# Can a money-less civilization exist? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [September 9, 2016, 3:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-a-money-less-civilization-exist/765410 "2016-09-09T03:01:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Enterprise](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/76d3ee/32.png) [@Enterprise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Enterprise)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2016, 2:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-a-money-less-civilization-exist/765410/61 "2016-09-30T02:04:47Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > No, it has nothing to do with “greed” or “compassion”. Economics is the study of making choices. Resources are finite. Labor pools are finite. Time is finite. A society has to choose where to allocate resources because it can’t allocate them everywhere at once. Deciding to build and maintain a hospital is deciding not to build and maintain a homeless shelter. Building a high speed rail is deciding to not build a powerplant. **Without money, a large complex society couldn’t manage the complexity of even building it’s own infrastructure**. Such a society would have more needy than it could care for because it would have so many shortages. Just out of interest: have you got any evidence for the bolded part, and could you perhaps define “large, complex”? ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2016, 4:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-a-money-less-civilization-exist/765410/62 "2016-09-30T04:13:38Z")
What I mean by “formal” vs “informal” is just that in a neolithic village or hunter-gatherer band, nobody makes tally marks that Thag owes 3 baskets of barley to Og. Thag just ladles out an extra bowl for Og when Og is hanging around outside the huts at dinner time. But if Og is constantly mooching for a bowl of porridge, and never does anything for anyone else, people notice. And what happens is that maybe people keep feeding Og, but people think he’s a bum and treat him with disdain. Or maybe they decide he’s gotta do more work and they kick his ass. Or whatever the appropriate penalty for being a lzay bum is in their village. But nobody is marking down exactly how many bowls of porridge Og eats, they just notice it. And hey, if Og is a great storyteller or a charming guy, maybe they’re glad to have him hanging around, and they try to set him up with their sister. This sort of thing happens even in the present day of ultra-commodified transactions. Nobody expects to be paid when they invite people over for dinner…but if you constantly have your friends over for dinner and they never ever have you over for dinner…you notice. But when the social structure gets more complicated than a small village with a shaman and a storyteller, you need a more complex system of keeping track of who owes who. And the earliest form of this is that every farmer brings grain to the temple, and the priests use this grain to feed themselves and the temple workmen and provide for emergencies. But you can’t just remember that each and every farmer brought the required amount of grain to the temple, there are hundreds of them and so you need some sort of tally system to record whether Og and Thag have brought their offering at the end of harvest. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2016, 7:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-a-money-less-civilization-exist/765410/63 "2016-09-30T19:46:41Z")
> [@Enterprise](#): > > Just out of interest: have you got any evidence for the bolded part, and could you perhaps define “large, complex”? Just mostly general knowledge of economics, history and how organizations work. Let me clarify. Yes, a small, mostly agrarian village can probably get by without money. It’s understood that everyone more or less works in the fields or hunts/gathers. Maybe a few specialists like blacksmiths and carpenters. They can get together at the weekly town meeting and decide to spend Sunday raising a barn or digging a new road. For the most part, things are simple enough you can probably teach anyone to do anyone else’s job if you need to. On the opposite end, imagine New York City trying to figure out how to keep the subways, buses, bridges, tunnels and ferries running without cash. Just the vehicles alone are extremely complex devices consisting of millions of parts manufactured in complex supply chains by hundreds of companies employing thousands of specialized workers all over the world. There has to be some unified standard by which each of them conveys the value of various parts, labor and time. ---
**Author:** ![santosvega](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c77e96/32.png) [@santosvega](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/santosvega)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2016, 10:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-a-money-less-civilization-exist/765410/64 "2016-09-30T22:15:58Z")
Everyone keeps talking in hypotheticals, but wasn’t the Inca Empire essentially a complex money-less civilization? ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2016, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-a-money-less-civilization-exist/765410/65 "2016-09-30T22:54:19Z")
Yeah, except what exactly is money? If everyone is required to hand over grain to the authorities, and work in corvee labor, and all this is meticulously recorded by government bureaucrats, and the exchange of gold and silver goods is widespread, what exactly are we talking about? Yeah, the government didn’t stamp ingots of precious metals with the face of the Inca. So? This is a perfect example of how credit precedes money. If you get a basket from Bob at the market you don’t pay him with a lump of silver, or with a chicken. Instead you record that you owe Bob a basket, and at some future date (like when the harvest is done) you settle up. It isn’t like “no money” means that people just produce what they like and take what they like. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2016, 10:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-a-money-less-civilization-exist/765410/66 "2016-10-02T10:03:36Z")
> [@santosvega](#): > > Everyone keeps talking in hypotheticals, but wasn’t the Inca Empire essentially a complex money-less civilization? [They would seem to be an anomaly.](http://io9.gizmodo.com/5872764/the-greatest-mystery-of-the-inca-empire-was-its-strange-economy) Of course some left-wing idiot posted in the comments how wonderful such a society would be if it survived into the modern age. Of course what they fail to comprehend is that the Inca empire was an authoritarian state that relied on slaves and forced labor. All production was rationed, so there is zero economic freedom. Even if the Conquistadors didn’t wipe them out, I doubt they would have advanced much further. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2016, 10:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-a-money-less-civilization-exist/765410/67 "2016-10-02T10:08:58Z")
And people think the Five-year Plans were a Marxist invention… then again, there is also a lot of people who think that “communal living” is a Marxist invention, some of them in this same thread. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2016, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-a-money-less-civilization-exist/765410/68 "2016-10-02T15:01:42Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > Yeah, except what exactly is money?. A representation of other goods or work-hours, not a commodity in itself. Counting sacks of grain or even work-hours directly is accounting, and barter, but not a monetary system. For everyone whose fingers flew to the keyboard to larn me about investment banking etc., I posit that the real objection most people have to “money” and their ideas for a moneyless society aren’t really about “money” (the markers and accounting system itself) but about monetarism, investment and the rise of money as a commodity. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2016, 3:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-a-money-less-civilization-exist/765410/69 "2016-10-02T15:06:50Z")
