I just recently had this odd thought

"Hey what if no one ever had thought of money, and no one ever would? What would this world look like?"

It's an interesting thought, so I'm going to ask the forum members:
1. What do you think the world would look like if the above statement was true?
2. Do you think value of something would exist?
3. Do you think the world would be a better place?
4. Show your work.(Just kidding.)

IMPORTANT: When I say money, I mean any thing that is used to measure a objects value -- gold, coins, dollars, euros, anything that is used as currency EVER.

Personally
1. People would probably argue less, do more work themselves, help others out. Every thing you made is technically yours, and you can help others make there own.
2. No
3. Yes
4. Remember, I did say I was kidding.

1. I don't think civilization would exist as we know it without money.

2.No, because currency was created to assign values to things.

3.I am not sure. Could go either way.

4.Work is overrated!

1. Without money, greed would haunt the world, plus thieves might steal your stuff. That's why the world is best suited with money.
2. Same agreed with Freddy. No. Currency assigned values to every item.
3. The world would be a much better place if everyone knew to get along. People need to think about how serious the pain from war is.(I hope I'm staying on topic....)
4. Money is the protection of merchandise. We cannot take everything for free, because the world wouldn't be fair. Everything gets stolen every now on and then without money. This is why we need money. Rumors say that money is 'the root of the devil', but this may be not necessarily true for what I believe in. Money is power.

To add to my earlier post, although many people say "Money is the root of all evil", this is not true. They should actually say "The love of money is the root of all evil".

Yes but if every one simply asked for help to make there own, wouldn't that accomplish the same thing? Plus, if something you bought gets stolen, wouldn't you just buy another?

1: Barter economy, or else most things would be community property.
2: Value is a property inherent to anything people can access, and fluctuates based on whatever conditions are current. Some things can have negative value, and value can be different to different people.
3: 'Better', when applied to two or more vastly different society forms, is not a very useful concept, especially when day-to-day conditions are undefined.
4: Man-hours are one of the most fundamental units of value.

With small self-sufficient egalitarian groups it would be possible to do without money. Experiments have been tried throughout the centuries to establish such societies. They seldom survive for long.

The problem is that it is very hard for all property to be communal, not least because of the concept of leadership, status and reward. If possession of any item implies privilege it has a value. Whether you measure the value in shell beads, numbers of camels or paper money it is an item that people will want to obtain if they can.

And obtaining it by theft or murder may be the only possibility. As such behaviour is endemic in the animal kingdom (where the valuable item is food) I do not believe the invention of money has any significant impact. Of course as Abramul points out the word 'better' has little meaning unless more specifically defined but if the intention is 'more peaceful, less violent, less materialistic' I doubt if it makes that much difference.

Where problems arise is with the relative value given to some items. But that is a different debate entirely.

Actually, I believe the world is a better place with money. Humans are comparative creatures by nature. Everything we do, everything we are is in comparison to something. We, as a species, could not physically exist without comparison. In fact, there was more argument about value before a uniformly accepted form of currency was established.
Example:
Let's say money didn't exist. Now there are two farmers; one has cows, and one has chickens. The cow owner wants chickens, and the chicken owner wants cows. How are you supposed to compare value between cows and chickens without money? Do you base it on the size of the animals? The amount the animals eat? The amount the animals produce? What the animals produce? Is one cow worth five chickens? Or is one chicken worth twelve cows? Or are they the same? Of course both farmers want the best deal, and, therefore, never reach an agreement on the transaction of cows and chickens. Now if you introduce money saying a cow is worth $20 and a chicken is worth $10 (example numbers), then the farmers know that one cow is worth two chickens and easily, quickly, and efficiently trade their cows and chickens.
As for the phrase "Money is the root of all evil'" that is completely wrong in every way. An inanimate object can't express emotions, and evil is an emotion. That would be like saying "Drywall is the root of all happiness". That doesn't make sense now does it? When have you ever seen happy drywall? Do you walk into your house and see your walls smiling? Money isn't, and cannot possibly be evil. Evil is an expression of emotions, so only things that express emotions can be evil. That means that a correct phrase would be "Humans are the root of all evil" since humans can express emotions such as evil or good.
If money didn't exist, would there be value? Yes, definitely. Humans would just establish something else as acceptable currency. Did you know that people in the southern states once used tobacco leaves as currency?
Better place, no. As I stated before, money makes things easier and better.

