Why is currency so essential?
Why do we focus solely on this one aspect of life?
Simpsons meme aside --
Those with currency can have significantly more options than those without it. I'm of a privileged state where if I wanted to drop everything and visit another country for two weeks, there's nothing stopping me financially. Not many people have that luxury.
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Your comment made me realize that OP wasn't asking about why we need currency as a society, but why people keep trying to get more money.
I hate when the post title and post content ask two seemingly different questions, lol
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Providing clarification is important...but to me, it seems prudent to just ask what one actually wants to know in the first place.
Honestly XY is hard to put into practice.
It wants the Asker to elevate themselves to the level of thinking as the Answerer and also have the forethought to ask "the right question".
But it lacks the perspective of what it means to be new at something. When you're new, you have no context of what the hell anything is. So you throw spaghetti at the wall and ask is this how you make pasta.
If it's a culture where stupid questions are allowed and people are willing to be mentors... Just ask your question.
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I think in this case, the OP should've just chosen one question and put it in the title, then left the post text blank.
If the question they wanted to know didn't get answered, they could've had conversations with the commenters where they gave more detail about why they asked the question.
A post consisting of two different questions in two different places (and nothing else) just seems counterintuitive to me.
Whoa dude, just answer the question. If answering or asking doesn't appeal to you just move on.
I thoroughly enjoy all the answers I've received and the discussion around it. Sorry I don't live up to your "no stupid questions" question standard.
It's a hard question to ask. I'd rather pin down why it's essential then ask why it's deemed the only thing that is essential.
it's essential then ask why it's deemed the only thing that is essential.
This is a very blanket statement and going to need a source here.
No not really.
Buddhist scripture believes in achieving enlightenment, yogi aim for inner peace, all sorts of subgroups and cultures like indigenous people put family first.
You're not providing a source to where this is truth, so it seems like you're putting this pressure on yourself. And you need to dig into yourself why YOU believe currency is all that matters.
Even if I were "putting pressure on myself" your inclination is that I'm the one who has deemed money the most essential thus providing you with your sought out evidence. Now kind sir, I say good day.
That's fair.
Hope you discover other alternatives because there's a wide world/groups of people out there that don't believe money is the sole focus of life.
Lemmy supports editing posts, deleting posts and making new posts - if a question is obtuse the author can always take it down and post something more precise and less open to misinterpretation. Of it's a language barrier issue I'm sympathetic but this just seems to have been a needlessly clickbaity title.
God, that was such a funny joke back in the day. One of the moments where the writers were at the top of their game.
Makes it easier to buy food and pay for rent.
My landlord doesn't want to barter for goods and services on a monthly basis.
Im being obtuse, for sure, but why does your land lord need to extract value from you? I know it's to pay for the property but that's just another exchange of currency.
You answered your question in the sentence right after your question. The landlord owns the property and so he can do what he wants with it. He's letting you live there but has decided he wants something in exchange for letting you live there. If currency didn't exist he'd want something else in exchange.
Making the assumption ownership is a valued currency of course.
Which is arguably a bootstrap-paradox; we need capital to participate in capitalism, for which we need - cause without capitalism what would we do with our capital.
Are you suggesting people shouldn't be allowed to own stuff? There are very few economic systems where people aren't allowed to own stuff and they tend not to be popular. Most of the people who are complaining about landlords and rent and whatnot really just want to own their own houses.
I mean like owning things is a human concept not a physical law, so yeah I can imagine a society exists where nothing is owned
Can't say if it'd be better or worse than our current cause were not trying it, but tbh I'd be happy if instead of solely me being able to use 'my' drill for example, the whole community can whenever they require.
Sounds a hell of a lot more efficient to me if we work together not apart
I mean, in a perfect world, yes. The issue comes up when someone wears out or breaks the drill, and it needs to be replaced or repaired. Whoever spends time and resources ensuring that we have a drill needs to be compensated somehow, because that's time they're not spending on making sure they have food and shelter.
Follow along that line of reasoning for a couple steps, and you end up with some kind of economic system, and likely some kind of enforcement system, so you're suddenly back at an early stage proto-state/government.
