world without money

[Othmane Dahi]

Hey guys,

I imagine a world without money. In this world you have the right to have whatever you want in a certain limit. For example, you have the right to have something to have breakfast but you have a list of combinations you have to choose from. In return, you have to do your mission too. 

What do you think? Is it a better world? Is it possible? WHY?

If you have any question about the world you are free to ask

Edited July 3, 2020 by Othmane Dahi

[HallsofIvy]

I remember when I was very young thinking about this.  Suppose we just let people go into a store and TAKE whatever they want!  Since everyone can have whatever they want, no one would complain.

Then as I got older I discovered a very important, very disturbing fact- work is hard!

Most people would not want to work if they did not have to have money!  What if we could just go into a store and take whatever we want, but  discovered that there was not anything in the store?  Who would plant, grow, and harvest the vegetables?  That's hard work!  If farmers did not need the money they wouldn't do it!  If tailor's did not need the money they wouldn't make shirts, slacks, suits!

Edited July 3, 2020 by HallsofIvy

[studiot]

6 minutes ago, HallsofIvy said:

I remember when I was very young think about this

When I was younger (the 1960s) I used to look forward to the Analog Science Fiction Annual every year.

One year there was a short story called "Business as Usual During Alterations"

Essentially some Aliens dropped a matter duplicator onto theEarth.

At first everyone thought that would be the end of 'commerce and work and MONEY'

But then some enterprising souls got a duplicator and started offering the service to "Duplicate your stuff for you to your requirements"

And the good old American Dream was saved.

[Othmane Dahi]

2 hours ago, HallsofIvy said:

Most people would not want to work if they did not have to have money!

No every one has to do something. And if he doesn't he will take a lot less than those who does.

And you can't go in a market and take whatever you want, you have a limit.

2 hours ago, HallsofIvy said:

I remember when I was very young thinking about this.

 

well I am 19

[Area54]

10 hours ago, Othmane Dahi said:

For example, you have the right to have something to have breakfast but you have a list of combinations you have to choose from. In return, you have to do your mission too. 

So, two measurements are required to ensure fair an equable application of the principle:

• A measure of the acceptable content of the breakfast
• A measure of that portion of  "your mission" that is to be applied to compensate for the breakfast

In today's society we call these measures money. How does your proposal differ?

[zapatos]

4 hours ago, Othmane Dahi said:

No every one has to do something. And if he doesn't he will take a lot less than those who does.

 

2 hours ago, Area54 said:

So, two measurements are required to ensure fair an equable application of the principle:

• A measure of the acceptable content of the breakfast
• A measure of that portion of  "your mission" that is to be applied to compensate for the breakfast

In today's society we call these measures money. How does your proposal differ?

 

Exactly. The way it works for me is I'm allocated a certain quantity of 'numbers' from my employer; the harder I work the more numbers I get. When I go to breakfast they check to see if I have enough 'numbers' for the amount of food I'm taking. If I don't have enough numbers, the restaurant receives the following message from the place they checked my numbers: "Insufficient Funds".

Edited July 4, 2020 by zapatos

[MigL]

You guys go ahead and burn all your money.
I'll see how it works out, and MAYBE I'll do the same.

But I won't be the sucker who goes first.

[Markus Hanke]

19 hours ago, Othmane Dahi said:

I imagine a world without money.

So did the Khmer Rouge during their regime in 1970s Cambodia - they abolished all currency and pretty much any trace of a money-based economy, and reverted to bartering between communes instead. We all know how this turned out.

In my humble and wholly unqualified opinion money is a dangerous thing if it is not seen for what it really is (a social convention), but I would be enough of a realist to recognise that currently there are few if any alternatives that would actually work in practice. Many attempts have been made throughout history to set up communities/societies that don’t use money, and to the best of my knowledge none of them have worked out in the end. 

[Othmane Dahi]

9 hours ago, Area54 said:

In today's society we call these measures money. How does your proposal differ?

There is people who have money and there is who doesn't and there is some " missions " that you are paid more doing them than other missions .

9 hours ago, Area54 said:

A measure of the acceptable content of the breakfast

I didn't get that 

6 hours ago, zapatos said:

The harder I work the more numbers I get.

Well this is a problem for my world. In my word you don't recieve more food if you work harder, you do if you have more family members to feed.

