A world without money
A lot of us may have found ourselves having this thought- Who invented money? Why do we even need it? What would the world be without money?
The first time I thought about who invented money was when I was in fourth grade. I didn’t have a device to instantly search it up on Google, so (unfortunately) the only reliable sources of information I had were my parents and teachers. Since it is a question that is pretty tough to explain to a kid, they expectedly told me that earlyman invented it, or that it just came along, or it’s been here from the start, or that there’s no particular inventor per se (which I believe is the most accurate).
The next time I came across this question was in my Microeconomics course in a chapter called ‘Money and Banking’. Economically speaking, money is important because the barter system just doesn’t work. The barter system, theoretically, used to be a system in which goods and services were exchanged for, well, goods and services (since money didn’t exist). Some people also argue that the barter system never even existed to begin with.
But for the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that a barter economy did exist. The problems that it caused were-
It isn’t an adequate measure of value (how many apples is a shoe worth?)
There may not be a double coincidence of wants all the time
What about commodities that are indivisible?
How does one exchange services? (At least in a reliable way)
Above are some of the problems I learned about. There may be countless more, but you get the point. Why does money exist? Well, because it solves all the above problems, simply speaking.
Now that we have established our bases, let’s think further.
Almost all of us are extremely dependent on money for survival (the only reason I say ‘almost’ is because there are people who have their own food plantations and live independently). As much as money mediates, ironically, it becomes the very source of inequality in the first place. Now that there is no money, there should be no inequality, right? Okay then, what about the former? How would resources be distributed? Might I suggest a world without money in terms of survival would mean that all resources are equally distributed to ensure survival of all humans (on paper, at least). This is a very very extreme concept to even think about, given human tendencies. However, for the sake of exploring it, let’s leave our reality aside for a while. A world where resources are equally distributed raises the question of difference of needs of resources. Let’s just say everyone gets whatever they need (not what they want). In such a world, the people cultivating those resources would inherently be of more value than anyone else. Or would they? A world without money would have completely reworked social hierarchies. Maybe people would be valued differently- there could be a completely meritocratic system, there could be a democracy, of course, or any of the other systems we have today. The only reason this matters is because you need an authority to ensure everyone gets what they need. So, in any scenario without money, regardless of what path we take, the concept of ‘value’ would demand the existence of a sort of ‘government’.
The interesting thing is our idea of value would be completely reworked. Think about it. Today we value things based on the happiness they give us (or utils, for economics students). As much as we say, “money can’t buy happiness”, we have to admit that our concept of it is related to money in one way or another. Life for a lot of people is a journey of goals to achieve, all progressively towards the destination of a comfortable life, all related to earning more and more money to reach these goals. As students, we may study subjects we don’t like, intern at places we don’t fit in, sit in lectures that bore us, all for the prospect of earning a better living in the future. All of this also implies that a lot of us won’t be earning a good living and in extreme situations also struggle to survive. Without the ‘government’ system I talked about earlier, there would be nobody ensuring that everyone can survive in the first place.
Another interesting perspective I found on this was in an article written by Jade Saab(Lebanese/Canadian, PhD candidate researching Ideology and Revolution)-
“Even if we wanted to look at money away from the complexity of government and politics and purely through the rules of economics, through the idea of exchange, we would come across an even more damning predicament. If we’ve found ourselves trading our time for money, does that mean that we don’t even own our time? Isn’t that where the phrase time is money comes from? And if so does that mean that all we’re doing is working in the hopes that we can make enough money to buy our time back?”
This makes one wonder, if money wasn’t really that important, would we be doing different things today? If you had all you needed, and had no way of buying anything more, what would you do? Would you be happy? What does happiness look like, without the concept of money? Would there be anarchy?
Our idea of anarchy depends on economics and its core assumptions of scarcity of resources. Today we focus on maximising our utility, no matter how we get there. But if there is no scarcity of resources (which there isn’t according to the numbers, we have enough of arguably all the resources we need to survive, the problem is in their distribution, and that’s where more actors factor in), knowing that they are now equally distributed, would we still stick to our ways? Maybe we are like this as a result of the system we’ve created. Or is it the other way round?
The problem with imagining a world without money is that every scenario goes back to the concept of exchange. To completely abandon exchange, you’d need a system with equal access to all resources and someone ensuring that it happens. The latter won’t even be necessary if humans were all ideal beings. However, we’re not. A lot of my fellow batchmates would be able to relate to this through the idea of Game Theory and why the Nash equilibrium isn’t always the best outcome for both parties. If all of us agreed to share resources equally, we wouldn’t need a system of exchange, or a party ensuring that nobody cheats. But we do cheat, so we need a system of exchange.
It does make me think- are humans likely to cheat because of the system’s design? Or is the system designed because we’re bound to cheat?
Speaking of cheating, since we’re focusing on ‘Reset’ this year, let’s reset more aspects of our world, like morality. A world without money leads to a world without a valuation mechanism. And without a valuation mechanism, how would we make decisions? How would we choose between left and right? Our time is only worth the happiness it brings to us. Our needs are met (or else we die). Our judgement mechanism is off. So we seek morality.
A world without morals doesn’t necessarily have to be dystopian. Or does it? No concept of money could very well dictate perfect morality. The thing with morals is, they’re really, really hard to define. They’re interlinked with culture and societal convention and sometimes even religion. It’s very easy to think about the unspoken rules of society today because of something called “law”, but what if there was no such thing? Would there be anarchy? Well, anarchy by today’s standards, at least.
Money is something that can exist only because everyone agrees that it be used for transactions. It’s a mutual agreement that benefits everyone, since it is a medium. If there were perfect moralities, we wouldn’t need money because we’d be sharing resources equally. But since there are no morals, there could be no money because nobody agrees even though it mutually benefits everyone. A world without morals is sometimes my favourite thing to imagine, because it is so difficult to do so. Even in a world with morals, such as ours, people justify killing. I can only imagine what would happen in a world without morals. Our imagination on this subject is so veritably limited, that the only examples one can think of are polar opposites of rules we have today. Here’s another way to look at it- there is no reason for society to be the way it is today. It could’ve been something so different, which is unimaginable for us right now because of the abundance of variables here, the same way in a different world how the world we live in would be unimaginable. Their idea of morals could be different, but they’d have rules too.
Would it be safe to assume that without morals or these unspoken rules of society, there is no co-existing?
Speaking of which, why do we have these unspoken rules in the first place? Who decided that slaps are actions of hate? Or that kisses are actions of affection? Or that speaking softly is politeness or any of the million other things that we never really acknowledge, but exists regardless. The reason we never think of questioning any of this is because, well, we’ve never had a reason to. I want to argue it is because of conditioning, but I’m no expert on psychology.
Going back to our world without money, maybe it does solve all our problems. A world without money means that the governing body doesn’t have to ensure equal resource distribution, it would just have to ensure that the individual need of resources is correctly assessed and met. In such a world, people would be more driven by passion than their need for earning for survival. Happiness would be linked with things outside of monetary value, since there would be none. Technology and infrastructure would be owned by everyone (that’s not to say the concept of private property is absent. As an example, imagine a park in your neighbourhood. Everyone owns the park technically, since government ownership is absent in our world). Innovation and improvement in quality of life could be the only things that society cares about, since there are no ulterior motives to change resource allocation here (on the assumption that without money being something we fight over, everyone would be an ideal individual). There’ll be no wars since resources are something the entire race knows they need, and without equal and just distribution, the system would break down.
It makes me fuzzy just thinking about this world without competition, ego clashes, or the banking and finance sector altogether. Truly a disappointment that we are immoral beings. Truly a disappointment that Game Theory makes sense.