Or alternatively artists who like doing commissions could have a lottery system where people who are interested can apply for some personalized art. Fanfiction and character art existed long before fiction was heavily financialized, and will continue to exist if we get rid of the money involved. Even if we leave a handcraft market in place, however, there is no reason not to get rid of monetary exchange for more everyday goods. Just let everyone requisition whatever they want and give them an equal LuxuryBux stipend every month.
GODSTAR - a Science Fantasy Civilization Quest
- Thread starter ScottishMongol
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No, but it makes it much easier.
So you want the government to give everyone 100 foot yachts and fully furnished mansion with every accoutrement and originals of the most prestigious artist's work? There's not enough copies of the artist's work for that, and not enough space for the first two.
There will always be some things that have real, rather than artificial, scarcity and that absolutely nobody needs but some people want and there's no reason to make illegal. Money, given for services that go above and beyond the basics, is an excellent way to allocate such luxuries even with no artificial scarcities involved whatsoever.
I'm dubious that completely removing every single unpleasant job is even possible. It's a good idea to try, but probably never going to be perfect.
It doesn't require you gatekeep anything that isn't already gatekept by reality. Many things have real scarcity rather than artificial scarcity, and making money the gatekeeping mechanism for those is super convenient.
My point is that needing to use a barter system for any luxuries is inconvenient and unnecessary. Making that sort of thing easier is what money is for.
Money imposes a certain standardization of value, sure, but doing that is only a bad thing in certain contexts, not universally. Being able to say society values X more than Y is an essential part of any planned economy, for example, and I doubt you think that's always a bad thing, I certainly don't.
I strongly disagree that making the value gains of people who handcraft things vastly harder on them (which is what enforcing barter rather than a monetary system actually does) is somehow 'more respectful' as a blanket statement. It may be more respectful to a specific artist who feels that way, but not to one who wants the convenience of money.
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Do you even read your own examples? Those are extremes ridiculous enough I think no one in a fair society should have because of the amount of work from other they represent. No, a fair future wouldn't have personal 100 foot yachts. Ones you can take on loan from a boat club, maybe.
My point is that this isn't all luxuries, because most of them can be produced for distribution based on demand. What you end up left in the pool to distribute has unique or emotional value money isn't good at handling anyway.
But exchange value tells you nothing about society. It tells you things about the money havers. It also incentivize producing for exchange, which is full of negative incentives like lying to your customers about the product and flooding society with marketing to manufacture demand. If there's people buying with money, there's people shackling themselves to producing for it. Money isn't just a tool for the buyer, it's a chain for the maker.
We're not enforcing barter. They have zero need to barter since society covers their demand through the planning system. There is no convenience of money if society isn't gatekeeping everything you want and need behind money. A lot of artists in money based societies produce to eat and house themselves and this is not going to be a thing for much longer in this society. I really doubt the motivation for producing art for others will stay the same when only unique and handcrafted goods remain scarce.
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I feel like it would be helpful for people to consider if they mean Unit of Account, Unit of Exhange, or Store of Value - because money is all three. Moneyless economy could well mean wiping out the Store of Value portion while leaving the Unit of Account and/or Unit of Exchange properties alone.
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a society like ours could also make it something weirder still, like all value gets zeroed out after every five-year plan concludes and there's some soft redistributive taxes (or social customs) on goods - like a modern digital version of the way the debt involved in gift economies often worked in small social environments, but scaled up back up to civilization-wide function by much broader social solidarity and new tech.
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the value is sentimental for those who buy them, but not necessarily for those who make them.
Not completely, at least. An artist still wants to get something for their time, and they might want to get something the client doesn't have or can offer, which is what money help circumvent by trading a universal trade good, the representation of value.
money.
for everyday goods? sure. If mass produced goods are not delivered through the work of market economies but through a planned economy (and computers+historians+councils should be able to make it work far better than it's currently possible in real life, at least), then there's no reason for those to be traded for money, because they're effectively not scarce anymore.
Or, at the very least, the monetary value becomes more of something internally used by accountants and planners to represent just how much effort goes into producing something... though I suppose that they could probably just represent it as the amount of raw resources and time required to produce it instead.
My whole argument is that there's still a use for money to evaluate and help exchanges of not-scarce things. artwork, hand-crafted goods...
Even if you go for something like a Time Bank, in which you basically pay with your time... you're not really changing anything.
