Hmmm. What’s the point of getting rid of money? That’s kind of like saying, what would the world be like if humans didn’t have hearts? Well, gee, I guess we’d all be dead, unless we had some kind of heart substitute. If I am to imagine a world without money, I imagine a vast, desolate world, where humans decline into barbarism and there are huge die-offs. There is nothing good about getting rid of money.
So what can the OP be thinking? He or she imagines a simpler world, where people are willing to help. This implies that he or she thinks the current world is too complicated and that too few people are willing to help each other.
I can’t help but think this is about a sort of personal experience. I remember when I was in my late teens and early twenties, I was some kind of socialist or communist. I believed that people should be kinder to each other. I thought we should all have a guaranteed job—employment that used our skills the best (and in those days, fresh out of college, I actually did think I was hot stuff, skill-wise—my how the worm has turned). I believed that the state should protect us if we had no job, and keep us from falling into poverty. Hmmm. Actually, I still believe some of these things.
I realize now that I believed a lot of that stuff because I was an unemployed or underemployed person. I also believed it because I truly had little idea how the economy worked, and I certainly had no idea what the role of money is.
Money is just a metaphor for value. It’s a placeholder for the esteem we put into various goods and services. If we don’t have a way of balancing the relative value of all that we do, then we can’t exchange anything, and then no one can get what they want or need, except in very crude, dehumanizing ways. The world descends into depravity.
So, OP wants a less complicated and more cooperative world. The first thing to understand is that we have an enormously cooperative world. Businesses are some of the most efficient forms of cooperation there is. They organize people to work together to build or provide all kinds of things. In fact, that’s what a business is: a group of cooperative people. The people cooperate to create value, and that’s where money comes in. We need a way to establish the relative value of what this group of cooperators does compared to what all the other groups create.
It’s complicated, getting people to work together—dare I say, to help each other? It just is. Complication will never go away, whether you have money, or nothing, or beads, or shells, or barter, or whatever.
So, what about helping each other? Well, remember my story of my youth? I wanted society to help each other more, and I wanted to be one of the beneficiaries of that help. To be sure, there were millions of other people I thought should be given a leg up by government, but in the back of my mind was my need.
Fortunately, I found a job—shit job, but still, a job. I saved my money, never spent much, and although the market has not recognized my value, I’m pretty secure.
So that’s the other hidden thing here: how well does money reflect the value of things? The more efficient our markets are, the more we can say that people are making choices and through those gazillions of choices, the relative value of goods and services are accurately measured via money.
But money does have a weakness. It doesn’t measure good will, or status, or social networks very well. For example, I have helped one or two people on fluther (to judge by their thanks), and in doing so, I have developed a little reputation—a positive one, I think. I’ve been told I’m an important part of the community. Now maybe the founders of fluther tell everyone that, but at the moment, let’s just assume that I actually am special in some way.
I don’t get paid for what I do. I do it because I enjoy doing it, and I enjoy being thanked occasionally. I enjoy being part of a community, and I enjoy the feeling (whether it is true or not) that some people actually care about what I say.
Money is not measuring my presumed value here. Money can not measure my relationships. Money can not measure emotional support. Yet all of these things are very important to the health and well-being of humans. Crucial, perhaps. These are the kinds of things that money is terrible at measuring. And these are the thing, I believe, that the OP is bemoaning, when he or she wants to imagine a world without money.
What would it be like in a world where people’s emotional and social worth was measured in addition to their resource producing worth? I think that is what the OP is inviting us to imagine. What would a world be like where people were valued according to how much they were loved instead of how many widgets they could build in an hour? How can we measure the relative social importance of individuals, and what would it be like if that became more apparent to all others? Would people start working to build love? Would people become more caring and helpful? What would happen?
I hate to say it, but I’m thinking ‘Now, there’s a question!’ It’s one I can’t answer right now.