Agreed with Ninja Lord. The world as I said before in my post is best with money. Without it, greed would haunt the world. Cheers, Ninja! You explained it for me!

Exactly what I meant, thank you Ninja for putting it more eloquently!

You have convinced me money is good. I believe you have all given a great deal of thought on this. I see now that it was the greed that came from loving money that made me think it was bad.

Supporters of Bush, ignore this. This has nothing to do with the thread.

How could Bush be so dumb! I would like to draw a picture of him and rip it to shreds....
random swear words directed at bush.
Sorry. Really off topic there.

Why, exactly, did you feel it was necessary to post that in this thread?

What i personnaly think is without money, the world would be runout sooner.

Jst think, going to get groceries;

3 hams
5 chickens
50 eggs
7 loaves of bread
19 pakets of cereal.
etc etc etc...

Money is limitations. without it there would be no status or holdbacks. a mansion with 12 plasma screens. their would be less crime as no-on paid for what they bought, it isn;t theirs so free to right to be taken. Status would be taken away. whiles not necessarily bad, there would be no struggle to live thrive and survive. as no-one had to make money, there would be no use for jobs, save for making something for someone else to take. surely you would want something in return for you work hence why money was invented. to keep jobs flowing for want of suvival, and by pricing everything, limits greed and, as people want more money, more items would made for people to buy, hence putting the price ETC ETC (i could go for 3 more paragraphs ut your probably bored by now)

While people aren't likely to work without payment, that payment need not be in the form of currency. It may even be in the form of an action not taken, as all too many societies have demonstrated.

To post #12
I was just a little odd that post. Its what comes from trying to think of sigs for to long. Call it my temporary sig.

To post #14
Very good point. I think that might have been what my poor brain was telling me, and I got the wrong idea.

It is hugely difficult in a world so heavily dependent on the use of money to have any conceptual idea of what the world would be like without it. Those who say money has made the world 'better' fall into the trap of comparison with what exists today. If money had not been invented not just basic elements of society but the whole philosophy of life would be different and it is impossible to say whether it would have been better or worse. Perhaps the only way one can even begin to grasp what it might mean is through the realms of Sci-Fi literature. (Somebody, somewhere will have written about societies where there is no 'money' or equivalent.)

In my own opinion the love of power is far more destructive (evil) than the love of money. In so far as the accumulation of wealth brings power (economic certainly but in other ways too) the love of money is usually only a reflection of the desire for power. (There will be exceptions I am sure, I am talking majorities here.)

If you had called a debate on 'the love of power is the root of all evil' you might find a more varied response. That is something we can more easily relate to in the current world.

Money was needed becasue the barter system couldn't be used to adequetly determine value. If I make a quilt, taking 17months to knit, and you have a wooden sculpture you took 7months to carve, I would want more sculptures for my quilt, because it took me longer, but you wouldn't see it that way. *shrugs*

currency was established first with common barter goods, such as shells or beads, but later converted to precious metals as the term "precious" was coined - that and precious and semi-precious gems, only becasue these minerals / crystals / metals, were not as common as others and hence were determined to have more value.

Even though food and water is among the most valuable of substances next to air and yet we do not think of things in these terms.

If 'money' was never invented, something else would have taken its place and soon another form of 'money' would have been created.
It's plain and simple, people demand value for their services and do not wish to be cheated (the inherit greed of people makes them want the 'better' deal, but that's a different topic)

If money (aka "currency") was taken out of the equations, we would still be in primitive status of "I am stronger, I take what I want and you are weaker, you will serve me or die"

The original poster talked of removing all kinds of money and later posters have implied bartering is the alternative. However bartering is simply changing the form of money. So, you are using tomatoes or shoes or paintings as 'payment' they are still money. If you want to imagine a society without money you need to stretch the mind a lot further and way beyond what anyone can see today.