Instead of paying with money, you're paying with "hours of work"... except that hours spent doing different things can be "priced" differently, simply because there's not the same amount of demand and offer for them.
if there's only 100 artists but 10000 babysitters, and demand for both is the same, they CAN'T be considered of equal value. And you can't exactly automate production of arts and babysitting sessions.
Do you realize that this also applies to less extreme examples? again, money is an easy way to commission someone to, for example, make you a portrait. or to write a story about something you like.
Some things are scarce by nature, and money just helps trading them between those who want them. If you have removed scarcity from the essential, like housing and food, then you have removed the need to give THOSE SPECIFIC THINGS prices, so they don't need to be traded for money. but that doesn't apply to everything that's not taken care of by the planners.
this also helps to put things in perspective.
For example, the Historians would likely continue to use the "unit of account" purpose anyway, as an easy way to express the cost to do things, at least in a summarized way (they could also go for a more extensive list of everything that goes into producing a specific good, but that's kind of complicated, at least when dealing with not-historians).
and what we're mostly arguing about here is the usefulness of money as a unit of exchange, a way to avoid a complex and inefficient barter system.
Store of Value is probably what could more easily be removed, at least to an extent.
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But again, money isn't an universal trade good when most goods could in fact be available through the planning system without money. You're trying to force the artists to keep pumping out commissions to get money to get what they want when we're freeing society of that need to produce for exchange.
Again with the client. I get it, it's good to be able to force others to labour for you. But why would they sell themselves when the bounty of society is made accessible to them if they participate in the planning system?
The "thing" you're trying to make scarce and retain the ability to buy is nothing less but labour. And that's a bad thing. People should come together to produce for use, rather than answer the whims of clients because producing for exchange is the only way to get things for themselves in turn.
With the technology we have here, it's true that we can easily have not quite currencies that only fulfil some of those roles.
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Can we please stop calling it money. Because unless anyone here is arguing that we should keep Store of Value, it's not money as we know it anymore and you're just generating confusion that's leading to pointless arguments.
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How is the artist forced to do anything by being paid if the government is taking care of all their needs? Like, you're acting like money is coercive inherently rather than coercive in our current society because we need it for things like food and shelter. And that just doesn't make any sense.
Again, money is only coercive if it is required for necessary things. If it is only needed for luxuries, you can just not work if you don't want to.
People should make whatever they want for whatever people they want for whatever reward they deem appropriate. Making people only produce things that have immediate use is more restrictive than allowing them to do so either for that reason or to acquire things they want from others (the latter being what money is for).
Do you have a preferred term? I can't think of anything that doesn't make the conversation really awkward at best. I'm also not sure that getting rid of money as a store of value is a good idea. It's a lot less of an issue than getting rid of it as a medium of exchange, but I'm not sure getting rid of that usage is actually good in and of itself.
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eh, it's still basically money. what changed isn't really it's nature in my opinion, but more what it's allowed to buy.
Like, Money would no longer be used to buy food or medicine, sure. But that's more of a change in the nature of food and medicine, as going from scarce goods to public goods I think.
there's even a decent argument to be made to keep very low and mostly symbolic prices on those goods, just to discourage people from asking more than they'd actually need, to avoid waste.
It's probably not necessary in this fantasy society, and culture, education and historian oversight can probably be enough to discourage excessive requests, but low prices (something like having the government pay for 90% of the bill, but leaving a 10% to be paid by the people) it's a simpler way to do it.
Still, if we don't already have a UBI in place, we'll likely want to introduce one soon I think
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Tokens, Vouchers, Chits, etc.
Can you provide a reason we shouldn't get rid of the store of value function?
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Its wild how we are clearly beginning to venture into post-scarcity and people are super attached to keeping money. Its pretty clear even most luxury goods are already not subject to scarcity or will be shortly. Except of course for stuff a single person shouldn't own.
Like the update clearly hints that people are being retrained as specialists or become artists in massive numbers because the demand for labour just isn't there. The little blurb about how money changing hands is increasingly disconnected from how people make a living hints at what is happening here. We are clearly sliding naturally into a reputation based economy that is rooted in our collectivist and democratic traditions.
Also I really don't see how our economy is purely reactive? Like we literally brute forced modern computing as a massive state wide project and are casually neutralizing old nuclear waste dumps.
Like the update clearly hints that people are being retrained as specialists or become artists in massive numbers because the demand for labour just isn't there. The little blurb about how money changing hands is increasingly disconnected from how people make a living hints at what is happening here. We are clearly sliding naturally into a reputation based economy that is rooted in our collectivist and democratic traditions.
