Market economics is one way that people have invented for distribution of goods. It isn’t the only way. Money is a human invention. It’s not like air. People can, and did, live without it. It’s probable that some other technology will replace money and market trading because eventually every technology becomes outdated. We aren’t talking about moving from gold to cash to cards to bitcoin—we mean that all forms of market exchange will be replaced by something else.
That should be a relief to hear, because the current financial system has generated shocking inequality; it’s increasingly difficult to navigate for the average human; and it’s causing untold ecological damage.
Yes, we invented money and we could invent something else, and that’s Good News.
When you learned the history of money, you were probably told that before there was money, there was barter—and that’s true in some societies, but in most pre-money societies, there was sharing. One person was a better hunter and another person was a better basket-weaver. Some people were elders and some people were just old. Everyone shared the food and baskets and wisdom. In that sense, there was no trade, just people sharing what they had. You didn’t let the children, old people or less talented people die because they didn’t “contribute to the economy”.
In some societies, trade was more like gifting, where it was more important to get a good reputation than a good deal, because you didn’t want the other tribe to go to war with you. Rewards for the best warriors might have been first choice of the food, but it wasn’t more food—because everyone ate what they wanted. Rewarding the hunter might have come in the form of feathers and beads or other types of decoration to make them feel significant, but not so that they could have more than everyone else. All of these forms of distribution and more have been used by different cultures. In any case, historically, people have used different forms of distribution, both with forms of money and without forms of money.
In some societies, it was incredibly important for everyone to work very hard, because producing enough food for everyone required everyone to chip in, but in many societies food was abundant and people didn’t work hard at all.
Market economies are based on the idea that everyone must work hard for a living. But as machines and computers take over more and more of the work that must be done—you would think that people could just relax. In fact, they could, if we lived in a different system. It’s time to create that system, because the current one is outdated.
Outdated doesn’t mean bad. It just means that it is no longer the best we can do.
Money is a human invention, and we could (and did) live without it.
