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Counter to the popular linear theory of currency progression, barter is a system that exists when there is little trust between the engaging parties. When there is trust, credit systems appear, even in primitive societies.
So in a complete societal breakdown, you and some guy you meet on the road might barter some food for medicine while holding shotguns on each other for fear of theft. You probably won't be holding a gun on your father-in-law if he wants to buy some of that medicine from you, and if he currently has nothing you want in trade you will still give him the medicine he needs because he's part of your communal support system and it's understood that he will owe you something in return, specified or unspecified, at a later date.
<strong>"Debt: the First 5,000 Years" by David Graeber</strong>
>Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: he shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.
>Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.
Suggest a read of the late David Graeber's book Debt: the First 5000 Years, probably the most important book on Economics in at least the last 15-20 years.. Graeber argues that it's not so much about the style of economic system, but power relationships. One more thing, anthropologists have known for quite some time that true barter was never used as a serious, long-term medium-of-exchange, ever - yet, Economics books continue to perpetuate the myth that barter was "first".
No you're not. Saying "people are inherently selfish and apathetic" is not "realism", it's you being an incurable cynic. The reality is that when people find common cause they are capable of communitarian solidarity. This has been the case throughout history. Before the advent of nation states it was what kept this species alive. Human beings are social creatures. The thing is that tendency has been perverted by the isolating, sensory overloading, effects of modern consumer capitalism.
And yet we’ve been making slow but steady progress that’s increasing including those energy companies, who are now among the largest investors in green energy and transition.
That’s just been the hallmark of humanity not capitalism.
Yes, they do come from universities but there’s often an exceedingly complex number of steps between discovery and product.
We’ve always had money or a tool of exchange.
And pray tell who is going to man this pseudo command economy, and determine what it is people want or need and the requisite columns. And how will it not be an absolute failure unlike ever other time.
If you’re opposed to capitalism for whatever reason that’s fine but don’t go conflating that with climate change, all it does it put others off from solving actual pressing issues vs pining for bizarre Moore inspired Utopias.
Debt: the First 5000 Years by David Graeber
It gives a really great walk through about the evolution of the exhange of value (debt) and how that has shaped cultures around the world. It also does a great job of dispelling the modern myth of how wealth is created and sustained. I highly recommend it.
A certain amount of poverty (not desperate poverty mind you) makes people happier. When people don't have everything they need but somebody else does and is willing to share, it creates a web of social relationships between people. Sharing, owing, and being owed all creates the necessity of engaging with other people in your community.
David Graeber's book called Debt: The First 5000 Years had this interesting anecdote about a culture in West Africa: everybody in their society owes somebody something. Neighbors will borrow eggs or flour from a neighbor, and then they owe them some eggs or flour later on. But they never pay back the exact amount they borrowed, they either return more or less or they return something else entirely like apples. And that forms a web of indebtedness that ties the entire community together. It's actually a gigantic slap in the face to borrow 12 eggs from your neighbor and then pay them back with exactly 12 eggs because it basically says "Here's your fucking eggs back. Now I don't have to talk to you again, I don't want to talk to you again, we're settled up and we owe each other nothing now."
that's a different way of looking at it than I thought you meant; I can see how we'd be talking past each other now.
traditionally, there's been a lot of debate of what aspects of human behavior are "nature vs nurture"; what do our genetics dictate (or influence) vs the environment we're set in.
the "natural environment" is a particularly thorny phrase... political theorists like Hobbes and Locke were very concerned about the nature of humanity in a "natural environment," i.e., one that would reflect only the genetic disposition of humanity, rather than the combination of that and society.
and I actually have started reading Graeber's book, and it is phenomenal. just provoking the idea that holding people responsible for their own actions (rather than the denizens they "represented" as despotic "leaders") is revolutionary. the Magnitsky Act comes to mind as a practical implementation of that, and it certainly has caused ruckus.
I disagree that capitalism reflects human nature. I think that living in a capitalistic society for tens of generations makes people have a skewed perception of human nature. I recently read https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290 which gives anthropological evidence of non-commercial societies and it paints a very different picture of human nature. It isn't all good, but it is different. I believe Marx makes a similar argument in Capital.
While many of the books I would suggest have been mentioned previously throughout the comments, might I add a sort-of different take on history? Check out David Graeber's <em>Debt: The First 5000 Years</em> for a unique view on economic evolution and the role its played in the development of human society (particularly, how debt has been a major driving force behind politics for millennia).
