5 ms·

Before we reliably had money, we had barter and "mutual aid." Now, some people think you just pay for stuff with money and if someone is "nice" to you, you don'

Before we reliably had money, we had barter and "mutual aid." Now, some people think you just pay for stuff with money and if someone is "nice" to you, you don't "owe" them anything. A lot of people no longer seem to understand the implicit social contract behind such interactions and it can go bad places. From religion to community development work to politics, there have been myriad attempts to educate people that if you don't understand that you are one figure in a larger equation where 1+1=3, then you are probably messing things up because that "3" isn't supposed to belong entirely to you as an individual and when other people get tired of being shafted, there will eventually be consequences. You may be able to get away with claiming 1.75 of it and giving them 1.25 of it for a long damn time but if it becomes clear to them that all interactions between you and them benefit you at their expense, well, count on them eventually not being cool with that. (No, you don't get to keep shafting them and expecting something for nothing indefinitely, not even if you brainwash them into believing that being your victim is "The Christian thing to do" or some nonsense. If nothing else, it will eventually kill them, so this is simply not a sustainable model long-term.)

landemva 3y ago
Yet Americans vote for religion of government that preaches we will be taken care of by continuous deficit spending. Deficit spending of money/value created out of thin air will eventually reach a mathematical point of no return. Maybe USA is already at that point, and now we wait for the judgement day when money no longer has purchasing power.
- Teever 3y ago
  Deficit spending doesn't make matter out of thin air. The things that are bought on credit are real, tangible things that exist.
  - landemva 3y ago
    USA munitions, which were bought on credit deficit spending, are really being exploded in Ukraine. Financed by USA tax payers and future tax payers. Yes, this is real physical destruction overseas, monetary destruction of US dollar, and GDP number goes up for the headline news shows.
ajross 3y ago
> Before we reliably had money [...] Now [...] A lot of people no longer seem to understand the implicit social contract behind Nah. Being a jerk isn't a modern invention. By every objective measure, misbehavior/criminality/violence et. al. have been getting inexorably better over the past centuries. If you have to make a pronouncement like this, it's more "In a world of excess and luxury, being pissed off about minor bullshit is an engaging hobby". The modern world didn't invent selfish jerks. Maybe it invented Karens.
- watwut 3y ago
  It did not even invented Karens. The complainer behavior existed too. There might be more or less of this or that behavior and social behavior changes, but majority of "past was better" arguments are not born from historical knowledge.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > Maybe it invented Karens. It didn't, and for some reason this made me think about the biblical Parable of the Unjust Judge / Parable of the Persistent Woman[0]. The lesson usually taken from that story is about the value of persistence against unjust (but mostly indifferent) opposition. However, I can't help but imagine that, for everyone else witnessing the widow's repeated pleas to the judge, this was a Karen experience. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Unjust_Judge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Unjust_Judge
TeMPOraL 3y ago
It's a complex topic, but it's important to recognize that, to a large extent, > you just pay for stuff with money and if someone is "nice" to you, you don't "owe" them anything is kind of the whole point of money. More specifically, it allows you to trade with random strangers, without having to first develop and afterwards maintain social relationships with them. It's what, for better or worse, let humanity form groups larger than a small village. > You may be able to get away with claiming 1.75 of it and giving them 1.25 of it for a long damn time but if it becomes clear to them that all interactions between you and them benefit you at their expense, well, count on them eventually not being cool with that. This is always the case - but it takes longer for this process to settle, the larger the group is. Money is what allows you to even have this issue in the first place, by allowing societies to reach this size. And laws exist to compensate for our social intuitions and behaviors failing at this scale.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  Yes, it is a complex topic and one that disproportionately impacts some demographics. It is related to the phenomenon of unpaid internships where getting your foot in the door requires you to be able to work for free for a substantial period of time. This has been criticized as a form of gatekeeping because young adults from already prosperous families can comfortably do this and people from the lower classes cannot. Upper class society seems to still honor those implicit social contracts, but only if you are already part of the in crowd and your disfavor could come back to bite them. If you are poor, my firsthand experience suggests most people are all too happy to take advantage of you and then not let you walk away. That worked for them, they want more and at the same price: free. Money is a wonderful thing but there is no excusing a common phenomenon of well-heeled individuals knowingly preying upon lower classes for what often amounts to free therapy and other free services with zero plans to in any way return the favor.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > Upper class society seems to still honor those implicit social contracts, but only if you are already part of the in crowd and your disfavor could come back to bite them. And this is exactly how "barter and <<mutual aid.