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A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

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Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#301

Post by mikem170 »

chmod600 wrote: post #290
mikem170 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern society has problems with violence and sex crimes against women, too.

The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker makes a compelling case that violence (including rape) are dramatically lower in modern societies all around the world.

I'd buy that. I just didn't know that it was relevant or comparable to modern state backing of the rentier rich. wasn't sure how to judge such a comparison. I know that modern governemnts will send uniformed guys with guns if you mess with a rich persons property. But I wondered if aborigines beat low status members and women for economic reasons, or for mating reasons, or for something else?

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#303

Post by mikem170 »

zizee wrote: post #276
mikem170 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the first source you quoted, the Atlantic article [0], quotes Graeber describing economies which don't depend on money or barter: > Communities of Iroquois Native Americans, for instance, stockpiled their goods in longhouses. Female councils then allocated the goods, explains Graeber. Other indigenous communities relied on “gift economies,” which went something like this: If you were a baker who needed meat, you…

This "gift economy" sounds someone trying to put a nobel spin on a debt based economy. I bet in many cases if someone got a reputation for not reciprocating "gifts" they'd soon find themselves not receiving anything. Hardly a gift. And why are people "hinting" at things in this economy, and why this is presented as something different from a direct request. How often have you come across people "hinting" at what they…

> This "gift economy" sounds someone trying to put a nobel spin on a debt based economy.

I saw that same connection myself. Gifts, aka favors, aka "you owe me one", aka debts.

> This gift based economy just sounds like a passive aggressive debt based economy, and it doesn't sound real.

I brought this up initially (near the top of this thread) in response to someone who couldn't imagine an economy without without money. Such things have existed, as per anthropologists.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#304

Post by mikem170 »

samatman wrote: post #285
mikem170 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the first source you quoted, the Atlantic article [0], quotes Graeber describing economies which don't depend on money or barter: > Communities of Iroquois Native Americans, for instance, stockpiled their goods in longhouses. Female councils then allocated the goods, explains Graeber. Other indigenous communities relied on “gift economies,” which went something like this: If you were a baker who needed meat, you…

> Communities of Iroquois Native Americans Had wampum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wampum Which was absolutely used as trade goods between Iroquois bands, between the Iroquois and other natives, and between the Iroquois and settler colonialists. Standardized trade goods, portable and of a broadly recognized value: in other words, money. Money which was good enough that the English, being kept short of coin by the Cr…

Like I said, the original post I replied to seemed to say they couldn't imagine the dishes getting done without money: "He wants everyone to suddenly stop using money. If that happened, who would wash the dishes?"

I'm fairly certain the Iroquois didn't need to trade wampum with other bands to get the dishes washed? Just like you said you don't need to pay someone in your family to do the dishes, families (and friends, and Iroquois villages, etc) help each other without needing money.

I didn't say that one can construct a modern economy without money, just that the dishes could still get washed, like a lot of other small scale transactions, in response to someone who may have thought that such things are not possible.

Are you trying to prove me wrong, that humans cannot possibly organize activities amongst themselves without wampum of some sort? You mentioned families doing things for each other, which might be a better example than I brought up.

(I do appreciate the discussion though, I've learned a couple things along the way. But I'm not sure if we disagree, or are going on tangents.)

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#305

Post by dredmorbius »

Thorncorona wrote: post #182
henvic wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (shouldn't that be a government choice?). Why? Just why? Why the hell can't I be free to move freely to a place where other people accept me? Why is it that a parasitic entity (the state) has to say whether they allow me in or not? Why should I be barred to enter a continental region of the world without convincing a bunch of bureaucrats that I'll be there just for a few days? > Privatisation is also taking over po…

I can't tell if you are trying to be sarcastic so I will respond in good faith. > Why the hell can't I be free to move freely to a place where other people accept me? Why is it that a parasitic entity (the state) has to say whether they allow me in or not? Because when a community decides to provides services to a people it must now have standards to decide who to provide services too. There are only 2 possible ways…

The state's monopoly, qua Max Weber, is on the legitimate use of violence.

All three words matter: state, monopoly, and legitimate.

That is, the right and legitimacy of that right, is restricted to the state.

Absent this, one of three conditions exist;

1. There is no monopoly. In which case violence is widespread.

2. There is no legitimacy. In which case violence is capricious. This is tyranny or unaccountable power.

3. Some non-state power or agent assumes the monopoly on legitimate violence. In which case it becomes, by definition the State.

The state's claim is to legitimacy. A capricious exercise would be an abrogation of legitimacy

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#306

Post by ALittleLight »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #262
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #74

I’m not sure living in the city off handouts, charity, and free tax payer provided facilities exactly promotes his no money philosophy. His life relies on the things he despises, if the economic collapse he predicts comes he will be among the first to starve to death. Go into the wild and grow/hunt food or trade some skill - the post money society doesn’t need philosopher poets scavenging cigarettes from trash cans

> Go into the wild and grow/hunt food It is easy to radically underestimate how much food a human needs every day and how hard it is to acquire, especially when living a non-sedentary life as a hunter/gatherer. Trying to accumulate 2000+ calories per day growing food requires a rather significant farm and skill (and weather); doing so with meat requires daily hunting, or a permanent storage facility with refrigeratio…

I don't think that comment is underestimating it, but rather saying that living off the grid would be impressive because it's hard. Living off of charity or the work of others isn't impressive.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#307

Post by stevejb »

bserge wrote: post #88
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Haven't you ever done your own dishes? I use something so that it gets dirty, so I'll wash it off. Dishes is just one example. You may wash your own dishes, but did you buy those dishes from someone who was selling them as their job? Do you grow all of your own food? Do you also sew your own clothes? Build your own shelter? Engineer your own transportation and manufacture your own iPhone? The truth is that a societ…

In the case of a small community, it can be left to volunteers (optionally offer them a meal/beer) or simply rotation so everyone does the unwanted jobs. It's a fair system and people will do it.

