Why do we focus solely on this one aspect of life?
Every exchange between people requires an exchange of value. If we both agree on a common “thing” as a representation of value, we can be more accurate and flexible in our transactions.
Because they represent a resource, concrete or abstract. Currency is easily exchanged, either for other currencies, or for goods and services. This allows for a lot more opportunities than hauling around a swarm of sheep for bartering at the car dealership.
On one end carrying sheep would be annoying, but so is a credit score; arguably both are sources of noise distracting humanity from actually improving at all
Credit scores aren’t a direct result of currency. Credit scores are the result of lending and credit, which is possible without currency.
Example: “I could give you this car if you promised to bring me schwiftyfive thousand sheep over five years, but according to my records you’re only good for schiftytwo sheep. Sorry pal. Here, first borrow this chicken, and give me an egg every day for a few years to prove that you’re the kind of guy/gal/ghoul who honors debts, and we can discuss the matter again.”
We had currency without credit scores for about three thousand years prior to the first credit score agency (1841 from what I found). Having credit score agencies is just a modern problem and their prevalence in the past fifty years is a demonstration of how shitty our capitalist system has gotten.
Can be exchanged for goods and services
But I wanted a peanut!
$20 can buy many peanuts
Maybe it’s not as essential as one is led to believe. The book Debt by David Graeber deals with the very question you asked. I highly recommend you check it out.
I can’t really summarise it well since I haven’t finished it myself, so maybe peruse the Wikipedia entry. But the first couple of chapters try to answer your question
There is also a meta discussion here on liquidity (how easy it is to exchange something). People want currency because it is easy to exchange. Your landlord might be okay with getting paid in a mix of gallons of milk and some cuts of beef, but most will not. Trading for “non currency value” is not uncommon. You might get paid with stocks depending on your work. If you buy a car you might trade in your old one.
Kinda like when an AI is overtrained on one thing that wasn’t really correlated to its original goal, we’ve attempted to create a system that organizes collaboration between people; were now so overtrained on acquiring wealth that some would rather the planet burn than risk acquiring slightly less.
Its similar enough to a trail of ants in a death spiral; the same essential survival instincts that their society depends on, now nefariously dooming all involved to a slow starvation.
That being said similarly to the ants most of the populace will do the average (as it’s what’s kept us alive this long so how could it harm us?) And continue the spiral, but if one individual is able to reconnect the spiral to the main pheramone train the entire death spiral may be avoided
Life ain’t nothin but bitches n money
Who cares about a return on one’s effort amirite
Those are 2 very different questions
We live in capitalism
… Bottom text?
It’s literally in the name. CAPITALism
Idk why the correct answer always attracts several down-votes on Lemmy. This is literally it… Money is useful because it can be used as payment, it can be exchanged for goods… The reason why our whole lives revolve around it is because we have shaped society to be that way… We call that capitalism.
(And with knowing the proper term for it, everyone can just look it up on Wikipedia and learn about the history and how it’s all linked.)
Barter was never a thing in daily life. No anthropogist found evidence for that. Trust based systems were used, but those don’t work well when they population increases and interaction with strangers happens more. That’s where currency takes over.
Why currency is the most important thing right now? Because currency at the moment is status and many people seek a high status on society.
It’s not because we require currency in order to meet our basic needs?
Currency is an energy equivalent in human society. I’d say our current ridiculously exploitable system with greedy for profit banks, rampant credits, tax havens, exchange rates manipulation, dividends and stock market micro trading leaves a lot to be desired, yet it is still incredibly convenient and relatively stable even with all the major crashes. Beats barter that’s for sure.
We are focused on it because life itself is based on burning energy to sustain itself. Any plant would be happy to get more nutrients and sunlight like every animal would gorge itself to get some of that fat on their bones. It doesn’t matter that it’s sometimes to the detriment too - it’s just wired that way in the DNA, because scarcity is way more common than abundance and if this balance crumbles then it’s just a matter of time before abundance turns to even more scarcity due to overgrowth/desertification/overpopulation.
Food, water, sex, security, shelter. This are the major factors that drove human behavior. Currency is only useful in that it can be used to secure the other things.
Nobody is lusting after a hyperinflated Zimbabwe dollar.
Makes it easier to buy food and pay for rent.
My landlord doesn’t want to barter for goods and services on a monthly basis.
I being obtuse, for sure, but why does your land lord need to extract value from you? I know it’s to pay for the property but that’s just another exchange of currency.
Landlords exist to extract value.
And we exist to extract value from agriculture. We’ve developed to a point where it’s both possible and desirable to live in close proximity to one another. It’s possible because ag is so successful and scalable, and it’s desirable because new opportunities are possible when everything is nearby. So that’s the trade off you made. To afford the city life, you accrue value through city opportunities and you trade it in exchange for the goods from service providers. The alternative is that you run your own farm. Ask yourself how many farmers you know! And you’ll see which decision most people make.
All to say, we shouldn’t think of value extraction as a uniformly bad practice. We all do it and we need to do it because each square acre of land doesn’t provide the same goods and services.
