a private project (my gazebo in my back garden), I would choose the public project -- keep in mind this is my personal subjective ethical judgement. Money doesn't really help with that reasoning, it actually abstracts that reasoning away because if you have the money, you can buy the stuff, no questions asked.
Obviously if every checkout had a Stasi agent trying to figure out what project you're getting your lumber and tools for and evaluating if that was a good use of your fellow comrades' time and effort then that would totally suck, and it's not a satisfying solution to the problem either. But I do think that if people have access to information to be mindful of their requirements, and if the drive to always have 'the best' or 'better than the rest' as an individual is eliminated or reduced, then conspicuous consumption of this type would be reduced. Rather than using money as a shitty proxy to sweep the problem under the rug, let's solve the real problem!
There are other changes that go hand-in-hand with this kind of socialist moneyless world I envision as well, such as:
Yes, even putting aside the extreme unfairness of how much money people have in the first place, there are a lot of ways people have different attitudes towards money and spending. People can be downright weird about buying decisions, depending on cultural background, previous good or bad experiences, and even psychological needs. People will sometimes be frugal out of need and sometimes out of habit. A lot of waste comes from exploiting psychological quirks about money. (See Las Vegas and high-end shopping districts.)
But I disagree that prices don’t tell us anything, since it seems like they tell us about stuff we wouldn’t know any other way? Cost is invisible. It’s not the thing itself, but a number attached to the thing via a social process, and sometimes a price tag. There are a lot disputes over these numbers and they are often wrong, but we’d lose some important information for making decisions without them.
There are very indirect costs, like the amount of carbon emitted when manufacturing something, the amount of pollution caused and cleanup that has to be done, and the risks workers took while making it. Often these costs aren’t taken sufficiently into account, and they should be - with higher prices. A price is a summary of a lot of costs throughout the supply chain, most of which as a consumer we know hardly anything about, but at least we have a number.
There is a lot of nonsense about prices, but in the end we do need some way to know what efficiency means as part of the design process. You don’t need top-end supplies for something nobody is going to see. It takes experience to know when cutting corners is perfectly fine and will reduce costs and when it might cause problems. It’s also not an objective question, because it depends on tastes.
Some simple examples might be not spending a lot on kids clothing that they’re going to outgrow pretty quickly, or that vegetables don’t need to look good if you’re going to make soup out of them. There are a zillion things like this, little ways of being frugal that people are rarely consistent about, but there is a tendency towards reducing costs.
An extreme example might be building a house where there are thousands of choices to be made about design, materials, and fixtures to be optimized. Even the fairly-rich people who might pay for a new house to be built for themselves usually don’t have unlimited funds. Developers building houses or apartments for others are still going to be trying to maximize the appeal of the housing without unnecessary costs. Cost-cutting can be done well or badly (it is often done badly) but it’s a real problem to confront.
Incentives are a blunt instrument and sometimes result in bad choices, but without some quantitative idea of cost, it seems like we would have little clue about how much waste and environmental damage we are causing and little reason to care. It seems like, if you care about the environment, wanting to be liberated from thinking about costs is kind of irresponsible?