If it makes you feel better, debt and credit are actually older than money. They had debt and credit in ancient Babylon 5000 years ago, but coins weren't invented until about 2300 years ago:
https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290
Kinda fascinating really... Gold coins mainly took off because it was a really good way to pay soldiers while they were invading foreign lands.
I never said that corruption isn't part of the global banking system. In fact, I specifically said that it is.
Also, the shareholders of the fed are publicly available.
What do you mean "put people too rich and stupid to catch on in charge"? Who do you think is putting these people in charge? The lizard people?
Also, money has never been based on utility. Literally in no point in human history. Money has always derived from systems of credit. If you need a monetary history from someone who is ideologically aligned with yourself, check out the below. It's a good start. http://www.amazon.com/Debt-The-First-000-Years/dp/1612191290
> Markets have zero to do with government
http://www.amazon.com/Debt-The-First-000-Years/dp/1612191290
This is a long book with lots of citations and anthropological evidence to say otherwise.
Boils down to this. Money is a state invention. It allows people to trade value without trusting each other. This is why the mob only accepts cash. When states fall, people revert to informal and local credit systems and trade ceases.
It doesn't matter what the money is made of, it's real value is backed with state power and violence. Without a state no one accepts trinkets for anything of value, like food or goods. They will however accept mutual trust. That's what informal credit is.
Well, I'm reading that book.
Link: https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290
There’s been some fascinating research about how most “popular” revolutions are attempts by the indebted to tear down the system and reset their finances. This book has some great stories.
There was also a big article in the Washington Post about how many of the insurrectionists had tax problems and bad debts. Babbitt was just one of many, but since she’s the one who took a bullet to the neck her family is going to use that to try to make some coin.
Your problem is that you somehow conflated the fact that supply and demand doesn't determine the price of rentals into "supply and demand doesn't exist"
But the answer to your question is that Alabama has a lower minimum wage.
Not sure what that has to do with supply and demand. The minimum wage is set by politicians. People in Alabama would make three times what Washingtonians make if their legislature made it so... And rent prices would follow.
To put it another way, rent in WA is more than in Arizona but Arizona has way more people. By your VERY LIMITED understanding, that should mean housing is more expensive in Arizona but again, because WAGES ARE LOWER, rent is lower.
The crux of your issue is that you seem to have ONLY taken an Econ 101 class. You, seemingly, have literally no understanding of it beyond "supply go up, price go down/demand go up, price go up" which is frankly embarrassing considering we are living through a period in which scarcity no longer exists yet prices only go up.
Most people understand that what you learn in a 101 class is a simplistic small minded surface layer understanding of a concept. Like saying the world is round... It's not, it's an oblate spheroid. But you say that in a room and you'll get a bunch of people like you arguing that "Geography 101 teaches us the world is round...hurdur."
Perhaps you should try reading a bit.
https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290
https://www.amazon.com/Winners-Take-All-Charade-Changing/dp/0451493249
https://www.amazon.com/World-Without-Work-Technology-Automation/dp/1250173515
And just for good measure, the most important piece of literature in the past 20 years - https://www.amazon.com/Defense-Looting-Riotous-History-Uncivil/dp/1645036693
Bruh. Your solution is not general enough. Money predates kings and soldiers. It most likely predates farmers in the form of credit accounting. It is a coordination tool that naturally arises in any society that grows beyond a certain limit. Probably something like Dunbar's limit.
Here are some reading materials. Check yo' self (out a book from the library) before you wreck yo' self.
https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/
Is not it funny that you also proceed to make claim without providing a single source whatsoever? I got my info from here: https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290 it is anything but "chinese nationalist sources". I listened to audiobook so it is hard to extract particular quotes.
>It's also wild to suggest that capitalism exist because it "fits human nature" when the vast majority of human existence didn't have anything close to capitalism. Capitalism also didn't come natural to humans. It had to be beaten into them and even now requires constant enforcement to keep in check.
I agree, capitalism is not natural. I say this as a business owner that is able to be moderately successful within capitalism. Reference:
https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290
and
https://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Misogyny-Prejudice-Histories/dp/B00B76TCCS
These two books helped flesh out my understanding of SOME (not all) of the aspects of capitalism that we live in today.
>They just didn't see selfishness as something to reward and developed strategies for dealing with it.
I agree, from my reading, didnt start to take hold until the knowledge of agriculture was improved to the point where certain land (with water) was more valuable for the food than other land (without water). Then you get into property rights, inheritance, blood rights, control of family and reproduction. Boom now you have a reason to be selfish. Eventually when a family/tribe grew beyond its means, and you needed to feed your family; boom a credit system based on relationships.