3 minutes ago, Othmane Dahi said:

Well this is a problem for my world. In my word you don't recieve more food if you work harder, you do if you have more family members to feed.

It's a problem because a worker who work harder than someone might get the same amount of food than someone who work less harder. But when I was contructing this world the reason I put in this rule is that people will do a job that they like and they won't be worried if it pays less money.

5 hours ago, MigL said:

You guys go ahead and burn all your money.
I'll see how it works out, and MAYBE I'll do the same.

But I won't be the sucker who goes first.

LOL.

You can keep your money as a souvenir but it won't help you anw.

The problem that you show here is that people who are rich won't accept this system.

59 minutes ago, Markus Hanke said:

We all know how this turned out.

Lol I don't. Can you please help me with that?

1 hour ago, Markus Hanke said:

Many attempts have been made throughout history to set up communities/societies that don’t use money, and to the best of my knowledge none of them have worked out in the end. 

I really want to have an idea about what they did so maybe I can make use of their experience. Is there any place I can have some informations about these attempts, please?

[Markus Hanke]

35 minutes ago, Othmane Dahi said:

Lol I don't. Can you please help me with that?

If you disregard fatalities due to direct acts of violence, some 1.2 million people died in the four years of the Khmer Rouge regime from hunger, disease, and other ‘natural’ causes linked to malnutrition and inadequate health care. Of course it is difficult to disentangle how much of this is a direct result of economic policies (or rather their absence), but you get the idea - it didn’t end well for the people of Cambodia.

38 minutes ago, Othmane Dahi said:

I really want to have an idea about what they did so maybe I can make use of their experience. Is there any place I can have some informations about these attempts, please?

I think Google is your friend here, I am not in a position to do that kind of research for you. Keywords such as “communities without money” will get you a lot of search results, both for historical communities, and current ones. They definitely do exist, but once you read between the lines (remember that much of the material will be biased one way or the other), it becomes apparent quickly that the absence of money - just like an abundance of it - is not necessarily correlated to increased happiness. There are always trade-offs of one kind or another, usually related to personal freedom, or opportunities to pursue things other than basic survival.

I actually personally know an individual who chooses to live without money for ideological reasons (he isn’t part of any community) - he makes it work for himself, but his days consist of hard toil from morning to late, just in order to secure his basic survival. I know that he has little to no time nor resources for any other type of pursuit. To be honest, that would not be my idea of a fulfilling life, but each to their own.  

[Othmane Dahi]

10 minutes ago, Markus Hanke said:

If you disregard fatalities due to direct acts of violence, some 1.2 million people died in the four years of the Khmer Rouge regime from hunger, disease, and other ‘natural’ causes linked to malnutrition and inadequate health care. Of course it is difficult to disentangle how much of this is a direct result of economic policies (or rather their absence), but you get the idea - it didn’t end well for the people of Cambodia.

I think Google is your friend here, I am not in a position to do that kind of research for you. Keywords such as “communities without money” will get you a lot of search results, both for historical communities, and current ones. They definitely do exist, but once you read between the lines (remember that much of the material will be biased one way or the other), it becomes apparent quickly that the absence of money - just like an abundance of it - is not necessarily correlated to increased happiness. There are always trade-offs of one kind or another, usually related to personal freedom, or opportunities to pursue things other than basic survival.

I actually personally know an individual who chooses to live without money for ideological reasons (he isn’t part of any community) - he makes it work for himself, but his days consist of hard toil from morning to late, just in order to secure his basic survival. I know that he has little to no time nor resources for any other type of pursuit. To be honest, that would not be my idea of a fulfilling life, but each to their own.  

Thank you so much.

[timo]

22 hours ago, Othmane Dahi said:

I imagine a world without money. In this world you have the right to have whatever you want in a certain limit. For example, you have the right to have something to have breakfast [...]. In return, you have to do your mission too.

I wonder how different that is from money. Effectively, you seem to get one credit for a task that you can use for someone doing another task for you (providing breakfast). There are a few differences to our current implementation of a monetary system: I assume you image a single world-wide credit currency, you seem to assume there are no fractions of credits, I am not quite sure how tasks/missions are assigned, ... . But most of these differences seem to be disadvantageous compared to our current system.

[joigus]

Very interesting topic, very interesting comments. Not sure I haven't missed some of the important points.

The initial concept of money was far simpler and far less risky than today's. And it was necessary.

