What would it be like if there is no money system? Barter? Would big and profitable trades exist? What are the incentive for people to form government? Would the world be a better place without money? Or would there be more enslavement, injustice, and poverty? ----------- When life gets hard I want to blame money, but then as I continue to question and to research--to ponder again and again from different angles and cases--I realize over and over again. Money is just a tool. It is how the user use it. Human greed, human ego, and human lack of moral principles--those are the foundation to which corruption and injustice. Spoiler: ...possible world Here is a little story of my imaginary world: Farmers were given home that had fertile land, so they may start their own stock of vegetable and trade for goods. The average household who are not framers, such as office workers, tech, engineer and so on take common vegetables from the Farming Plantation. For rare or vegetables not farm in the Farming Plantation, they have to find a farming providers/sellers. Just like in farming, there are people who cultivate their building skills or other trades. They are allowed to re-structure their home to include a workshop; while they are also employed at the General Goods Department. They may produce certain goods and use this to barter with farmers for a 5-6 years contract of rare or whatever the farmers produce year around. Every children go to school. It is at school that they either continue the caste in which they were born, or if they have talent cultivate another pathway. People are not force into one pathway, but is generally allow to experience and declared it later in college. Meanwhile they are in school, students are expected to also have a jobs that are more flexible and keep the economy going, such as : restaurant workers, waitress, gift stores, etc. For those who fail to enter a caste or certain job placement, they may work in sectors that are in need of worker or be re-trained to do other stuff. One is not simply stuck in their caste, for example: if one if an office worker but still enjoy farming they may taking simple farming course to plant vegetables in a pot; or go to have fun workshop and make a bird house or of similar nature. Perhaps if one has an idea, they may apply to test it out and once it is in full-gear open up space for people without caste to donate their time. At the end of the year, everyone have to fill out something like a tax return where they record their time spent in community re-education class, jobs, etc. However, one of the biggest problem is--incentive! What are the incentives for someone to do the things they do? But then, why do we go to school? Our parents told us so and we did when we were little--and so we continue to do so. What about more dangerous position like cops, bodyguard and etc? What about the people who seriously don't care?
They would go with trading for rare or precious items, like silver, gold, and gems. Paper money(or even digital money for that matter) is just a legitimate representation that we use in place of precious metals like gold anyway.
It use barter system like "you need this, i need those. Let's exchange" Also, money is actually an IOU for gold of the old times, that's why gold exchange rate is constant
The world would be worse without money. Instead of having people with varying degrees of wealth, almost everyone would be extremely impoverished, since a capitalist society with individuals specializing in certain professions wouldn't be possible with just barter.
Money makes things easier. And people will strive to make life easier and more convenient. Unless of course there's an almighty being who limits the human thinking cap and forcefully halt progress. Wall-E is our future. That chair is fuking awesome.
I remember asking my parents why we didn’t all just barter for things when I was eight. I got accused (jokingly) of being “a little communist.” ... even though I didn’t know what a communist was, I was quite unhappy about being accused of being one. Looking back, they just might have been trying to avoid answering the question.
Money? What's that? Am I supposed to bake it or fry it? Joking aside, what do you mean by money here?
This happened one time... Everybody was just too bloody stupid to invent something to trade that they'd just beat up others and steal. Thats why human population was low back then...
A world without nuffies isn't a world I want to live in! As for that useless cash stuff in real life, well... if you wanted a current world without money and not a futuristic one. Probably a point system would be the way to go. Like for example, each person starts at 1000 points. Doing productive actions to society gives you more points while doing bad stuff subtracts points. Then the things you can buy is limited by how much points you have. You don't consume points, more like think of points as tiers and quotas. So you can only get a TV if you have 2000 points, and once a year. If you have 5000 points you can get 2 better TVs. Kind of like club or credit card tiers that you get benefits as long as you have X points to maintain a tier. Thus you have a society without money without being futuristic and still incentivize people. Of course there are downsides to this concept as it centralizes power in government and can obviously be abused. Just like china's social score, millions of people could find themselves unable to use public transit cause they lack the "points" simply because they don't do actions the government wants.
Without money immediate essential like food and materials would be the primary currency. Tertiary products would be premium not much different but tooling and expertise would reign supreme as the primary driver of the economy.
We would literally still be in the stone age. money fulfilles the need for validation when we humans do anything it is physical proof of our worth , it also breeds competition and competition breeds conflict and conflict breeds growth and the means to overcome the conflict be it making better products or through more forcefull methods as dirty as money is it is fundamental for all intelligent species you yourself may not want money or see the need but that is a thought bread from wealth and I'm not talking monetarily but from wealth of society created on money but there are 3 billion people on this earth and each one has different needs and for each need someone is there to fulfill it for a price
Whether it is the most primitive form of bartering, ancient forms of gold, or modern day digital currency, "money" comes down to trust, therefore the real question is what would the world be like without trust? Whether it is an item, gold, or digital currency, the trust in that currency is what determines its value. I won't go into detail about this (if you google it or youtube it you can find an explanation to it) but Venezuela is an excellent example of this. When you use currency you are trusting that the currency has value, that it can be traded for things. In Venezuela, the inflation was so bad that the money became useless, to the point where it litters the street now. Despite being the same physical bill that was used to buy things just a few years ago, that same bill now has no value due to the lack of trust in it. Nobody would accept the money because it can no longer be relied upon to be traded for goods. There was an interesting youtube video that explained how a country in south africa actually fixed their inflation problem caused by a lack of trust in their currency - by making up a fake currency. It goes to show that whether it is an object, a piece of paper, or even something virtual, as long as it has trust it can be used as money.
This question delves into economy and philosophy, I think. A world without money exists. It's the time before 700 BC, which is the time period before coin money was made. This time was an age of war and conquest. Most professions with above average lifestyles were either lords or soldiers. A world without money is not a world with a majority of happy people. The modern world, though flawed, is vastly better in terms of the amount of people happy versus unhappy. This is a Utilitarian view in philosophy. (Never enough blobs in NUF threads.)
To have a not crappy world without money it would likely have to fall into the category of "Post-Scarcity" in Science Fiction terms. One where resources are no longer limited by any real means due to technological advances. Cheaply turning any one material in any other material, huge quantities of easy energy, and machines that do nothing but suck up CO2 + hydrogen, spit out 02 and sugar. No mineral or material is therefore any more or less 'rare' than others, food is so cheap as to be basically free to anyone, etc.. If that is not the case, money currently fills a necessary niche in our lives by being a universal trading means. Without it, I could get paid for a day's wage in anything - 3 chickens, 1 pig or 2 sacks of potatoes may have the same 'value', but if I don't need them I need to trade those for what I do need. But what if the person selling what I do need wants something else? Do I sell what I have to try and get what he wants, to get what I want? Do I offer him what is obviously more valuable than the item I want to try and force the deal? It is sloppy. If I do a day's labor, I get $X. $X is $X anywhere I go. I want something that can be gotten with $, I just find someone selling it and they'll want $ is return, $ they can use immediately else without have to go through any extra processing. It is a much more efficient and less sloppy a system than barter or managed distribution, but it does bring about a whole host of woes. That tends to be the case with humanity, we create concepts, ideas, technologies and such that alter the daily realities of our lives far faster than we as a species evolve to adapt to them - at least in my opinion that is so, and one of the reasons why the world is always so hectic.
Money is what allows us to separate components of production across a large group of people, decreasing the cost of practically everything. Without it we would have nothing.