You need to imagine a society where there is no question of 'payment' in any form. Where people imagine things, make things, develop things etc because that is what they do. Everyone would have equal access to whatever were considered necessities. And because of this there would be no need for anyone to be acquisitive. Those necessities could be anything - advanced medical treatment, works of art, whatever. There is no reason to assume the society need be less advanced than ours. Indeed if it was a harmonious one it could be more advanced.

As I said earlier I'm sure someone must have written a sci-fi story with just such a premise. So this is fiction but the original debate requires us to follow that fiction. 'What would happen if there had been no money of any kind?' Any answer which says 'it would have had to be invented' negates the whole question. The moment it is invented the question becomes irrelevant and so it CANNOT be invented.

It is so utterly alien to life as we know it some may say - well, it's impossible; it couldn't happen. But so far no one has come up with a rational argument to prove that assertion. All I am saying is that whether the society would be better or worse in any definition of those terms is unknowable.

You've made a nice point - it CANNOT be invented so what will the world be?

but it 'has' to be invented. Because as a species, we -are- an aquisition species. Every one of the 6.6billion minds on this planet deems something else as having 'worth'.
and because as a species we classify things as worth something (things we make usually above other things), we will -always- demand that someone give a value if they want it.

Now first if you -can- remove this inherent 'value' concept, -then- you can start creating a utopian world where people do things becasue 'that's what they do'.

of course if you take away free will from people and make one sect work mines, one sect work manufaturing, and one sect work industry, and yet another work distribution and another work research / development...

yes you can have a world / system that doesn't run off of the needs of aquisition, because we are all working for 'the common good'.

sounds a lot like communisim or a brain-washed society who's been programed (like the books "Anthem", or "A Brave new world" <~~ although they 'did' have money in that book)

If you have ever seen the movie The Village, it has such a society. It is quite small, though, and there are outside factors. Systems where everyone gets what they need have been tried before. If you have studied American History, you have seen the example of Jamestown. It did not work, because some people were unwilling to work, and even if they did not recieve the necessities, they simply broke into the storage room and took what they wanted.

Late Night Final, by Eric Frank Russell, presents a post-emigration society in which:

WoW this discussion can get real deep, real quick I will try to do my part in keeping it light & easy to follow.

I’m thinking to myself: What would it take to have a world without money?
First like you say anything can be used as currency (money) so how do you prevent anyone from ever thinking of it? It is just such a natural thing; I have 2 oranges, you have 2 apples, we trade each other, now we both have 1 of each.
Since you can’t prevent people from thinking of currency you can’t answer your questions.
I guess the only way you could eliminate the use (not the thought) of currency for a time is if you had a big powerful guy who controlled everything & he was the only one that gave people things.
This of course is not realistic, it’s a big planet & people would just move to another area or gang up on him.

Now what would have happened if we did not start using non-consumable items as currency and start the practice of accounting (keeping records).

1. What do you think the world would look like if the above statement was true?
I think people would be less stressed, maybe less productive also but less stressed (if they had the basics for a couple of days down the road they would be happy).

2. Do you think value of something would exist?
Yes, bigger food would be worth more than smaller & non-perishable like nuts would be worth more than they are today.

3. Do you think the world would be a better place?
Yes, for most (but not the Bill Gates & Donald Trump).

4. Show your work. (Just kidding)
I say yes because without accounting practices things would be less clear & have a tendency to kind of balance out more according to need. Accounting allows us to record with amazing precession who barrowed what on what date, what % of interest they agreed to & so on.
I think of my own family, I don’t keep strict records of whom barrowed what & so forth, I see a need & I fill it, they pay me back when they can.
FYI, I don’t hate Accountants, I have 2 good friends that are accountants.

P.S. It’s the love of money (mammon) not the money it’s self.

You nailed it xenxander, have a kudo!

