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?
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