If I grow beans and you make leather, there should be a way in which you and I agree to exchange our products even if you're not interested in my beans and/or I'm not interested in your leather (see Markus Hanke's point above about "barter-based societies are not good enough"). That's what money originally was invented for. Leather and beans are demanded in sufficient generality so that you and I can produce notes exchangeable for beans or leather for everybody to accept them as payment in any concept. With this old concept, money represents a wealth that has already been produced. But this requires trust (see MigL's point).

Then, along came the money lenders in Venice (initially only Jewish families); and later, also Christian families, like the Medici, followed suit. Now it's possible to lend money for an interest. It's also possible to lend money you don't have, because:

1) Not everybody needs all the money at the same time.

2) You can pay with money you don't have, but you think you will have.

That complicates things enormously, because value gets entangled with time and predictability.

Then, along came the Dutch, who invented the stock market; and followed the British (who sold the idea to everybody else) and invented a concept of money that represents a value that doesn't as yet exist (the wealth will come later). William Paterson invents the Bank of England, and gets us farther and farther into this new concept of money that's entangled with the future and the will to make money from money (see Studiot's point).

The last unfortunate development (besides different sophisticated new ways of selling wealth that doesn't yet exist) is the modern banking system.

Now, not only unpredictability is entangled every which way. Money is created as pure debt ab initio by banks, which also decide who's going to have it and who isn't. So even the primitive concept of money as a unit of exchange and account for the wealth you have produced has been completely lost.

Summarizing:

A) Money is based on trust: So,

8 hours ago, MigL said:

You guys go ahead and burn all your money.
I'll see how it works out, and MAYBE I'll do the same.

But I won't be the sucker who goes first.

+1. Don't burn your money just yet. People still trust it.

4 hours ago, Markus Hanke said:

In my humble and wholly unqualified opinion money is a dangerous thing if it is not seen for what it really is (a social convention), but I would be enough of a realist to recognise that currently there are few if any alternatives that would actually work in practice. Many attempts have been made throughout history to set up communities/societies that don’t use money, and to the best of my knowledge none of them have worked out in the end. 

+1. Barter alone doesn't cut it. You need a universally accepted unit of exchange and account.

 

17 hours ago, studiot said:

But then some enterprising souls got a duplicator and started offering the service to "Duplicate your stuff for you to your requirements"

+1. Greed. The possession of money leads to trying to find ways to get more money from your money. The people who can't make leather, or grow beans, or do anything real, but crunch numbers. Those are called bankers and investors.

[dimreepr]

18 minutes ago, joigus said:

Greed. The possession of money leads to trying to find ways to get more money from your money. The people who can't make leather, or grow beans, or do anything real, but crunch numbers. Those are called bankers and investors.

We can have money and a stable society, we've just got to spend it (according to Keynes), the problems only occur when the banks get involved. It's fine to strive for and have more than your neighbour, as long as by more we mean stuff rather than a bigger number; because then it's fine to let the poor have enough to live on, because they just spend it to live on and the rest of us have someone to have more than...

[zapatos]

5 hours ago, Othmane Dahi said:

 In my word you don't recieve more food if you work harder, you do if you have more family members to feed.

 

That's not what you said earlier.

16 hours ago, Othmane Dahi said:

No every one has to do something. And if he doesn't he will take a lot less than those who does.

You directly tied how much you get to how hard you worked.

[Othmane Dahi]

9 minutes ago, zapatos said:

You directly tied how much you get to how hard you worked.

No I didn't, the people who work and are the same weight and have the same amount of children will receive the same amout of food. But who does not work will have a lot less just because he is not doing anything.

[joigus]

49 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

We can have money and a stable society, we've just got to spend it (according to Keynes), the problems only occur when the banks get involved. It's fine to strive for and have more than your neighbour, as long as by more we mean stuff rather than a bigger number; because then it's fine to let the poor have enough to live on, because they just spend it to live on and the rest of us have someone to have more than...

I also believe in a concept of money that is cyclic. But it's not just spend it; money must be extinguished. It must disappear at a rate that's equated with the rate at which it's issued. The first historical kind of money as unit of exchange is a very clear example of this. If you pump money indefinitely into an economic system, you've got a recipe for inflationary disaster. The modern concept of money is also cyclic. The problem with the present monetary system is not lack of re-cycling; it's that it's the banks who decide who's going to get it and who's not; as well as how much of it is put into circulation.