Money is the foundation of civilization, for without it we would always live in the present. Only money lets us work now for what we will need in the future. Without money, whatever value came from our work would rust and rot before it was fully used.

Money is trust. Money means that I can give you something now and you give me something inherently worthless, like a slip of paper, so that in the future I can give that paper to someone else for something I need then. Without trusting that worthless paper, I would never give up anything that is useful now for something that hasn't even been created yet.

Without money we would be animals, living strictly for what we can touch and see right in front of us, with no ability to work now for any future benefit. Sure, some primitive societies can exist that way. But they never went to the moon, and they will die when the sun burns out. The rest of us will have children living amonst the stars.

-Jumonji

• No one ever thought of money and no one ever did.

1. What do you think the world would look like if the above statement was true?
2. Do you think value of something would exist?
3. Do you think the world would be a better place?

I think trade would still exist but every culture would have its own ways if determining value. ^[2] It would be harder for people to agree on value but perhaps in the best case wise rulers would judge disputes and in the worst case brute force would rule. I guess I am saying that no one absolute system would exist for determining what an object or a persons time is worth.
It would be very hard to store some things of value and to accumulate value as wealth because most things deteriorate. The things that do not deteriorate like gold, diamonds and gem stones might have little value. Gold makes a poor tool and you cant eat it. Perhaps each region would value things according to their usefulness.

This is a great topic that deserves a great answer and I'm just not sure I have one. There are so many variables to consider. I have recently become aware of the view that the current money system is based on credit sold to the world by a few mega banks. ^[3]If I understand this view and if it is valid, then I must say that money in its present form is a tool of evil intent. And the result of this system of selling interest may well mean world wide slavery.
In short I have no pat answer. ^[1]I just have more questions. Sorry.

I understand the desire to debate materialism and money is a good scapegoat, er, proxy for that. But money is not materialism.

If you remove money and leave materialism (i.e., the desire to accumulate property) then money will be reinvented as soon as you turn around. Money is just a more efficient way to barter because you don't have to carry your trade goods around with you. Can you imagine trying to optian a car if there were no money? You'd have to store 10 years worth of your corn crop and then haul it to the car dealer... not bloody likely.

What I think people here really want to debate is materialism - the abilit yto accumulate "things" that is only really possible (beyond a few trinkets) with the acceptance of money. (Not the existance of money, but it's acceptance amongst the population as something of value.) Besides the practical matter of saving your crops to buy a car, there is also the increase in efficiency that comes from specialization of labor which creates surplus wealth that can be accumulated in the first place.

If you live in a primitive society, everyone pretty much does everything for themselves. Trade is minimal, so everyone has to create their own clothes, food, shelter, etc. But with the ability to "horde" the results of your great crop in the form of money, you can spend all your energy in learning how to grow better and better crops and just buy your clothes from someone else. The "someone else" can spend all their energy on learning how to make better clothes...etc. Such is how civilization is born.

It's so easy to think "things were better" before "fill in your favorite scapegoat." But the truth is, people can subvert anything to evil if they choose. Money is a necessary component of our advancement as a space-going species, despite the face that it tempts people into excess behavior. It's not the money that makes people want things, it's the fact that people want things that leads them to create money.

Yea I wish I had said that.

But I stlll say some thing stinks about the current state of capitalism.

I know what you mean. Too much capitalism is nearly as bad as not enough. The ideal of capitalism is that it encourages competition so that the best ideas win. But if taken to an extreme - the winners will use their initial success to force the competiters out of the game in the later rounds.

That's why America has a "regulated" capitalism. The idea is to allow people to succeed, but then don't allow them to use that success to block others from succeeding as well. It's a very, very fine line - and we don't have it right yet - but a great ideal to strive for anyway.

-Jumonji

Nope it's not perfect. Like when Microsoft told IBM (way back in the day), if you wish to distribute our hardware, you 'cannot' sell it with Netscape - it must have I.E. (which microsoft stole - it was spyglass browser originally)<~~ which I had on my ol' IBM ^_^

countless others do the same - corporations run capitalism. The american dream is to make a million dollars (for the common joe, anyway), but it's very rarely seen. This leads full circle back to the two faces of capitalism. Then one can blame money for it all and then announce "Money is evil - look what it has done to us!".

