I also think a lot of posters underestimated just how resourceful small groups of people can be in the face of necessity. All you need is one person who knows how to purify water, another who has seeds and knows how to plant them, someone who is inventive around tool use, etc. Many rural people have a whole lot of these skills. And many people who now live in cities have retained them.
And books. I’ve learned many a skill from a combination of books and getting it wrong until I get it right.
Yes, a lot of people whose existence depends upon civilization – diabetics, for example – are going to die. But many won’t. People made it a couple million years without “civilization” however you define it. They won’t be exterminated all that easily.
With 8 billion people in the world, if we lose 90% of them, that leaves us 800 million people. Which is about what the world population was in 1760. If they could maintain a society, I expect the badasses who survived an event that killed the other 90% of the human race could pull it off as well.
This is not how things worked before there was money, or in times when money disappeared. People just … mentally kept track of these kinds of debts and obligations. They didn’t need elaborate IOUs until the situation got way more mercantile and international.
Humans have been cannibals before. Not just in immediate survival situations, either. It crops up fairly frequently in prehistory. Sometimes en masse. I see no reason that behaviour couldn’t spring up again.
Money has existed since Princess Hermodike married King Midas (6th century BC) and, to my knowledge, has never disappeared from a society post-introduction.
Maybe in a group of 4-5 people you might be able to forego money. But your average kingdom through history was probably no more than what we would now consider to be a tiny village. I’m sure they bartered where it made sense but they also exchanged money where it was more useful.
A catastrophe that kills off 90% of everyone still leaves the world with a greater population than it had through most of history.
Despite Hollywood’s attraction to the idea of a handful of people wandering around through empty cities, the reality would generally be that we’d form into towns and cities, with large groups of hundreds or thousands of people.
There have been times when money more-or-less was valueless and people turned to barter and trade in kind. The end of the Crisis of the 3rd Century comes to mind, but also parts of Western Europe after the fall of Rome but before the successor barbarian kingdoms established their own coinage.
Many societies much larger than that did without money. The various Andean empires like the Inca used no currency, for instance.
Did I already post this? I’m reading about the pioneer edges of colonial New England and how farmers had --and hence, used – virtually no money. They traded goods and labor for what they needed, for a couple hundred years. Because it was a self-sufficient agrarian substistence economy, there really was no need for money. Admittedly these economies were adjacent to the mercantile economies of the coast, but they were not reliant upon them.
It’s easy for me to imagine an economy without money.
As an example of how people might adapt in cities in the event of a collapse of civilization, look at the “Tower of David” in Caracas. It’s an unfinished abandoned skyscraper that’s been taken over by squatters. From what I’ve seen, they’ve occupied 28 of 45 floors. Access is only via the open stairwells. The residents have had to figure out how to bring water up and, presumably, trash, sewage and dead bodies down. They’ve figured out how to secure themselves.
Here is a fifteen-minute story about it from BBC Newsnight.
Yeah, “they kept track of who was in debt to whom” rings truer to me. I feel like there’s a bunch of stuff where we do that even in a society that uses money.
At least within groups of people smaller than Dunbar’s Number, a strict quid pro quo is less common than having an idea of who generally pulls their weight, contributes and overall is a good person to have around; versus someone who’s a jerkass, a taker and a slacker. It’s similar to the unconscious assessment of who in your life is worth how lavish a Christmas present.
Those aren’t people in a post-civilization world; they are squatters living at the fringes of what is at least a basically functional urban environment. They may have made ‘Torre de David’ marginally livable but they can’t produce food or clean water, nor maintain the structure which has already experienced a partial collapse and will continue to degrade as it weathers. (It also seems like something straight out of a J.G. Ballard novel.)
In a post-civilization world, cities are about the worst place to settle because they are a ‘superorganism’ that requires substantial inputs of consumables, energy, natural resources, and materials to maintain it and keep basic services functional. Settlements on the edges of cities or suburbs might make sense in terms of scavenging manufactured goods and refined resources, which is the reason that pre-historic cities are built upon or next to one another, but settling in skyscrapers or other urban structures that cannot be maintained with available resources makes little sense.
The lynchpin of our global society is our industrialized food production systems; prior to the 20th Century, and certainly before WWII, food production was largely local, and never greater than regional just because of how difficult it was to transport perishable goods. We now have a system where virtually all food is processed and packaged by largely centralized systems, and even ‘developing’ nations with previously robust indigenous local cultivation are now heavily dependent upon foreign imports of basic staples like grain (or refined flour) and oil. The shift in large scale farming and animal cultivation has actually had a dramatic impact upon the large animal biomass of the planet:
A transition away from or environmentally-driven collapse of such a globalized, high efficiency food system would certainly result in death by famine of much of the human population, and recovery of the native biomass to the pre-industrial norm such that significant populations could ‘live off the land’ would take generations, notwithstanding the impact of climate change on agricultural viability. Unlike previous political collapse of empires where much of the population can keep on living in much the same way as they had in the pre-collapse era, a failure of civilization today would make indefinite survival virtually impossible regardless of what skills you have or medieval cosplay you do unless you are part of a large community of like-minded people in a well resourced area who will provide for the common support and defense, and even then would be an uncomfortable and brutal existence leaving little time for leisure and intellectual pursuits until it could build up to a critical mass to support a group of anointed ‘priests’ or ‘scholars’ or however they are identified.
As for billionaires in bunkers, even if they can maintain authority over their security forces, they can only pack away so many MREs or food stocks, and are eventually going to have to emerge to a reality that industrial society isn’t going to spontaneously reformulate, nor are AI robots going to build for them a utopia from hopes and dreams. They are living in just as much of a fantasy world as those solo homesteaders who think they’re going to “go back to the land” and survive from the yield of a half-acre garden and small game hunting.