Also I really don't see how our economy is purely reactive? Like we literally brute forced modern computing as a massive state wide project and are casually neutralizing old nuclear waste dumps.
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Sure.
Because I don't think saving such income and using it later is a problem. It's not strictly necessary if all needs are seen to, but it's also not an inherent problem to do so. If moving to a reputation-based system it might need to go, I suppose, but that's a neutral consequence (or even a negative one) of using a different system not an inherent good, IMO.
I mean, leaving aside things like unique works of art, is there a legal maximum size of house? How is it determined? Post scarcity society is great, but it's post fundamental scarcities, not every single possible thing being completely available. Space still has scarcity, novelty still has scarcity, and so on.
The number of things that one needs to spend money (or tokens or chits or whatever) on goes down, sure, but there are some things that are not as easy to make universally available.
I'm fine with moving to cashless, but reputation-based alone has problems (as anyone who's familiar with things like Yelp should realize). Reputation systems are useful, but as the only means of acquiring luxuries I'm somewhat dubious that it's really a superior system.
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it might be easier to just... put a cap on how much money someone is allowed to store. after which point you either spend it (on whatever can still be bought by money, so not necessities), or it just gets redistributed.
Or maybe it's just a point at which you stop getting a UBI.
This also means putting a cap on how much a single object can that can be owned by a single person can be worth, I suppose, as nobody would be able to pay more than that price... unless more people joined to buy a single item... but in that case it's presumably a group purchase of some kind, and it's no longer about private purchases...
We probably got a bit off topic though
The issue is that, despite what Star Trek says to the contrary, there will always be some items that have inescapable scarcity. Antique or vintage items are one example, but my personal favorite is concert tickets. There's going to be a limit as to how many people can sit in the front row of a concert, or even inside the venue itself. As such, you need a way to figure out who gets a ticket, and how close they sit to the action. Money is a pretty decent way of ensuring the ones who want to see the show the most tend to get the best seats. It's not a perfect system by any means, but the nature of the True People's society is such that the worst downsides should be mitigated.
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I imagine in a moneyless society concert tickets would be distributed by a first-come first-served policy or by a raffle or lottery system. For other goods like fine clothes or furniture or like, a really good wine vintage, they'd probably be distributed at the discretion of the people who made them, like you have to know them personally and they make it for you as a gift. None of these systems are completely "fair" but imo they're no more or less fair than handing them out to the highest bidder.
It is great that automation has freed up workers from having to work. They aren't forced to work longer hours for less pay. It's a nice touch.
IamtooSleepy
I came here to be an ant
You know, thinking about it, it feel kinda weird now how we don't have a 10 page long argument about computer like every other major society changing tech in this quest.
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LuxemburgLover69
There are more things between Heaven and Earth...
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Just caught up. All I can say is clearly we must move away from money into a crab-based economy as soon as we have the technology.
Jokes aside. Great update. Great quest. Can't wait to really explore the stars ⭐️
Jokes aside. Great update. Great quest. Can't wait to really explore the stars ⭐️
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Money is either coercive or unnecessary. If you don't gatekeep useful things from people behind prices, no one will do your work for you in exchange for money. It just doesn't buy enough to be worth doing work you don't enjoy as much. So my expectation is that money will either fail to incentivize people as promised (not that I think such incentives are truly necessary) or lead to people with government influence gatekeeping more luxuries than necessary so they can spend their money (which they get due to government influence) on making others do work for them.
You're the one who tacked "immediate" before "use", not me. Production for use doesn't have anything to do with immediacy. It has everything to do with the purpose of production: its use rather than its exchange.
People should be allowed to produce whatever they want. Not for rewards because rewards imply there's things they can only get if they suborn their own desire to produce to someone else's desire to consume, ie sell their labour.
Do we want some people to have much bigger houses than others regardless of their use for them?
There are things that will remain scarce due to their non-commodity nature (they are not fungible), but money is not really any good at handling those because it's the ultimate commodifier.
I think you could have a more elaborate system that pairs a lottery with compensation points that increase your odds on the next lottery if you lose so that people aren't left entirely at the whims of the random number generator, since society is large enough it would cause outliers who get nothing (or everything) and people wouldn't appreciate that even if it's statistically insignificant.
I think that'd handle scarce luxuries produced as part of the "official" economic system (which I think enough of art should be, considering it's a human need), while luxuries produced on people's free time because they enjoy the process would just be given by them to whoever they think will appreciate their labour, since the production itself is the goal, rather than the product and its exchange.