Daft_ishWhy is currency so essential?
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.
I being obtuse, for sure, but why does your land lord need you to provide him goods and services?
It’s nice to have something to eat.
Food, people make food in excess.
They make that food for money.
Just money?
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.
Landlords exist to extract value.
To pay for more goods and services that extract value.
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.
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.
VindictiveJudgeWe’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
There is definitely human induced scarcity. I debated including that distinction.
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.
More than we can consume right now. We used to think this about oil as well. Humans will seek to reach this limit as quickly as possible. It will certainly create new technologies. However I don’t think it will solve scarcity problems for everyone since many of those issues are not resources or technology but politics. We choose to deprive certain humans of their basic needs.
FaceDeerYou 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.