Local Colonial governments often printed currency but this was primarily for exchanges with the government, almost more like purchasing bonds, and was usually a terrible deal because they depreciated due to the colonial government having little revenue. The British passed several Currency Acts intended to provide a specie-backed currency or banknotes that were essentially a promissory note backed by property mortgage because of how unreliable the colonial bills were for international trade (and also so the Crown could track finances and collect taxes on the Colonies) but most trade involving currency was actually done in Spanish dólar (silver coin) which is where the term “dollar” for modern American currency comes from. Local colonial settlements tended to be highly communitarian and almost invariably governed by their church officials, so trade was as much ‘caring for ones neighbor’ as formal barter, and anyone deemed not sufficiently contributing to the settlement as a whole could and not infrequently would be rejected.
Trade with Native American tribes was almost exclusively in barter for tools, weapons, and goods that the Natives could not produce themselves; the iron tomahawk that is so associated with Algonquian, Lakota, and Souix peoples is actually developed from the naval boarding axe. (Natives had developed stone axes of similar function prior to the arrival of European colonists but never smelted iron.)
Post-Revolution, most colonies (later states) issued bills of credit, but these were again mostly for formal transactions and depreciated badly, in no small part because had a massive counterfeiting operation. In most local communities trade would have indeed been in trade for goods and services, and certain religious sects like the Quakers largely refused to use currency. The United States did not start to issue ‘real’ currency until the Coinage Act of 1792 and subsequent creation of the US Mint. Even then, many states and individual ‘wildcat’ banks issued their own paper currency (ostensibly backed by specie but a variety of banking scandals made it clear that a lot of banks were fudging their inventory) and the US government didn’t issue paper currency that was in wide use until the National Banking Act of 1863.
In the Western frontier, currency other than the dólar was uncommon until the railroads opened the West to trade, and most community exchanges were barter or specie, although Western settlers were generally less community oriented and more likely to be wholly self-sufficient.
How large were these farms?
Probably between 50 and 200 acres on average. These were not good farms, either. The river bottom lands were the first to be developed, these were the hill farms east of the Connecticut River basin.
What percentage of society were farmers?
Almost everyone. A few shopkeepers, tavern owners, smiths, coopers, etc. .
How “virtual”?
Monetary exchanges were rare. Farmers had few ways of obtaining money – market towns were an arduous multi-day journey away, even if you had much excess to sell. Few navigable rivers in this part of New England, which is mountainous, and roads were very hard to build and maintain. Almost the whole of the economy was within families (which were typically multigenerational and large) and between neighbors within a day’s journey.
As Stranger points out, these communities were in increasing tension with the mercantile, money-based economies linked to Europe, centered in Boston and New York.
I’m reading about this because the man who built my house was one of those ‘yeoman farmers’ who was intimately involved in Shay’s Rebellion, an agrarian uprising in 1786-87.
That is the very much disputed opinion of one writer. In his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years , anthropologist David Graeber argues against the suggestion that money was invented to replace barter.[34] The problem with this version of history, he suggests, is the lack of any supporting evidence. His research indicates that gift economies were common, at least at the beginnings of the first agrarian societies, when humans used elaborate credit systems. Graeber proposes that money as a unit of account was invented the moment when the unquantifiable obligation “I owe you one” transformed into the quantifiable notion of “I owe you one unit of something”. In this view, money emerged first as credit and only later acquired the functions of a medium of exchange and a store of value… Economists Robert P. Murphy and George Selgin replied to Graeber saying that the barter hypothesis is consistent with economic principles, and a barter system would be too brief to leave a permanent record.
You are stating a disputed opinion as fact .
Hypothesis of barter as the origin of money[edit source]
In Politics Book 1:9[29] (c. 350 BC) the Greek philosopher Aristotle contemplated the nature of money. He considered that every object has two uses: the original purpose for which the object was designed, and as an item to sell or barter.[30] The assignment of monetary value to an otherwise insignificant object such as a coin or promissory note arises as people acquired a psychological capacity to place trust in each other and in external authority within barter exchange.[31][32] Finding people to barter with is a time-consuming process; Austrian economist Carl Menger hypothesised that this reason was a driving force in the creation of monetary systems – people seeking a way to stop wasting their time looking for someone to barter with.[33]
In 350BC, Aristotle was a lot closer to barter economies than some writer 2350 years later.
Not just ‘one writer’. Of course it’s disputed* - by economists who just have “a feeling” that it’s not the case. Graeber (and his predecessor Mitchell - so much for “one writer”) point out that there’s no evidence for this, but plenty of evidence for gift economies. They are the ones being scientific, as the part of that paragraph you notably left out says:
John Alexander Smith from Bella Caledonia said that in this exchange Graeber is the one acting as a scientist by trying to falsify the barter hypotheses, while Selgin is taking a theological stance by taking the hypothesis as truth revealed from authority.[38]
* Hell, the roundness of the Earth is ‘disputed’.
Aristotle also plain made shit up, like aether, and thought the brain was for cooling down the blood, and thought women had less teeth than men. Hardly the rigourous scientist Graeber was.
I left out a lot of stuff, that is a very long article.
Look, whatever happened, whether it was Gifts or IOUs or barter- that is prehistory. So, no one is taking a scientific viewpoint.
Yes, he tired to falsify it, but since it isnt testable and repeatable, it isnt scientific. That is the very definition of scientific. A hypothesis must be testable and that test repeatable in order to become a theory.
In any case, sure, both sides are issuing opinions. I didnt say one side or the other is right. I said they are opinions, and you stated a disputed opinion as a fact. It is not a fact.