To pay for more goods and services that extract value.
Going back far enough, scarcity is the answer. We technically live in a post-scarcity world now. But we are bound by the models we developed when it existed.
I wouldn’t say we are completely post scarcity, but enough of the producers of goods create enough artificial scarcity in order to keep prices high and the train moving. Unfortunately, I don’t see the paradigm changing until we have a major altering event in which many people perish.
There is definitely human induced scarcity. I debated including that distinction.
No worries. I do think that a major tipping point towards true post scarcity will be when we can figure out and deploy nuclear fusion, though we’ll still be mired by price gouging until we demand better.
I’m not certain near infinite energy will solve scarcity. Humans will simply use up all the available energy anyways until we eventually run out of whatever previously “infinite “ resource we’re using. We’re very good at this type of optimization.
I don’t think it’ll solve it either, but it’ll certain help. The beauty of fusion is that it can and will produce, at scale and maturity, more than we can consume, leading to an unprecedented technological revolution.
We’re only post-scarcity for certain things in certain geopolitical regions, and even then, logistics of distributing those things is a problem. Computers, for example, will always be scarce in their current form because the raw materials to build them are naturally scarce, can only be extracted so fast, and have a limited ability to be recycled. We have a shit-ton of them, but they’re still scarce.
I hear you on the resources needed for computers being scarcer. But this might still fall overall under human induced scarcity. If we lived in more communal ways, the whole approach to personal computers could change, for instance, in a way that increased access in a more sustainable way. In no way do I believe that will happen, ofc. Just as we’re not likely going to go from every household owning one or more televisions to having, say, a shared theater in every neighborhood
It’s nice to have something to eat.
Food, people make food in excess.
They make that food for money.
Just money?
For the things the money buys. Because it’s really though to trade food directly for them.
Hot women are usually all over the farmers but the farmers are usually about those dolla dolla bills yo.
Do they? I’m pretty sure only about one in three humans works in food production. I think it is reasonable for them to expect the other two to give them something for their food in return.
You answered your question in the sentence right after your question. The landlord owns the property and so he can do what he wants with it. He’s letting you live there but has decided he wants something in exchange for letting you live there. If currency didn’t exist he’d want something else in exchange.
Making the assumption ownership is a valued currency of course.
Which is arguably a bootstrap-paradox; we need capital to participate in capitalism, for which we need - cause without capitalism what would we do with our capital.
Are you suggesting people shouldn’t be allowed to own stuff? There are very few economic systems where people aren’t allowed to own stuff and they tend not to be popular. Most of the people who are complaining about landlords and rent and whatnot really just want to own their own houses.
I mean like owning things is a human concept not a physical law, so yeah I can imagine a society exists where nothing is owned
Can’t say if it’d be better or worse than our current cause were not trying it, but tbh I’d be happy if instead of solely me being able to use ‘my’ drill for example, the whole community can whenever they require.
Sounds a hell of a lot more efficient to me if we work together not apart
I mean, in a perfect world, yes. The issue comes up when someone wears out or breaks the drill, and it needs to be replaced or repaired. Whoever spends time and resources ensuring that we have a drill needs to be compensated somehow, because that’s time they’re not spending on making sure they have food and shelter.
Follow along that line of reasoning for a couple steps, and you end up with some kind of economic system, and likely some kind of enforcement system, so you’re suddenly back at an early stage proto-state/government.
Here’s my take:
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We’re built for about 150 relationships max (Dunbar number), and yet we benefit from cooperation above that threshold. Rather than make it so we have to have a personal relationship with everyone who could possibly benefit us, we accepted a ramped down version of relationship we call “transactions”. This is a very weak replacement for a relationship, but it is a sort of “micro-relationship” in that for a brief moment two people who don’t know each other can kind of care about each other during an exchange. Through specialization, we can do something well that doesn’t just benefit the handful of friends and neighbors we have, but tens of thousands and possibly millions of people via transactions (e.g. a factory, starting an Amazon business, etc.)
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There is a process called “commensuration” in the social sciences, where people start to make one thing commensurate with another, even in wildly different domains. For example, to understand the value of a forest and to convey its importance to decision makers we might say “this forest is worth $100 billion”. It’s kind of weird to do this (how do leaves and trees and anthills and beetles equal imaginary humoney?) But slowly, over time, we have made many things commensurate to dollars at various scales. (I don’t think this is a good thing, but it does have benefits). In short, more and more things that were part of an implicit economy of relationships (e.g. can the neighbor girl babysit tonight?) have entered the explicit domain of the monetary economy (e.g. sittercity).
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IMO, in order to participate in the huge value generated by this monetary economy, people sometimes lose the forest for the trees (so to speak) and forget what really matters (e.g. excellence of character, deep relationships, new experiences, etc.) because it seems like we might be able to put off those things until “after” we square away this whole money thing first. But maybe “after” never comes–and the hollow life of a consumer capitalist drains the inner ecological diversity of a soulful life.
This kind of thoughtful introspection is the only reason to get out of bed in the morning. That, and dogs. Dogs are wonderful.
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