Then you get into language + numbers, symbol systems, documented history, logical fallacies (call to tradition) etc,.
Once we invent numbers, we can now start to quantify that credit, convert the credit into debt, convert the debt into money, and somewhere in 1000s of years we make rocks think and then we get real fucked.
I'd even posit, that modern capitalism theory, was idealized by people who could not empathize with the human condition. Reference: https://www.amazon.com/Who-Cooked-Adam-Smiths-Dinner/dp/1681774445
So of course, if you have no empathy, you'd want to reduce the world to numbers that you can understand. Economic man is soooo rational. Not. Barf.
Cohen. https://journals.openedition.org/oeconomia/1877
Polyani. https://inctpped.ie.ufrj.br/spiderweb/pdf_4/Great_Transformation.pdf
Marx. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBazR59SZXk&ab_channel=ReadingMarx%27sCapitalwithDavidHarvey
Graeber. https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290
School of life's videos on left wing philosophers can give you a left-liberal (non socialist) perspective on left wing intellectuals: https://www.youtube.com/c/theschooloflifetv/playlists. Look at political theory and sociology. IMO. Sociology is pretty much the discipline of 'capitalism and market society the critique'
We read theory does short overviews of leftist theory: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/we-read-theory-we-read-theory-a_WcKj2TiMe/
^The linked tweet was tweeted by @VitalikButerin on Apr 03, 2018 07:28:56 UTC (96 Retweets | 513 Favorites)
- "Money always evolves in the following four stages, collectible -> SoV -> MoE -> UoA" - no, no, no! Seriously, read David Graeber's Debt. Amazon link for the lazy: https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290
^^• Beep boop I'm a bot • Find out more about me at /r/tweettranscriberbot/ •
A lot of people seem to brush off Bitcoin's Store of Value proposition based on their emotional attachment to their coin or just that coin X is fast, Bitcoin is useless. Vitalik responded to the Bitcoin's SOV proposition agreeing with it but having issues with Bitcoin maximalism. It's a much more intelligent argument than random shitcoin bloggers provide and book Vitalik references is a "history of money" and provides a much better historical context of how Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies might evolve and be adopted.
> Money always evolves in the following four stages, collectible -> SoV -> MoE -> UoA" - no, no, no! Seriously, read David Graeber's Debt. Amazon link for the lazy - Vitalik
https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/981070574137962496?lang=en
> Debt the first 5000 years - https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290
..
> What we now call virtual money came first. Coins came much later, and their use spread only unevenly, never completely replacing credit systems. Barter, in turn, appears to be largely a kind of acciden- tal byproduct of the use of coinage or paper money: historically, it has mainly been what people who are used to cash transactions do when for one reason or another they have no access to currency
..
> We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around. What we now call virtual money came first. Coins came much later, and their use spread only unevenly, never completely replacing credit systems. Barter, in turn, appears to be largely a kind of accidental byproduct of the use of coinage or paper money
..
> The story of the origins of capitalism, then, is not the story of the gradual destruction of traditional communities by the impersonal power of the market. It is, rather, the story of how an economy of credit was converted into an economy of interest
Check out Debt: First 5000 Years. It's written by David Graeber, an anthropologist. It talks about the history of money and involves the history the pre-agricultural society.
> But that group of people who are tuned in and educated on the topics in depth with knowledge unavailable in the mainstream want the truth. That's their audience.
Except these sources do not provide in-depth knowledge; quite far from it. The video this thread is about is an excellent example of just how vacuous and shallow the "alternative media" is. The attorney, Beck, just lists a series of random facts with no analyses or conclusion, and the infowars guy just free associates with the term "organ transplants."
The strongest argument against the infowars and Sargons of the world is a comparison of them against actual books researched over years, like Debt: The First 5000 Years, Nixonland, or Capital in the 21st Century. These books are what "in-depth information" looks like, not super-secret conspiracies that only the blessed can discern.
> Because otherwise it is very hard to know who to trust and who not to trust.
You don't have to trust anyone. This is the main problem with conspiracy theorists: they have discovered that one source cannot be trusted, therefore another can be. But don't trust anyone; evaluate all the claims. In the case of this video, what claim is being made? There is no claim -- they want you to rely on your imagination to conjure up scary images.
> Debt won't disappear
Good read by Anthropologist Dave Graber on this Debt: The first 5000 years
>But the author is wrong if he imples that "money" has always been dematerialized, just "credit".
