After all of our needs are reasonably met. Once civilization develops enough sophistication where survival is more or less ensured, then resources can be devoted to wants/desires. This is where currency really begins to become necessary. Before this point, I think civilization can still become highly developed in terms of technology where the economy revolves around state distribution of goods and state authority is dependent upon said ability to gather and distribute said goods.
Wi: money was never invented?
- Thread starter crazy2378
- Start date
To me, this question is so ridiculous that I have to respond. (My apologies if the OP is under the age of sixteen; I have a soft spot for young people but once you hit 21...pull your head out of your ass & comb-the-shit-out- of-your-hair!!!)
WI: Shoes were never invented?
WI: Glass was never invented?
WI: Clothing was never invented?
WI: The left-handed teapot was never invented?
WI: The right-handed drinking mug was never invented?
WI: My aunt had balls...would she then be my uncle?
Joho
WI: Shoes were never invented?
WI: Glass was never invented?
WI: Clothing was never invented?
WI: The left-handed teapot was never invented?
WI: The right-handed drinking mug was never invented?
WI: My aunt had balls...would she then be my uncle?
Joho
What if you just give it a rest?To me, this question is so ridiculous that I have to respond. (My apologies if the OP is under the age of sixteen; I have a soft spot for young people but once you hit 21...pull your head out of your ass & comb-the-shit-out- of-your-hair!!!)
WI: Shoes were never invented?
WI: Glass was never invented?
WI: Clothing was never invented?
WI: The left-handed teapot was never invented?
WI: The right-handed drinking mug was never invented?
WI: My aunt had balls...would she then be my uncle?
Joho
As for the Incans, they might have a primitive economy, but not a primitive civilization. The Chimu did have some currency IIRC. Once the State is big enough and you have no one else to trade with, well, money becomes kinda pointless. Didn't the Khmer Rouge abolish money at some point? I mean, obviously it wouldn't last long in Cambodia, but a money-less Soviet Union could very well maintain a somewhat functional nation because it was a huge nation with every type of commodity that you can find in the world, but now I'm digressing... IMHO the OP's question isn't as silly as one might thing.
Admiral Matt
Gone Fishin'
You say money, but you mean cash. The last couple millenia have made it hard for people within state or international economies to even visualize the distinction. Hard to visualize many aspects regarding these sort of issues. Your question, and quite a few of the answers, do a job demonstrating that point, so I'll hold off elaborating.
For much the same reason, though, it is a fricking fabulous question. Thank you for posting. This is something to sink teeth into.
For all that the TL;DR is simple:
I. Money could not not exist, period. Sorry. If there's no money, that means either [1] there are no hominids, or [2] all the hominids are low-density hunter-gatherers.
And scenario 2 might not accomplish it 100%.
II. Cash could not exist, but it would be a very long shot scenario. The world is too big for a total lack of invention to be likely. But it is technically possible.
We live in a world in which the Mayans had wheels for centuries, but never used them. So yes. Cash as it exists - in the sense "money" is scripted into modern languages and the processing structures of your brain - that might never have arisen.
This is the useful slash interesting bit. In a world that had never had cash.... culture, language, spirituality, and perhaps even aspects of cognition would be unrecognizable. It'd be fascinating.
III. "Free" is meaningless without money. No money DNE something for nothing.
If you get something for nothing in a cashless world (or even in a money-less microtribe), it'd be with the usual caveats:
They're afraid of you and paying you to go away.
It's a gift, now you must give gifts.
Now you owe them a debt. Failure to repay will cost more than repaying.
You can have very developed money-less societies, th Soviet Union and similar states could easily have gone without money internally.
But that's not money never being invented.
There is no absolute threshold. It's just that the more developed society becomes, the more likely it gets that money will be invented.
But that's not money never being invented.
There is no absolute threshold. It's just that the more developed society becomes, the more likely it gets that money will be invented.
Skallagrim
Banned
I'd argue that there are clear thresholds. People mention the USSR; they forget the conditions under which it could exist. Even Marx himself argues that you need capitalism before you can get to socialism. Regardless of what one thinks of socialism, it is an ideology that emerged within the framework of the modern world; an industrialising world. That process of industrialisation cannot just come about without money. Why not? Because it requires a whole lot of investment. The economy of the modern world has some pretty clear prerequisites, like the emergence of corporate structures, joint-stock companies, certain banking practices etc. -- These all need money to function. The problem with moneyless societies - the thing that I believe limits them no matter what - is that they don't allow for investment structures. And those are needed to develop an economy that can produce industrialisation.
Perhaps some kind of really specific scenario can be contrived where all this is done without money, and that would technically vindicate @Salvador79's point about there being no absolute threshold. Yet that scenario would, indeed, be just that: contrived. Just as Salvador79 writes: the more developed society becomes, the more likely it gets that money will be invented.