So was a gold coin money? A silver dime? Or are those commodities? ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2016, 3:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-a-money-less-civilization-exist/765410/70 "2016-10-02T15:12:30Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > So was a gold coin money? A silver dime? Or are those commodities? I don’t know that this thread needs to make it any more complicated. Money has to be two things: impossible or difficult to counterfeit, and convincing in its value. Making coins out of a rare, controlled material that inherently carries the value of the coin in itself is the traditional solution, but then it’s crossed the line a little into commodity. The distinction, for my argument’s purposes, is whether money can be used to make more money through investment and interest, or not. Either money is a shared accounting system of agreed value, or it’s a commodity in and of itself - and it’s the latter that seems to cause all the trouble. In an era when we can create counterfeit-proof tokens and accounting, money doesn’t necessarily need to carry its own value the way checks used to have to be a self-standing financial instrument. (Now they’re just an accounting memo.) ---
**Author:** ![Enterprise](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/76d3ee/32.png) [@Enterprise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Enterprise)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2016, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-a-money-less-civilization-exist/765410/71 "2016-10-02T22:03:28Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > Just mostly general knowledge of economics, history and how organizations work. Then I would just reiterate my recommendation of Graeber’s book, which should give you a handy read on what history’s lessons are so far–and they are decidedly mixed on the need for money. At least, if by “money”, you mean (as below), cash: some sort of accounting system is probably a requirement, though the balancing of these accounts, if ever they need to happen, can be done in things other than money. > [@](#): > > Let me clarify. Yes, a small, mostly agrarian village can probably get by without money. It’s understood that everyone more or less works in the fields or hunts/gathers. Maybe a few specialists like blacksmiths and carpenters. They can get together at the weekly town meeting and decide to spend Sunday raising a barn or digging a new road. For the most part, things are simple enough you can probably teach anyone to do anyone else’s job if you need to. > > On the opposite end, imagine New York City trying to figure out how to keep the subways, buses, bridges, tunnels and ferries running without cash. Just the vehicles alone are extremely complex devices consisting of millions of parts manufactured in complex supply chains by hundreds of companies employing thousands of specialized workers all over the world. There has to be some unified standard by which each of them conveys the value of various parts, labor and time. Two things about this: the first is, of course, that it’s probably the case that NYC would run plenty fine without “cash”–in fact, I doubt that in any part of the complex supply chain to mention, cash plays any role. You’re probably right that there needs to be “some unified standard” to convey values, but (just to pick on example), this need have no relation to any sort of “really existing” money. Graeber notes that for the longest time in the Middle Ages, people would do their accounting in Roman coins, the like of which nobody had seen for years: didn’t matter, as long as there as an “accounting language”, as it were. So much hinges on the question of what “money” is supposed to be in this hypothetical… The second is that these examples are far less interesting than the necessary moment where the one transitions into the other: the moment where “sure, who needs money” becomes “can’t do without”. Now obviously, this will be somewhere on continuum, but even were we to grant that NYC required money to keep operating (hypostathized, but not shown, so far). But when does this start? When does it historically start, and when does it theoretically start? ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [October 3, 2016, 2:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-a-money-less-civilization-exist/765410/72 "2016-10-03T14:35:21Z")
> [@Enterprise](#): > > Two things about this: the first is, of course, that it’s probably the case that NYC would run plenty fine without “cash”–in fact, I doubt that in any part of the complex supply chain to mention, cash plays any role. You’re probably right that there needs to be “some unified standard” to convey values, but (just to pick on example), this need have no relation to any sort of “really existing” money. Graeber notes that for the longest time in the Middle Ages, people would do their accounting in Roman coins, the like of which nobody had seen for years: didn’t matter, as long as there as an “accounting language”, as it were. So much hinges on the question of what “money” is supposed to be in this hypothetical… Sorry…are we discussing if a civilization can get by without “cash” or if it can get by without “money”? Cash, we already can pretty much do without if we really wanted to. But money (defined as a common accounting language) is a different story. ---
**Author:** ![Enterprise](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/76d3ee/32.png) [@Enterprise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Enterprise)\ **Post date:** [October 3, 2016, 4:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-a-money-less-civilization-exist/765410/73 "2016-10-03T16:44:25Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > Sorry…are we discussing if a civilization can get by without “cash” or if it can get by without “money”? > > Cash, we already can pretty much do without if we really wanted to. But money (defined as a common accounting language) is a different story. Huh? You wrote: > [@](#): > > On the opposite end, imagine New York City trying to figure out how to keep the subways, buses, bridges, tunnels and ferries running **without cash**. Just the vehicles alone are extremely complex devices consisting of millions of parts manufactured in complex supply chains by hundreds of companies employing thousands of specialized workers all over the world. There has to be some unified standard by which each of them conveys the value of various parts, labor and time. My bolding. Sorry if that was unclear, but I was just replying to your point here. I agree that we need to talk about an accounting language, but my question remains: on the spectrum between the primordial village and NYC, where would you see the need for such an accounting language fall–that is, what level of “civilization” can go without it? This seems to me to be the trickier question than to posit that a city essentially built on such a language cannot run without it. I actually have another question that seems in need of discussion in this: what is it that money accounts for–that is, what does our accounting language actually account for, and in which instances is such an account really required? After all, our money is far more than an accounting language, and the question is whether is additional qualities (its ability to multiply on its own, for example) is needed a basic, and sufficient, accounting language. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-a-money-less-civilization-exist/765410.md?page=3)