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"No money in the future" is a common thread in parts of the Left. I think it's in Marx's communism, if not a lot older. In science fiction, we've got Star Trek (at least ST IV and TNG/DS9), Banks' Culture ("money is a sign of poverty"), MacLeod's Solar Union, probably LeGuin's Anarres, and "post-scarcity" economies in general -- which tend to mumble if you take them literally and ask for a planet.
But why? Why is this so popular, as opposed to the leftism where everyone has enough money?
The way I see it, any group that has a lot of trade will have a money, hacked out of fungible high-demand goods or IOU time-labor scrip if nothing else. So to me saying "no money" is effectively saying "no trade", which doesn't sound very attractive.
One might appeal to computers and advanced barter exchanges, but while that might make it possible to work out "you give an IOU to make A in return for B, to trade for C, to trade for D, to trade for E which you actually want", I suspect a money would arise anyway.
There's so much automation that no one ever does anything useful, but that doesn't seem fun. There's that plus people doing things just for fun, and I don't rule it out entirely... but if there's a high-demand artist, maybe people end up bribing her to help on their projects.
"To each according to their need" is great and all, but what about getting what you *want*?
[This was better written in my head, I may revise later]
[Edit: discussion on RPG.net is circling around "post-scarcity" being the key: it's not that money is to be gotten rid of (well, that probably is an appeal some of the time) but that post-scarcity is the appeal, after which there's no role for money. Whether post-scarcity is realistic, even at personal nanoforge tech levels, is another matter.]
But why? Why is this so popular, as opposed to the leftism where everyone has enough money?
The way I see it, any group that has a lot of trade will have a money, hacked out of fungible high-demand goods or IOU time-labor scrip if nothing else. So to me saying "no money" is effectively saying "no trade", which doesn't sound very attractive.
One might appeal to computers and advanced barter exchanges, but while that might make it possible to work out "you give an IOU to make A in return for B, to trade for C, to trade for D, to trade for E which you actually want", I suspect a money would arise anyway.
There's so much automation that no one ever does anything useful, but that doesn't seem fun. There's that plus people doing things just for fun, and I don't rule it out entirely... but if there's a high-demand artist, maybe people end up bribing her to help on their projects.
"To each according to their need" is great and all, but what about getting what you *want*?
[This was better written in my head, I may revise later]
[Edit: discussion on RPG.net is circling around "post-scarcity" being the key: it's not that money is to be gotten rid of (well, that probably is an appeal some of the time) but that post-scarcity is the appeal, after which there's no role for money. Whether post-scarcity is realistic, even at personal nanoforge tech levels, is another matter.]
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Date: 2009-03-01 16:46 (UTC)From:Why? The reason for "credit, interest, loans and suchlike" is that present-goods are worth more than future-goods, hence if someone wants more goods than they have now, they must pay rent on the goods they hire. This is true whether or not the goods are in the form of money, ingots of metal, cattle, grain, robots or micrograms of antimatter.
The renting of goods is vital to capital formation, which is in turn vital to economic adaptation and growth. Thus this renting is a valuable service, for which the creditors quite reasonably expect to be compensated. Fail to compensate them, and goods will no longer be available for rent, with all that this implies.
Of course, your points are also well made, which means that coming up with a non-monetary economic system is far from easy.
One can change the specific medium of exchange -- it was once grain, then precious metals, now abstract claims of good, and I suspect that it will eventually be claims on usable energy. But the need for a medium of exchange remains, because without it all one can do is barter.