But those who are smart enough, know better. The main problem is there aren't enough smart people to balance the stupid people - scales are always inadvertently tipped to favor the uneducated masses which suits large corporations just fine - gives them a massive, and cheap to employ, labor pool.

This is a little off topic now, perhaps we should open a thread about "is capitalism evil?". But we'd have the same two faces - good and evil, and end up saying: "No, but those who manipulate it are." (inherit greed of people).

P.S:
Thanks for Kudos! ^_^

So far the best replies I have heard. And I know that no won thought of money, but it had to start some were, right? Plus, xenxander, your point is completely valid. It was the most straight-forward one yet. everyone!

When I typed "No one ever thought of money and no one ever did." I was being a kinda smart-ass cause you wrote "if the above statement was true?" so I made a statment and put it above. Sorry.

Well, here's what I think:
1) The world would probably not only be different, but would most likely look different. I can't elaborate too much, but I know the world we live in today wouldn't be the way it is if money was taken out of the equation.
2) Not really - at least, not in the sense we would think of some thing's "value". Of course there would have to be some form of value placed upon goods, services, etc. but it wouldn't be monetary.
3) I'd like to think so. For one, money seems to be both a help AND a hindrance, depending on what end of the wealth spectrum you are. Someone couldn't be judged by how much money they make in year, rather they'd be judged by the quality of work they do. "Work" is anything we do today, just that it wouldn't be rewarded with a paycheck every two wks.
4) No comment.

The whole issue of $$$ means different things to different people; it all depends upon what end of the wealth spectrum you're at that determines what your response will be. A dirt-poor person may loathe the usage of money, whereas someone who's well-off might appreciate raking in a decent sum of cash.

2. As soon as you establish a 'value' for something, you've recreated 'currency'. This is a trap - a catch22. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. I recall that PURE Communists societies all live by such values where everyone does what they need to do, for the benifit of the entire community, without a thought as to receiving money. Unfortunately, communism only works on paper and because as I have stated, people have 'inherit greed' <~ we all desire to occur 'wealth', of one form or another.

3. the quality of work would be a very shady area. As there are no "unimportant" jobs, it would be treading on thin glass as to how 'well' someone is doing a job that seems trivial (such as washing windows or cleaning up the horse crap after the Mardi Gras parade). Once can do either of those jobs very well indeed, but the time and effort involved is much less than working out a technical problem with software or creating a photoshop logo for a company <~ yes these can take many days / weeks, as I've done them before. Because of this factor, we develope a 'value' for jobs related to difficulty and / or education requirement.

'Value' isn't the same thing as 'currency'. The defining characteristic of currency, I think, is that it's an acceptable medium of exchange to anyone. Five sacks of potatoes might be a fair trade for two chickens, but if the person you're trying to barter with doesn't like potatoes, they won't make the trade.

The ability to be stored without degrading might also be important.

True, but money today is just little peices of paper and metal. What would the value of a cow be, if you were paying in little peices of paper? Doesn't that seem to be little odd? What I'm trying to say is, currency itself doesn't actually have as much defined value as it used to have. People used to use silver in the quarters, but now there value is the same, even though they have taken the silver out. Also, the person trying to barter with potatoes could ask the person if they could teach them how to raise chickens.

Currency is defined by the honor system. We know what the "prices" of things are, so we trade something of value (usually our time) for money based on what we think the money will buy us later. The paper itself (or the electrons in some bank's computer) have no intrinsic value at all. It's all based on trust.

When we worry that the money won't be able to buy us as much tomorrow, then we demand more of the money now.. this is inflation. Sometimes this happens from simple fear, and sometimes it's very real because the government prints more money and we know that the things we want to buy will be sold before we get there (with all this new money floating around) so we "devalue" the money that is paid to us for our work.

Honor combined with supply and demand equals money and currency value.