I'd like to argue that as we approach something like 17th century North-Western Europe, the likelihood of money becoming needed to develop further begin to approach complete certainty. Industrialisation without such an intermediary means of exchange (which is also the tool that facilitates flexible and ubiquitous investment) may be possible in theory, but I don't ever expect it to happen.
(On a side note: @Salvador79 -- sorry for not responding to your points about value earlier. It could be an interesting conversation, but it would probably derail this thread a bit. For the purposes of this subject, we can simply be said to be in agreement on that topic. )
Perhaps some kind of really specific scenario can be contrived where all this is done without money, and that would technically vindicate @Salvador79's point about there being no absolute threshold. Yet that scenario would, indeed, be just that: contrived. Just as Salvador79 writes: the more developed society becomes, the more likely it gets that money will be invented.
I'd like to argue that as we approach something like 17th century North-Western Europe, the likelihood of money becoming needed to develop further begin to approach complete certainty. Industrialisation without such an intermediary means of exchange (which is also the tool that facilitates flexible and ubiquitous investment) may be possible in theory, but I don't ever expect it to happen.
(On a side note: @Salvador79 -- sorry for not responding to your points about value earlier. It could be an interesting conversation, but it would probably derail this thread a bit. For the purposes of this subject, we can simply be said to be in agreement on that topic.
)Admiral Matt
Gone Fishin'
Agreed.
If you organize for projects (so if you're doing agriculture, having long term larger-than-family-sized wars, holding regional religious events) you need a mode of accounting. It might not be how we discuss "money" colloquially, sure. But fundamentally? That's money.
No real way around it.
Cowrie shells were money though. They just weren't post-bullion money, usually.
Yes and no.
Yes, it doesn't make everything free.
No, it definitely does not mean that either another medium of exchange is used (not in the sense you're using "medium of exchange" anyway), or barter.
Starting civilizations all had means of accounting and systems for distributing goods that functionally were "money" in the abstract, but did not involve a physical medium of low intrinsic value that was culturally/cognitively imbued with value and physically exchanged for products or services. Which is to say no cowrie shells, or copper cards, or brass rings. It was perfectly possible to run a complex urban society in this way.
Take Sumer, for instance. The economy was debt-mediated. Precious metals were a sort of foundation of accounting, but were a medium of measurement, not of exchange. At the state level this translated to temple reserves of silver ingots used as a basis for issuing loans and mediating budgets between parts of the government, religious establishment, and managerial aristocracy. But until much later periods when treasuries were pillaged in warfare, those silver ingots very rarely moved an inch. The transfers were on paper.
Well, on clay.
On the private level, the same fundamental system was playing out. People carried precious metals with them about their business, but not as a medium of exchange. Rather, the gold/silver/copper/whatever was usually in the form of jewelry, and functioned as portable collateral; a statement of the bearer's ability to make good on loans. It was the distributed mental-and-written (so virtual, sort of) accounting that was the "value" in these people's lives. There was no need for constant exchange of physical representations of this value, not in a functional society.
Cash and bullion as money are more powerful - they retain their value when no one trusts anyone. The weakness of debt-moderated money is that it requires a level of trust that one will be repaid.
And barter.... Argh. Historically barter seems to be the resort people turn to when they're already accustomed to an economy based on a medium of exchange, and then that medium runs out. The idea that barter evolved into premodern and modern economies was hypothesized by economists, not discovered by historians.
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If the Soviet Union, PR China, North Korea, or any other communist country had abolished money, they would still be using money, it would just probably be US dollars. North Korea, for instance, doesn't want tourists and other foreigners to use their currency, they want them to use renminbi, Euros, US dollars, and such. Likewise, internally, there would be huge use of money going on in any socialist state which abolished currency, since I doubt the state could be perfect in allocating resources to its citizens through central planning and thus a black market forms, and foreign currency (or some unofficial currency, or in the digital era even a cryptocurrency) would fulfill the role of money. I'm not convinced that even in a communist world government there would be no money--maybe officially there's no money, but unofficially, I'm not convinced the government can supply everything through central planning and thus a black market would form which requires money and so our communist utopia ends up being sadly unobtainable.
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Admiral Matt
Gone Fishin'
"Without money" in the technical sense?
Until urbanization. Once agriculture produced dense population and the accompanying specialization, you need accounting of stock and debt, plus systems to manage labor and distribution. This is money.
"Without money" in the colloquial sense?
Until the civilization has an extended period in which mercenaries need to be relied on for military force. That may require a sizable civilization with a common culture in a "warring states" period, so mercenaries can switch sides to follow the money.