An economic system that's workable, IMO, must define, so to speak, a socialist ground (minimum wealth guaranteed as long as you're healthy and not just a leech) plus a capitalist ceiling (maximum wealth allowed).

1) Everybody must be able to have their basic needs guaranteed

2) Nobody should be able to buy, e.g., all the islands in the Indian Ocean

The reason for the first, in my view, is basic human dignity; the reason for the second, if nothing else, is the simple fact that there is a finite number of islands in the Indian Ocean.

I know how unpopular this is in some quarters, but any other possibility is simply not sustainable, or ethically acceptable.

[Othmane Dahi]

3 hours ago, timo said:

I wonder how different that is from money. Effectively, you seem to get one credit for a task that you can use for someone doing another task for you (providing breakfast). There are a few differences to our current implementation of a monetary system: I assume you image a single world-wide credit currency, you seem to assume there are no fractions of credits, I am not quite sure how tasks/missions are assigned, ... . But most of these differences seem to be disadvantageous compared to our current system.

you don't get one credit for your work you recieve the right to take every right, including breakfast.

You do whatever mission you want and feel comfortable doing. 

[zapatos]

4 minutes ago, Othmane Dahi said:

But who does not work will have a lot less just because he is not doing anything.

My cousin is 6' 3" and probably 240 pounds.

My niece is about 5' 1" and I doubt she tops 105 pounds.

Neither have kids.

If she works and he doesn't, you said she will get more food according to you. ("if he doesn't he will take a lot less than those who does")

You are changing the rules as you go.

[Othmane Dahi]

1 hour ago, joigus said:

there should be a way in which you and I agree to exchange our products even if you're not interested in my beans and/or I'm not interested in your leather

I didn't quite get that, please explain. Why would I agree to take leather if I don't want it

I think between two people it's harder than with a group for the leather maker, because it will increase his chance of a client every while that wants to change his leather

2 minutes ago, zapatos said:

If she works and he doesn't, you said she will get more food according to you. ("if he doesn't he will take a lot less than those who does")

Yes you are right. If we take weight in consideration the state "if he doesn't he will take a lot less than those who does" is false.

4 minutes ago, zapatos said:

You are changing the rules as you go.

I didn't finish setting the rules yet I am still constructing the world and if I see that one of the rules in unfair I change it.

2 hours ago, joigus said:

That's what money originally was invented for.

Okay I see what you meant before

[zapatos]

6 minutes ago, Othmane Dahi said:

I didn't finish setting the rules yet I am still constructing the world and if I see that one of the rules in unfair I change it.

Then don't deny you said something. Just say you are changing the rule. That way we can avoid wasted effort.

[Othmane Dahi]

Just now, zapatos said:

Then don't deny you said something. Just say you are changing the rule. That way we can avoid wasted effort.

Okay that was my bad I will try to avoid it. Thank you.

[zapatos]

Is your world different than the one Marx envisioned when he said "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"?

[Othmane Dahi]

6 minutes ago, zapatos said:

Is your world different than the one Marx envisioned when he said "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"?

I don't know what Marx exactly said. But I can say in this world " each one has to do a mission that benefits others, according to his ability and his passion, in return he recieves what he needs to live and to do his mission "

The problem here is that maybe someone might not find an opportunity to work even if he wants to. 

 

2 minutes ago, Othmane Dahi said:

The problem here is that maybe someone might not find an opportunity to work even if he wants to.

I think it is not fair to treat him like someone who doesn't want to work.

[sangui]

Just now, Othmane Dahi said:

I don't know what Marx exactly said. But I can say in this world " each one has to do a mission that benefits others, according to his ability and his passion, in return he recieves what he needs to live and to do his mission "

I don't see how this is incompatible with money (I see why it's impossible with our system, but we could build an alternative monetary system).

Money is the simplest way to trade (and trade is important, because it's the simplest way to connect people). So maybe just build some new rules ?

-Every body will receive a minimum salary (without looking for his employement, sex, age ...).

-Nobody can earn more than 10 times this salary (10  is just an exemple).

-An organisation can control some prices (for the most important supplies)  to avoid dangerous inflation.

 

It may be an alternative between our world and a world without money (remember : money is a tool, a tool can't be evil, it just may  be evily used).