>>" worked "Before we reliably had money"; this is exactly "the implicit social contract behind such interactions" that you refer to. Upper class society is a small group, pretty close to the point of everyone in it knowing each other. The average degree of separation[0] is going to be less than 2; I'd bet excluding a few outliers and wannabes[1], the maximum degree of separation will be 2. Meaning, if you're upper class, everyone else in upper class is either your acquaintance, or an acquaintance of your acquaintance. At that scale, the informal social mechanisms reign supreme. They may be influenced or channeled by the formal system of laws, but they're not replaced by it. (Note that this isn't the "lowest" / most implicit level of group mechanics. Upper classes tend to have codes of conduct, etiquette, honor codes, etc. That's the consequence of size and weak binding of the group. The average degree of separation is still greater than 1, and even those you know directly, you may not hang around with much - so you need some structure to boost the implicit, informal social self-regulation mechanism. In a way, those upper classes sit at the intermediate point between early, small human tribes, and organized societies that came later.) Conversely, if you're poor, you're in a huge social class, and your social interactions are dominated by those with total strangers. Average degree of separation is above 2, probably above 3. You're almost always dealing with strangers who themselves are also almost always dealing with strangers, and most of the time those dealings are effectively one-off - you have one interaction with a random person, and then neither of you are likely to ever cross paths again[2]. The point I'm getting at is that most people in the modern world have a large amount of one-off, transactional interactions with others. Such interactions are too brief and too weak to allow for bonds to form - and without that, there's little in terms of mutual obligations, or mutual care. What you get is the baseline "stranger treatment". This is not to justify the conduct of people taking advantage of others, knowingly or not. I'm just saying that at this scale, all most of us can expect is the baseline "stranger treatment". Money isn't the direct cause here - the scale of our societies is. Money is merely what allows societies to scale this far, and it shouldn't be blamed for problems that are problems of scale. As for the "common phenomenon of well-heeled individuals knowingly preying upon lower classes" - that is indeed a challenge, because at this scale, implicit social defenses (like people having reputation and getting shunned if it gets too bad) don't work. The options we have instead are more difficult to use and slow-acting - teaching people empathy, promoting a more benevolent culture, and adjusting laws to discourage bad behavior. It works well for many things, not quite well for others, and takes a lot of time to adjust - but again, consequences of scale. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation [1] - And geography. E.g. the upper class in Poland and in Germany may know each other well, but they might have few direct connections to upper class in e.g. South Korea. But that's just because they rarely deal with each other, and thus doesn't impact the thrust of my argument. [2] - To this, too, there are degrees. Consider us here specifically - you and me. We're both aware of each other, crossed paths on HN many times over the years - but those interactions are infrequent and inconsequential enough that we aren't much more than strangers to each other. We may be nice to each other, and I do consider you wise, but we aren't really taking each other into account during our daily lives.
CraigJPerry 3y ago
>> Before we reliably had money, we had barter As far as i know there’s no evidence for this. No historical economy which worked primarily on barter has been discovered. As i understand it, Adam Smith suggested this was the case and it’s now given as rote learning in economics but that historians have never found conclusive proof that this is the case. The wiki entry for barter has this: “No ethnographic studies have shown that any present or past society has used barter without any other medium of exchange or measurement, and anthropologists have found no evidence that money emerged from barter.”
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  On the one hand, the proposition is kind of obvious and self-evident - "I'll trade you ${thing you want} for ${thing I want}" is the next step from "I'll beat you up and take ${thing I want} from you", and then basic money is just doing the trade in two steps. On the other hand, single-step trading - that is, barter - gets infeasible as the primary trading model very quickly. Not because of specialization (the "I want to trade shoes for food, but everyone already has enough shoes" problem), but because of fairness - everyone's memory and the "shared knowledge" established through gossip can scale only so far, and past that point, you need some other means to ensure exchange of goods and services stays balanced over time (and that your group can agree fair balance is being maintained). Basically, either your proto-society develops ways to track balance of trade[0], or it'll grow a freeloader problem, which will keep it down and possibly even destroy the group. That point comes early enough that it's entirely likely the early societies that didn't develop money didn't grow large enough, and didn't survive long enough, to enter historical record. -- [0] - Trading via a medium of exchange - that is, some form of money - is just one way to achieve it, but it has the useful property of being self-balancing, thus not requiring shared global state. That is, you don't have to keep official logs of every trade made by everyone in your group to keep things fair and balanced (or even define, update and defend what "fair" and "balanced" means, which is something everyone has slightly different view of) - you can just establish a common medium of exchange, give people freedom to individually negotiate the exchange rates, and you have a self-balancing system.
  - karatinversion 3y ago
dragonwriter 3y ago
> Before we reliably had money, we had barter and "mutual aid." That’s a reasonable supposition at the most primitive level, but there’s not really evidence for that especially the former, as attractive as the conjectured barter => money narrative is. Its quite possible that the actual chain is non-exchange mutual support (“mutual aid” is a specific fairly modern concept that may not be a good model) => explicit quid-pro-quo with money => barter as a fallback when money fails and until a new currency is adopted by convention.
jazzyjackson 3y ago
Nah, humans work the same as we always have: we become indebted to each other. Cash is this wacky invention by which we cancel debt, specifically so we don't owe each other anything, relationship over, see you later, don't @ me.