Actually the author is correct. Believe it or not, "credit" was actually invented before "money". Have you read David Graeber's Debt the first 5000 years or any of Michael Hudson's books on the ancient middle eastern economies?
> They knew that a goat was worth so many of these coins, or so many of those other coins. Debasing and coin scraping was not their concern, as long as it was not so extreme that the thing could no longer be considered a whole coin.
People using these items didnt worry so much about the specific weight or metal content of these coins because, as the author states, they were used as "tokens" representing a specific value of "money".
Your not very familiar with the history of debt if you think anything contrary. http://www.amazon.com/Debt-The-First-000-Years/dp/1612191290
I shall remind my mother of her foolishness. However I recommend the following book http://www.amazon.com/Debt-The-First-000-Years/dp/1612191290
Check it out. I don't agree with his interpretation of economics, but as an anthropologist his reporting on how people actually shared goods is very strong.
Well. I suppose I might as well simply point you to Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years for introductory reading. I'll just go ahead and spoil it for you: money isn't what you think it is.
Money is just a representation of matter and energy -- the labor to reformat it as well as the stuff itself -- of which there is a finite supply within humanity's reach at the moment. Why should anyone have more of it than anyone else? Especially since, if we just divided it evenly, we would all have plenty to survive.
So in other words, the mere existence of inequality proves that those who have more than others are the very people who should not have more than others... if you care about human happiness and morals, that is.
Yes. Check out Debt: The first 5,000 years, by David Graeber. It's an extended take on this theme by an anthropologist. I'd take some of what he says with a grain of salt, but it's mostly excellent.
> A woman hitting a man is not necessarily concerning (inasmuch as a man hitting a woman is concerning) because (on average) the woman doesn't pose a serious threat to the man.
I think it goes deeper than that: Within living memory, women were effectively property of their husbands, and a certain amount of violence by husbands towards their wives was expected. You can even find people today seriously arguing that it is acceptable for a man to rape his wife, and I personally remember people being acquitted on the basis of this reasoning. So for a woman to attack a man is perceived in much the same way as a cute pet attacking its human owner — if the pet were serious, it would get crushed.
This is observed across societies. This is an interesting excerpt from <em>Debt: The First 5000 Years</em>:
> Most of us don't like to think much about violence. Those lucky enough to live relatively comfortable, secure lives in modern cities tend either to act as if it does not exist or, when reminded that it does, to write off the larger world "out there" as a terrible, brutal place, with not much that can be done to help it. Either instinct allows us not to have to think about the degree to which even our own daily existence is defined by violence or at least the threat of violence (as I've often noted, think about what would happen if you were to insist on your right to enter a university library without a properly validated ID), and to overstate the importance-or at least the frequency-of things like war, terrorism, and violent crime. The role of force in providing the framework for human relations is simply more explicit in what we call "traditional societies "-even if in many, actual physical assault by one human on another occurs less often than in our own. Here's a story from the Bunyoro kingdom, in East Africa:
> > Once a man moved into a new village. He wanted to find out what his neighbors were like, so in the middle of the night he pretended to beat his wife very severely, to see if the neighbors would come and remonstrate with him. But he did not really beat her; instead he beat a goatskin, while his wife screamed and cried out that he was killing her. Nobody came, and the very next day the man and his wife packed up and left that village and went to find some other place to live .
> The point is obvious. In a proper village, the neighbors should have rushed in, held him back, demanded to know what the woman could possibly have done to deserve such treatment. The dispute would become a collective concern that ended in some sort of collective settlement. This is how people ought to live. No reasonable man or woman would want to live in a place where neighbors don't look after one another.
> In its own way it's a revealing story, charming even, but one must still ask: How would a community-even one the man in the story would have considered a proper community-have reacted if they thought she was beating him?(*) I think we all know the answer. The first case would have led to concern; the second would have led to ridicule. In Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, young villagers used to put on satirical skits making fun of husbands beaten by their wives, even to parade them about the town mounted backwards on an ass for everyone to jeer at. No African society, as far as I know, went quite this far. (Neither did any African society burn as many witches-Western Europe at that time was a particularly savage place.) Yet as in most of the world, the assumption that the one sort of brutality was at least potentially legitimate, and that the other was not, was the framework within which relations between the sexes took place.
> (*) True, in many traditional societies, penalties are given to men who beat their wives excessively. But again, the assumption is that some such behavior is at least par for the course.
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