Cash, "currency", bullion.... It's not defined by some civilizational "level". It appeared in Lydia, Greece, India, and China almost simultaneously and spread quickly within Persia. It would be absurd to suggest these utterly different regions all hit the same developmental "stage" at the same time.
Far more likely to assume cash is an infectious idea that can explode into use if geopolitical circumstances allow.
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I remembered something. A lot of the trade in the Indian Ocean, the country trade, was barter based.
Silk against spices, spices against porcelain...
It was a very complex economy with only an underlying need for silver.
There were those luxury goods but also rice, tin... There was a lot.
Silk against spices, spices against porcelain...
It was a very complex economy with only an underlying need for silver.
There were those luxury goods but also rice, tin... There was a lot.
ManintheField
Banned
The Soviets actually tried to go without money for a little while. It was disastrous. Look up 'War Communism'.
Admiral Matt
Gone Fishin'
Not really.
The Soviets tried to go without physical currency to mediate economic transactions. They - like many here and now - conflated cash with money. Money - numerical systems for accounting for value and changes/transfers of value - the Soviets didn't really go there except as war exigencies. And everybody did war exigencies.
That said, the fact that a war-wrecked developing country faired badly trying to go without physical currency.... Should we take that as evidence of anything? How many economic policies are going to smell like roses implemented by a war-wrecked developing country?
While I agree with much of what you said, I think the cash/money distinction does not describe Soviet Experiments well. Money but no cash describes our plastic currency society well - everybody still knows what they're making and how much everything costs. In the early Soviet Experiments, of course, value was measured, but there was no one universal measure which at the same time also served as measure for exchange. For this is what money is. Even if you subtract the exchange aspect, Soviets were still moneyless for a while, but with that subtraction we're no longer talking about what people usually mean by the word money.
ManintheField
Banned
Your definition of money seems idiosyncratic.
The definition you're using is not of money, but of a unit of account. That is indeed one of the roles that money plays, but it is not the only. Money is also a store of value and a medium of exchange. You can have units of account that are not either of those two, but they are not clearly money in the same way anything we would colloquially call money is.
I'll be honest though, 'the one time this has gotten even close to being tried in modern times was an unmitigated economic disaster', is not a great place to start.
Admiral Matt
Gone Fishin'
I likewise agree with much of what you're saying. For one, the Soviet "Experiments" had a lot of moving parts. I definitely oversimplified. But in the AH.com spirit of being disagreeable:
What does "universal" mean?
At a certain point in discussing the Soviets, one drifts from policy into circumstance. In a sense the Soviets were functionally without a monetary standard through sheer chaos and multipolarity, nor was this entirely divorced from policy, which arguably made virtue of necessity. But money is a measure of value and exchange, and as I recall (albeit from courses/discussions a decade old) there is evidence that Soviet actors participating in "moneyless economics" were either tracking value in their dealings or carefully not tracking value (i.e. they were coercing unequal exchanges and "writing off" what would normally be considered debts under cover of post-war chaos and ideology).
But, yeah, semantics.
You also mention "what people usually mean by the word money." That's tricky, because what they usually mean by the term generally carries assumptions divorced pretty far from historic reality.
Take what you say about electronic currency being "money but no cash," for example. That matches very much how we moderns habitually talk about money, but how much does it match the history or the practical reality?
The key functional distinction in forms of money isn't between an object representing value (cash) and a non-object representing value (understood debt or electronically recorded debt). The key functional distinction is between value with verifiable existence outside of human relationships (cash and electronic currency) and value that only exists in the context of human relationships (handshake debt, gift economies, et cetera). In function, if not form, paying by Visa card or Wechat account is only barely distinguishable from paying by cash.
Whether you steal my wallet or hack my alipay account, the initial economic distinction is negligible. Try doing the same with the handshake deal I have with my uncle, or my church's commitment to buy school supplies for my kids.... All 4 are value, but 2 of these things are not like the others.
TL;DR - I'm not convinced plastic we imbue with imaginary value alters the economics forged by metal or paper we imbued with imaginary value.
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Admiral Matt
Gone Fishin'
Yes, I'm defining money as a unit of account for these purposes. The bottom line is this:
It strikes me as plain absurd to look at the first maybe-half of human economic history, examine the complex numerical financial interactions therein, then call it a "moneyless society". While at the same time very similar economic actions happening today are taken for granted to involve money. I don't hold with it because the main distinction seems to be that one was recorded on clay (and papyrus, and memory, and mnemonic device) and the other on computer chips; one delivered by courier and the other by wire.
That's just a difference of medium, not of function.
TL;DR - the colloquial "money" obscures good comparisons and analysis, IMHO.
Lol, touché.
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