As an idealist, I can imagine such a society, akin to the Star Trek universe, where the concept of money serves no purpose, but it’s not pragmatic because such a universe depends on principles and technologies that just plain don’t exist and may or may not ever exist. For instance, one of the things that they’re very clear about is that the basic needs of every citizen are met, this is largely due to replication technology, free-energy, and other technological advances in fields like medicine. Thus, theoretically, if nearly everyone decided to just stop working, all the citizens would still be provided for.
And this is one of the major purposes that money serves in our society today, it forces people to make economic decisions, such that one makes good uses of one’s own resources to provide for oneself. Money ensures that any work one chooses to pursue has into it’s consideration my ability to provide for myself and the efficiency at which I obtain that.
I’ll use myself as an example. I’m educated in Computer Science and I work in a related field; however, my biggest passions are related to music and philosophy. In a world like our own but without money, I’d probably do little or no work related to my education and primary skills and I’d focus a lot more on the latter. As a result, I might be happier, but ultimately society as a whole is worse off because that is my greatest contribution to society. I don’t do that work because I want to be rich, in fact, I work the fewest hours possible so that I can focus more on my passions, but it’s an informed decision that, as a result of money, forces me to consider the greater whole of society but in a simple manner of whether or not I may enough money without having to understand the complex economic interactions in the background.
Yes, for some people money is an end in and of itself, but I think for most of us it is a means to an end of balancing our own self interests with the interests of society as a whole. Theoretically, it means I can make decisions about how to best use my resources to balance those two ends without having an economics degree. Maybe I can see that I can make a little bit more money doing something else, and that might be due to shifting demands and new technologies or whatever, but the whole reason I’d get paid more to do it is because it theoretically is a better use of my skills.
That all said, even in an ideal world where we can easily provide for all the basic needs of everyone, I’m not sure the concept of money still isn’t useless. Will we ever see all of the jobs that need to be done but few people have interest in doing go away? For instance, not many people are passionate about doing janitorial work, ditch digging, burger flipping, and I could imagine that with sufficient technology many or all of those types of jobs will go away, but can we necessarily say that without money that we’d always have enough people to voluntarily do the jobs that need to be done to ensure that society can run smoothly? I’m sure there will still be some people who would do some thankless, difficult, or dangerous jobs for reasons I don’t really understand, but I can’t believe we’d have enough of them. If, however, we need at least some money to get some benefit above the bare minimum society is easily able to provide us, there will be incentive to do something other than just our passion projects because it will provide greater benefit to society.
So, sure, maybe some day in the distant future, with sufficient technological advantage, we might be able to provide a minimal standard of living to everyone that can survive purely on the work of those who are willing to volunteer. But we’re still far away from that goal barring some major scientific and engineering breakthroughs in the near future.