Hot women are usually all over the farmers but the farmers are usually about those dolla dolla bills yo.
For the things the money buys. Because it's really though to trade food directly for them.
Do they? I'm pretty sure only about one in three humans works in food production. I think it is reasonable for them to expect the other two to give them something for their food in return.
Going back far enough, scarcity is the answer. We technically live in a post-scarcity world now. But we are bound by the models we developed when it existed.
I wouldn't say we are completely post scarcity, but enough of the producers of goods create enough artificial scarcity in order to keep prices high and the train moving. Unfortunately, I don't see the paradigm changing until we have a major altering event in which many people perish.
We're only post-scarcity for certain things in certain geopolitical regions, and even then, logistics of distributing those things is a problem. Computers, for example, will always be scarce in their current form because the raw materials to build them are naturally scarce, can only be extracted so fast, and have a limited ability to be recycled. We have a shit-ton of them, but they're still scarce.
I hear you on the resources needed for computers being scarcer. But this might still fall overall under human induced scarcity. If we lived in more communal ways, the whole approach to personal computers could change, for instance, in a way that increased access in a more sustainable way. In no way do I believe that will happen, ofc. Just as we're not likely going to go from every household owning one or more televisions to having, say, a shared theater in every neighborhood
No worries. I do think that a major tipping point towards true post scarcity will be when we can figure out and deploy nuclear fusion, though we'll still be mired by price gouging until we demand better.
I’m not certain near infinite energy will solve scarcity. Humans will simply use up all the available energy anyways until we eventually run out of whatever previously “infinite “ resource we’re using. We’re very good at this type of optimization.
I don't think it'll solve it either, but it'll certain help. The beauty of fusion is that it can and will produce, at scale and maturity, more than we can consume, leading to an unprecedented technological revolution.
And we exist to extract value from agriculture. We’ve developed to a point where it’s both possible and desirable to live in close proximity to one another. It’s possible because ag is so successful and scalable, and it’s desirable because new opportunities are possible when everything is nearby. So that’s the trade off you made. To afford the city life, you accrue value through city opportunities and you trade it in exchange for the goods from service providers. The alternative is that you run your own farm. Ask yourself how many farmers you know! And you’ll see which decision most people make.
All to say, we shouldn’t think of value extraction as a uniformly bad practice. We all do it and we need to do it because each square acre of land doesn’t provide the same goods and services.
Because it's very difficult to get things you need to live solely through barter. Many trades are very niche, and an economy that uses money allows those trades to continue being viable parts of society.
Like, think of plumbing. If everything goes well, you don't need a plumber. But when you do...you really need it. Now imagine being the plumber who wants some bread and eggs but the farmer has no problems currently that needs the plumber's skills. Plumber can't eat, leaves profession, there's now no plumber when the pipes do break.
Obviously, the next thought here might be, "Well, why doesn't the plumber say if they get eggs and bread now, they'll come and fix your toilet later if needed?" But that sort of re-invents credit, right? "I'll trade 3 future plumbing problems for 3 boxes of eggs now." If you have that, why not money?
So basically, money is very useful. It can be traded for many things you otherwise wouldn't be able to get if you were only able to offer as barter a specific item that might be rejected by the other person you want to barter with. Money is a "universal" trade good, and it's also easy to store (you don't have to have lots of physical room to store your Universal Trade Good).
The BEHAVIOR of people surrounding this very useful thing can absolutely be suspect, depending on the person (greedy sociopaths hoarding wealth)--but that's a human thing, not because money is innately a bad thing. It's a social problem, not a technology problem. You could totally have a greedy hoarder storing up a non-money trade item too...see people and toilet paper/sanitizer during Covid.
Here's my take:
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We're built for about 150 relationships max (Dunbar number), and yet we benefit from cooperation above that threshold. Rather than make it so we have to have a personal relationship with everyone who could possibly benefit us, we accepted a ramped down version of relationship we call "transactions". This is a very weak replacement for a relationship, but it is a sort of "micro-relationship" in that for a brief moment two people who don't know each other can kind of care about each other during an exchange. Through specialization, we can do something well that doesn't just benefit the handful of friends and neighbors we have, but tens of thousands and possibly millions of people via transactions (e.g. a factory, starting an Amazon business, etc.)