landemva 3y ago

Yet Americans vote for religion of government that preaches we will be taken care of by continuous deficit spending. Deficit spending of money/value created out of thin air will eventually reach a mathematical point of no return. Maybe USA is already at that point, and now we wait for the judgement day when money no longer has purchasing power.

Teever 3y ago
Deficit spending doesn't make matter out of thin air. The things that are bought on credit are real, tangible things that exist.
- landemva 3y ago
  USA munitions, which were bought on credit deficit spending, are really being exploded in Ukraine. Financed by USA tax payers and future tax payers. Yes, this is real physical destruction overseas, monetary destruction of US dollar, and GDP number goes up for the headline news shows.

ajross 3y ago

> Before we reliably had money [...] Now [...] A lot of people no longer seem to understand the implicit social contract behind Nah. Being a jerk isn't a modern invention. By every objective measure, misbehavior/criminality/violence et. al. have been getting inexorably better over the past centuries. If you have to make a pronouncement like this, it's more "In a world of excess and luxury, being pissed off about minor bullshit is an engaging hobby". The modern world didn't invent selfish jerks. Maybe it invented Karens.

watwut 3y ago
It did not even invented Karens. The complainer behavior existed too. There might be more or less of this or that behavior and social behavior changes, but majority of "past was better" arguments are not born from historical knowledge.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> Maybe it invented Karens. It didn't, and for some reason this made me think about the biblical Parable of the Unjust Judge / Parable of the Persistent Woman[0]. The lesson usually taken from that story is about the value of persistence against unjust (but mostly indifferent) opposition. However, I can't help but imagine that, for everyone else witnessing the widow's repeated pleas to the judge, this was a Karen experience. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Unjust_Judge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Unjust_Judge

TeMPOraL 3y ago

It's a complex topic, but it's important to recognize that, to a large extent, > you just pay for stuff with money and if someone is "nice" to you, you don't "owe" them anything is kind of the whole point of money. More specifically, it allows you to trade with random strangers, without having to first develop and afterwards maintain social relationships with them. It's what, for better or worse, let humanity form groups larger than a small village. > You may be able to get away with claiming 1.75 of it and giving them 1.25 of it for a long damn time but if it becomes clear to them that all interactions between you and them benefit you at their expense, well, count on them eventually not being cool with that. This is always the case - but it takes longer for this process to settle, the larger the group is. Money is what allows you to even have this issue in the first place, by allowing societies to reach this size. And laws exist to compensate for our social intuitions and behaviors failing at this scale.