> simply rotation so everyone does the unwanted jobs. It's a fair system and people will do it.

I think that what would end up happening is that in even in a small group of people, it would naturally emerge that there are variations in quality, efficient, economies of scale, etc. Even in my immediate family, there are some menial jobs that my wife does 90-100% of and some menial jobs that I do 90-100% of. If we tried to make if 50-50 or have some type of rotation, we would both lose.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#308

Post by noduerme »

Retric wrote: post #267
noduerme wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's not just about economic benefit. Most people don't work to afford toys for themselves, they work to support others. At the end of the article, this guy expresses sadness that he's estranged from his two children as a result of his choices, but then attempts to justify it by saying he's not going to let having children keep him from making a better world for his children - a world in which there is no money.…

> If you can’t take part in your children’s lives… That’s a question without an objective answer. For example some people are better off in the foster system. It’s an oversimplification to assume some kind of standard life for other life choices.

But by the guy's own standard, the most important thing for him is to make the world better for his children. Even at the cost of actually knowing his children. Subjectively or objectively they may be better off with him not in their lives, but I fail to see how that bolsters his moral argument for how society should work.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#309

Post by boomlinde »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #63
boomlinde wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't you ever done your own dishes? I use something so that it gets dirty, so I'll wash it off. The jobs "no one wants to do" is usually work people are happy to do for themselves or occasionally their friends and family. The idea that "no one wants to do them" embeds the presumption that you spend eight hours a day doing just that. Of course no one wants to do that!

> Haven't you ever done your own dishes? I use something so that it gets dirty, so I'll wash it off. Dishes is just one example. You may wash your own dishes, but did you buy those dishes from someone who was selling them as their job? Do you grow all of your own food? Do you also sew your own clothes? Build your own shelter? Engineer your own transportation and manufacture your own iPhone? The truth is that a societ…

We're veering from the topic of jobs no one wants to do. No, I didn't make any of my dishes (actually, maybe a butter knife) or make my own clothes, but I don't think these obviously qualify as jobs no one wants to do. I'd love to build my own home. There are people that enjoy woodworking, pottery, metal working, engineering...

> The truth is that a society in which everyone is self-sufficient can’t look anything like modern society.

That much I agree with. I don't propose total self sufficiency. I just think that dishes is a very bad example of a job that wouldn't get done if we didn't pay someone to do it and, more constructively, that a lot of jobs fall into this category. There is an obvious incentive for me to wash my dishes: I want my dishes to be clean before I use them. No one has ever paid me to wash dishes. I've washed dishes for myself, for friends and for family.

Dishwashing is a good example of an ubiquitous chore that almost everyone does without any market incentive, which strikes me as the exact opposite of a job no one wants to do and which therefore has to be paid for.

Work that most people actually really don't want to do is usually well paid for this reason. If you'd said hyperbaric welding instead of dishwashing I might be more inclined to agree that it needs more of an incentive than the mere satisfaction of meaningful work.

> Most of the advancements we take for granted are made possible by monetary exchange

It should not be a surprise that money plays an important part in a society where the allocation of labor is governed by money and those that have it. It does not follow from this observation that there can't be other sources of incentives to innovate and produce.

It should also be mentioned in any discussion where the current state of production is touted as something we should aspire to that there are indications that the current mode and level of production is undustainable and harmful to the environment. It's perhaps something we should change, but the market evidently isn't creating effective incentives to do so.

> And for what it’s worth, back in college I had several roommates who clearly demonstrated that not everyone is willing to do their own dishes.

There's an important difference between jobs no one wants to do and jobs not everyone wants to do.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#310

Post by bernawil »

samatman wrote: post #238
mikem170 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The source I quoted agrees, saying favors, not barter. People did something before money was invented, right? Parent's raised kids, kids helped parent's when they were older, families banded together, items were traded between villages, across continents, etc.

Money in a broad sense is as old as anatomically modern humans, so, no. 80,000 year old grave goods have been discovered, consisting of shells of a consistent size, with holes drilled in them, a few hundred kilometers from the ocean. We know from ethnography of societies which existed until very recently that these collectibles served the same purpose as money. A good complement to Graeber's book is the work of Nick…

The book (Debt, The First 5,000 Years) goes over this (IIRC it's in the Games with Sex and Death chapter). It says that these kinds of "weird money" examples like stone wheels in Micronesia, where not really used to trade for goods, but more or less to trade in social favors / honor systems.

The early mesopotamian cilivilazations got debt and credit before there was coinage. Farmers bought goods on credit, the debt set in grain for example, to be payed on harvest season. Grain, would be as good as money since that's what you paid your taxes in. The whole region had a sophisticated credit culture and the effects of debt were pervasive. That's why the old testament has provisions against usury, the jubilee, etc.

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