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There is a process called "commensuration" in the social sciences, where people start to make one thing commensurate with another, even in wildly different domains. For example, to understand the value of a forest and to convey its importance to decision makers we might say "this forest is worth $100 billion". It's kind of weird to do this (how do leaves and trees and anthills and beetles equal imaginary humoney?) But slowly, over time, we have made many things commensurate to dollars at various scales. (I don't think this is a good thing, but it does have benefits). In short, more and more things that were part of an implicit economy of relationships (e.g. can the neighbor girl babysit tonight?) have entered the explicit domain of the monetary economy (e.g. sittercity).
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IMO, in order to participate in the huge value generated by this monetary economy, people sometimes lose the forest for the trees (so to speak) and forget what really matters (e.g. excellence of character, deep relationships, new experiences, etc.) because it seems like we might be able to put off those things until "after" we square away this whole money thing first. But maybe "after" never comes--and the hollow life of a consumer capitalist drains the inner ecological diversity of a soulful life.
This kind of thoughtful introspection is the only reason to get out of bed in the morning. That, and dogs. Dogs are wonderful.
Consider what we used as currency before it was currency. You would have to barter before, which was inefficient. Common currency saves you and everyone involved time. Instead of having to barter for every item, which would also require you to do carry all of those items, you can just pay with currency now.
We can think of it as a universal language for trading. It doesn’t matter what item you eventually want, you can trade money to get it.
Want, greed, hunger, sickness, lust... nearly every flaw and benefit has been translatable to currency at some point in history. I feel like you're focused on the negative but, for instance, take my partner - they suffer from hypermobility and would be unable to build their own home (most of us would be unable arguably) currency allows us to make an exchange at the the absurd levels of value that equal a house without needing to shuffle around herds of thousands of cattle.
That's not exactly true. Barter was never used like that in the past. People used gift giving systems or other trust based systems in daily life. Barter was only used with strangers and that was not a common occurrence. These trust based systems do work in smaller settings but break down in large settings where interacting with strangers is the norm.
A lot of cultures ended up with effective currencies. Whether that was grains of rice or chickens there ended up a small number of items that had a well understood value and ended up being the default item of trade, not because the receiver needed those items but because they were known to be easily exchanged with others.
Because they represent a resource, concrete or abstract. Currency is easily exchanged, either for other currencies, or for goods and services. This allows for a lot more opportunities than hauling around a swarm of sheep for bartering at the car dealership.
On one end carrying sheep would be annoying, but so is a credit score; arguably both are sources of noise distracting humanity from actually improving at all
Credit scores aren't a direct result of currency. Credit scores are the result of lending and credit, which is possible without currency.
Example: "I could give you this car if you promised to bring me schwiftyfive thousand sheep over five years, but according to my records you're only good for schiftytwo sheep. Sorry pal. Here, first borrow this chicken, and give me an egg every day for a few years to prove that you're the kind of guy/gal/ghoul who honors debts, and we can discuss the matter again."
We had currency without credit scores for about three thousand years prior to the first credit score agency (1841 from what I found). Having credit score agencies is just a modern problem and their prevalence in the past fifty years is a demonstration of how shitty our capitalist system has gotten.
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Modern society is only possible because of global trade networks. Global trade networks would never work without currency. If a person spends all their day fabricating metal sheets they need a way to buy bread to feed their family. Otherwise we'd all be back to farming our lives away.
God? Jesus is that you? Or at least someone omnipotent
You know with absolute certainty the only way people can trade is capitalism?
Even in a non-capitalist economy, currency would still make trading easier. It simply might not be exchanging hands between private individuals but between governments.
Capitalism is not trade in and of itself. It has to do with who owns the means of production.
There is also a meta discussion here on liquidity (how easy it is to exchange something). People want currency because it is easy to exchange. Your landlord might be okay with getting paid in a mix of gallons of milk and some cuts of beef, but most will not. Trading for "non currency value" is not uncommon. You might get paid with stocks depending on your work. If you buy a car you might trade in your old one.