DoreenMichele 3y ago
Yes, it is a complex topic and one that disproportionately impacts some demographics. It is related to the phenomenon of unpaid internships where getting your foot in the door requires you to be able to work for free for a substantial period of time. This has been criticized as a form of gatekeeping because young adults from already prosperous families can comfortably do this and people from the lower classes cannot. Upper class society seems to still honor those implicit social contracts, but only if you are already part of the in crowd and your disfavor could come back to bite them. If you are poor, my firsthand experience suggests most people are all too happy to take advantage of you and then not let you walk away. That worked for them, they want more and at the same price: free. Money is a wonderful thing but there is no excusing a common phenomenon of well-heeled individuals knowingly preying upon lower classes for what often amounts to free therapy and other free services with zero plans to in any way return the favor.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > Upper class society seems to still honor those implicit social contracts, but only if you are already part of the in crowd and your disfavor could come back to bite them. And this is exactly how "barter and <<mutual aid.>>" worked "Before we reliably had money"; this is exactly "the implicit social contract behind such interactions" that you refer to. Upper class society is a small group, pretty close to the point of everyone in it knowing each other. The average degree of separation[0] is going to be less than 2; I'd bet excluding a few outliers and wannabes[1], the maximum degree of separation will be 2. Meaning, if you're upper class, everyone else in upper class is either your acquaintance, or an acquaintance of your acquaintance. At that scale, the informal social mechanisms reign supreme. They may be influenced or channeled by the formal system of laws, but they're not replaced by it. (Note that this isn't the "lowest" / most implicit level of group mechanics. Upper classes tend to have codes of conduct, etiquette, honor codes, etc. That's the consequence of size and weak binding of the group. The average degree of separation is still greater than 1, and even those you know directly, you may not hang around with much - so you need some structure to boost the implicit, informal social self-regulation mechanism. In a way, those upper classes sit at the intermediate point between early, small human tribes, and organized societies that came later.) Conversely, if you're poor, you're in a huge social class, and your social interactions are dominated by those with total strangers. Average degree of separation is above 2, probably above 3. You're almost always dealing with strangers who themselves are also almost always dealing with strangers, and most of the time those dealings are effectively one-off - you have one interaction with a random person, and then neither of you are likely to ever cross paths again[2]. The point I'm getting at is that most people in the modern world have a large amount of one-off, transactional interactions with others. Such interactions are too brief and too weak to allow for bonds to form - and without that, there's little in terms of mutual obligations, or mutual care. What you get is the baseline "stranger treatment". This is not to justify the conduct of people taking advantage of others, knowingly or not. I'm just saying that at this scale, all most of us can expect is the baseline "stranger treatment". Money isn't the direct cause here - the scale of our societies is. Money is merely what allows societies to scale this far, and it shouldn't be blamed for problems that are problems of scale. As for the "common phenomenon of well-heeled individuals knowingly preying upon lower classes" - that is indeed a challenge, because at this scale, implicit social defenses (like people having reputation and getting shunned if it gets too bad) don't work. The options we have instead are more difficult to use and slow-acting - teaching people empathy, promoting a more benevolent culture, and adjusting laws to discourage bad behavior. It works well for many things, not quite well for others, and takes a lot of time to adjust - but again, consequences of scale. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation [1] - And geography. E.g. the upper class in Poland and in Germany may know each other well, but they might have few direct connections to upper class in e.g. South Korea. But that's just because they rarely deal with each other, and thus doesn't impact the thrust of my argument. [2] - To this, too, there are degrees. Consider us here specifically - you and me. We're both aware of each other, crossed paths on HN many times over the years - but those interactions are infrequent and inconsequential enough that we aren't much more than strangers to each other. We may be nice to each other, and I do consider you wise, but we aren't really taking each other into account during our daily lives.

CraigJPerry 3y ago

>> Before we reliably had money, we had barter As far as i know there’s no evidence for this. No historical economy which worked primarily on barter has been discovered. As i understand it, Adam Smith suggested this was the case and it’s now given as rote learning in economics but that historians have never found conclusive proof that this is the case. The wiki entry for barter has this: “No ethnographic studies have shown that any present or past society has used barter without any other medium of exchange or measurement, and anthropologists have found no evidence that money emerged from barter.”

TeMPOraL 3y ago
On the one hand, the proposition is kind of obvious and self-evident - "I'll trade you ${thing you want} for ${thing I want}" is the next step from "I'll beat you up and take ${thing I want} from you", and then basic money is just doing the trade in two steps. On the other hand, single-step trading - that is, barter - gets infeasible as the primary trading model very quickly. Not because of specialization (the "I want to trade shoes for food, but everyone already has enough shoes" problem), but because of fairness - everyone's memory and the "shared knowledge" established through gossip can scale only so far, and past that point, you need some other means to ensure exchange of goods and services stays balanced over time (and that your group can agree fair balance is being maintained). Basically, either your proto-society develops ways to track balance of trade[0], or it'll grow a freeloader problem, which will keep it down and possibly even destroy the group. That point comes early enough that it's entirely likely the early societies that didn't develop money didn't grow large enough, and didn't survive long enough, to enter historical record. -- [0] - Trading via a medium of exchange - that is, some form of money - is just one way to achieve it, but it has the useful property of being self-balancing, thus not requiring shared global state. That is, you don't have to keep official logs of every trade made by everyone in your group to keep things fair and balanced (or even define, update and defend what "fair" and "balanced" means, which is something everyone has slightly different view of) - you can just establish a common medium of exchange, give people freedom to individually negotiate the exchange rates, and you have a self-balancing system.
- karatinversion 3y ago

dragonwriter 3y ago

> Before we reliably had money, we had barter and "mutual aid." That’s a reasonable supposition at the most primitive level, but there’s not really evidence for that especially the former, as attractive as the conjectured barter => money narrative is. Its quite possible that the actual chain is non-exchange mutual support (“mutual aid” is a specific fairly modern concept that may not be a good model) => explicit quid-pro-quo with money => barter as a fallback when money fails and until a new currency is adopted by convention.

jazzyjackson 3y ago

Nah, humans work the same as we always have: we become indebted to each other. Cash is this wacky invention by which we cancel debt, specifically so we don't owe each other anything, relationship over, see you later, don't @ me.