Jumonji: Very well put. I never thought of the honer system when the value of money is decided. Currency is mainly the amount of trust we give to someone as payment. But is it a good idea to measure the amount of trust given in a matarial item?

...the first problem is that the subject line perpetuates the misquoting of the original statement... which, when translated, states, "the love of money is the root of many[all sorts of] evils.."


So, the world would still suck, becuase the other evils that have nothing to do with the love of money would still exist ... like porking your neighbor's wife, daughter and/or dog. just to start .... and no, this isn't a RELIGIOUS comment so PLEASE do not padlock this thread because of it. I would rather have my post stricken with a message saying [SMELT OF RELIGION] than to have you pad lock this one.

Actually, money doesn't have value because we say it does; it has value because the government says it does. The government says a ten dollar bill is worth ten dollars, so it is. When we give someone money, we're not trusting them, we're trusting the government. We're trusting that the government will make sure that money has and will always have value. The only trust we're putting in the other person is that they give me the item I just bought.

This is less true now than ever. How much of your money is actually in government-issued paper bills? I bet most of it is in the form of bits in some bank's computer, where it was "stored" when your employer sent some of it's electrically-encoded information bits to it. Then you "spend your governemt-guarenteed dollars" by swiping that bank's credit card magnetic strip over a store's scanner that then sends a signal to your bank to change the bit-pattern it uses to reprepresent your account balance.

So - yes we trust the government to enforce the value of it's currency, but we also trust many private institutions to honor the intent of information that represents the buying power of that government currency.

-Jumonji

Our money may be a bunch of numbers on a computer, but it still has value because the government says it does. There may not be a piece of paper covering every single number in there, but it's still valuable because the government says so. Those numbers are in dollars. If the government says, "Dollars have had a good run, but they're boring. We're now going to use Figgles!" then all those numbers at the bank become worthless. As I said, those numbers are in dollars, not Figgles. If the government says that one Figgle is worth two dollars, instead of having 1000 dollars at the bank, you now have 500 Figgles. If the government says that one Figgle is worth ten dollars, you now only have 100 Figgles. The government still controls the money, not the banks.

This is true to an extent - but if the govrenment cannot simply change the value of money! If it could, inflation and stagflation would never exist and we would live in the land of milk and honey forever!

-J

Of course, that was just an example. However, the government can change the value of money by printing more or less. Inflation is caused when the governmet makes more money than it destroys each year, and deflation happens when a government destroys more money than it makes each year. More money equals less value per dollar as the government doesn't just magically get more wealth, and the reverse is true for deflation, too.

Do you think our economy would be more stable if we still used the Gold Standard? (This only applies to U.S. users, like ninja.)

What do you mean by stable? Less inflation/deflation? Possibly. Our money would be worth at least 16 times more than it is. That's for sure, but we'd also have about 16 times less of it in circulation. I really have no idea what our economy would have been.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I meant. I guess it's hard to predict.

Modern governments don't create money by printing more - they do it by lowering interest rates. Most money exists in virtual bits - not in paper. It's much more complicated than you indicate -- if it were easy, we would never have recessions.

But the gist of what you say is true - money value is largely controlled by government actions. But it's not all good or bad - creating money will help those with no money but hurt those who already are working for money by devaluing their work.
 

Ideas are the root of conscious evil. But does evil even exist? One persons pain is another persons pleasure. Whats the definition of evil? Is it pain and suffering, or that which a god forbids? And can one back their claim?

Money is also the cause of much worry, such as when some immaterial things that can't have a value are still charged for. The ability to keep a home for example. Is it truly really fair to keep charging someone for paying for a home in the first place? What if the home is kept in better condition while someone owns it than when it is empty? Plus, where is all that money actually going?

For a simplified example I say that NOTHING that cannot think can't either be root of anything. Only the user of money can cause those "evil" things. However, like it's said already one's pain in the other's pleasure. So it is if I buy something, it causes me pleasure but may increase in a way or another suffering of some hungry poor child in somewhere.

I know that's a bit naive but so be it(no really, I'm just too English writer to bring up my point in more proper way).