You can either barter or you can have currency. Currency is the means through which the economy functions. You need something abstract to indicate value. That's currency.
In a post-scarcity society, when everyone could just get everything they wanted whenever on a whim just because, we could get rid of it. Could. Probably wouldn't. That society is a fantasy. But it's nice to dream of.
It lubricates economic activity (not a lewd joke). It makes it easier to exchange shit, which leads to a more robust economy. Would you rather barter?
Sometimes I would rather barter because the additional effort would make things more important instead of all the mass produced crap that is ruining the world. A robust wconomy tends to mean an excess of stuff we don't need.
But it wouldn't reeally work out that way, just wishful thinking.
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Food, water, sex, security, shelter. This are the major factors that drove human behavior. Currency is only useful in that it can be used to secure the other things.
Nobody is lusting after a hyperinflated Zimbabwe dollar.
Maybe it's not as essential as one is led to believe. The book Debt by David Graeber deals with the very question you asked. I highly recommend you check it out.
I can't really summarise it well since I haven't finished it myself, so maybe peruse the Wikipedia entry. But the first couple of chapters try to answer your question
Barter was never a thing in daily life. No anthropogist found evidence for that. Trust based systems were used, but those don't work well when they population increases and interaction with strangers happens more. That's where currency takes over.
Why currency is the most important thing right now? Because currency at the moment is status and many people seek a high status on society.
Today, yes. We're dealing with a few billion people with stuff shipped across the planet now.
Every exchange between people requires an exchange of value. If we both agree on a common "thing" as a representation of value, we can be more accurate and flexible in our transactions.
Currency is an energy equivalent in human society. I'd say our current ridiculously exploitable system with greedy for profit banks, rampant credits, tax havens, exchange rates manipulation, dividends and stock market micro trading leaves a lot to be desired, yet it is still incredibly convenient and relatively stable even with all the major crashes. Beats barter that's for sure.
We are focused on it because life itself is based on burning energy to sustain itself. Any plant would be happy to get more nutrients and sunlight like every animal would gorge itself to get some of that fat on their bones. It doesn't matter that it's sometimes to the detriment too - it's just wired that way in the DNA, because scarcity is way more common than abundance and if this balance crumbles then it's just a matter of time before abundance turns to even more scarcity due to overgrowth/desertification/overpopulation.
Kinda like when an AI is overtrained on one thing that wasn't really correlated to its original goal, we've attempted to create a system that organizes collaboration between people; were now so overtrained on acquiring wealth that some would rather the planet burn than risk acquiring slightly less.
Its similar enough to a trail of ants in a death spiral; the same essential survival instincts that their society depends on, now nefariously dooming all involved to a slow starvation.
That being said similarly to the ants most of the populace will do the average (as it's what's kept us alive this long so how could it harm us?) And continue the spiral, but if one individual is able to reconnect the spiral to the main pheramone train the entire death spiral may be avoided
Because it gives the ruling class something to hold over the poors so the rest of society is so terrified of becoming poor they forget that they're being used as literal slaves for the state
This is the crux of it. Currency is essential because it allows people to exchange goods and services in a timely manner. What it is used for today is not essential to the individual.
Today 100 different people could think up a 100 different ways to streamline the exchange of goods and services without using fiat currency. The reason we don't is because it would take power away from those who covet it and most people don't understand they are being used.
Step 1: Hoard a bunch of stuff no one really cares about.
Step 2: Wait until you've hoarded the majority of that stuff in your local area.
Step 3: Start telling people how important the thing you've been hoarding is.
Step 4: People are dumb and actually start believing the useless thing you've hoarded is actually important.
Step 5: Enjoy your new status as the man who convinced everyone something completely useless was important.
Idk why the correct answer always attracts several down-votes on Lemmy. This is literally it... Money is useful because it can be used as payment, it can be exchanged for goods... The reason why our whole lives revolve around it is because we have shaped society to be that way... We call that capitalism.
(And with knowing the proper term for it, everyone can just look it up on Wikipedia and learn about the history and how it's all linked.)