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Simpsons meme aside --
Those with currency can have significantly more options than those without it. I'm of a privileged state where if I wanted to drop everything and visit another country for two weeks, there's nothing stopping me financially. Not many people have that luxury.
Your comment made me realize that OP wasn't asking about why we need currency as a society, but why people keep trying to get more money.
I hate when the post title and post content ask two seemingly different questions, lol
Providing clarification is important...but to me, it seems prudent to just ask what one actually wants to know in the first place.
Honestly XY is hard to put into practice.
It wants the Asker to elevate themselves to the level of thinking as the Answerer and also have the forethought to ask "the right question".
But it lacks the perspective of what it means to be new at something. When you're new, you have no context of what the hell anything is. So you throw spaghetti at the wall and ask is this how you make pasta.
If it's a culture where stupid questions are allowed and people are willing to be mentors... Just ask your question.
I think in this case, the OP should've just chosen one question and put it in the title, then left the post text blank.
If the question they wanted to know didn't get answered, they could've had conversations with the commenters where they gave more detail about why they asked the question.
A post consisting of two different questions in two different places (and nothing else) just seems counterintuitive to me.
Whoa dude, just answer the question. If answering or asking doesn't appeal to you just move on.
I thoroughly enjoy all the answers I've received and the discussion around it. Sorry I don't live up to your "no stupid questions" question standard.
Lemmy supports editing posts, deleting posts and making new posts - if a question is obtuse the author can always take it down and post something more precise and less open to misinterpretation. Of it's a language barrier issue I'm sympathetic but this just seems to have been a needlessly clickbaity title.
Here's my take:
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.)
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.
Can be exchanged for goods and services
But I wanted a peanut!
$20 can buy many peanuts
Explain!
Because it gives the ruling class something to hold over the poors so the rest of society is so terrified of becoming poor they forget that they're being used as literal slaves for the state
This is the crux of it. Currency is essential because it allows people to exchange goods and services in a timely manner. What it is used for today is not essential to the individual.
Today 100 different people could think up a 100 different ways to streamline the exchange of goods and services without using fiat currency. The reason we don't is because it would take power away from those who covet it and most people don't understand they are being used.
Step 1: Hoard a bunch of stuff no one really cares about.
Step 2: Wait until you've hoarded the majority of that stuff in your local area.
Step 3: Start telling people how important the thing you've been hoarding is.
Step 4: People are dumb and actually start believing the useless thing you've hoarded is actually important.
Step 5: Enjoy your new status as the man who convinced everyone something completely useless was important.
People want purpose. Most people are too inept to grasp greater purposes, so rewarding them with ornate paper slips keeps them placated.
So money is used to control people?
Oh absolutely. Consider how inflation and the cost of living rise faster than the minimum wage, or even the median wage.
So how do reconcile most others peoples answers knowing what you know? Money is needed to enhance the exchange of goods and services but, as you said, also is used as a tool for controlling prople.
Money is only necessary in a capitalist society. The reconciliation as you put it would be a socialist society.
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
Modern society is only possible because of global trade networks. Global trade networks would never work without currency. If a person spends all their day fabricating metal sheets they need a way to buy bread to feed their family. Otherwise we'd all be back to farming our lives away.
God? Jesus is that you? Or at least someone omnipotent
You know with absolute certainty the only way people can trade is capitalism?
Consider what we used as currency before it was currency. You would have to barter before, which was inefficient. Common currency saves you and everyone involved time. Instead of having to barter for every item, which would also require you to do carry all of those items, you can just pay with currency now.
That's not exactly true. Barter was never used like that in the past. People used gift giving systems or other trust based systems in daily life. Barter was only used with strangers and that was not a common occurrence. These trust based systems do work in smaller settings but break down in large settings where interacting with strangers is the norm.
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
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.
Life ain't nothin but bitches n money
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.
Im 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.
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.
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.
More than we can consume right now. We used to think this about oil as well. Humans will seek to reach this limit as quickly as possible. It will certainly create new technologies. However I don’t think it will solve scarcity problems for everyone since many of those issues are not resources or technology but politics. We choose to deprive certain humans of their basic needs.
We live in 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.)
Those are 2 very different questions
Who cares about a return on one's effort amirite