Why do we focus solely on this one aspect of life?
Simpsons meme aside –
Those with currency can have significantly more options than those without it. I’m of a privileged state where if I wanted to drop everything and visit another country for two weeks, there’s nothing stopping me financially. Not many people have that luxury.
God, that was such a funny joke back in the day. One of the moments where the writers were at the top of their game.
Makes it easier to buy food and pay for rent.
My landlord doesn’t want to barter for goods and services on a monthly basis.
Im being obtuse, for sure, but why does your land lord need to extract value from you? I know it’s to pay for the property but that’s just another exchange of currency.
Landlords exist to extract value.
And we exist to extract value from agriculture. We’ve developed to a point where it’s both possible and desirable to live in close proximity to one another. It’s possible because ag is so successful and scalable, and it’s desirable because new opportunities are possible when everything is nearby. So that’s the trade off you made. To afford the city life, you accrue value through city opportunities and you trade it in exchange for the goods from service providers. The alternative is that you run your own farm. Ask yourself how many farmers you know! And you’ll see which decision most people make.
All to say, we shouldn’t think of value extraction as a uniformly bad practice. We all do it and we need to do it because each square acre of land doesn’t provide the same goods and services.
To pay for more goods and services that extract value.
It’s nice to have something to eat.
Food, people make food in excess.
They make that food for money.
Just money?
Hot women are usually all over the farmers but the farmers are usually about those dolla dolla bills yo.
Do they? I’m pretty sure only about one in three humans works in food production. I think it is reasonable for them to expect the other two to give them something for their food in return.
Can be exchanged for goods and services
Because they represent a resource, concrete or abstract. Currency is easily exchanged, either for other currencies, or for goods and services. This allows for a lot more opportunities than hauling around a swarm of sheep for bartering at the car dealership.
Consider what we used as currency before it was currency. You would have to barter before, which was inefficient. Common currency saves you and everyone involved time. Instead of having to barter for every item, which would also require you to do carry all of those items, you can just pay with currency now.
I’ll trade you 6 lima beans for a salt packet.
No, I need this salt for lima beans.
We can think of it as a universal language for trading. It doesn’t matter what item you eventually want, you can trade money to get it.
Extrapolating, want, or greed, is what gives money its value?
Time, agree, time is what is most essential to everyone here on this planet.
That’s not exactly true. Barter was never used like that in the past. People used gift giving systems or other trust based systems in daily life. Barter was only used with strangers and that was not a common occurrence. These trust based systems do work in smaller settings but break down in large settings where interacting with strangers is the norm.
Because it’s very difficult to get things you need to live solely through barter. Many trades are very niche, and an economy that uses money allows those trades to continue being viable parts of society.
Like, think of plumbing. If everything goes well, you don’t need a plumber. But when you do…you really need it. Now imagine being the plumber who wants some bread and eggs but the farmer has no problems currently that needs the plumber’s skills. Plumber can’t eat, leaves profession, there’s now no plumber when the pipes do break.
Obviously, the next thought here might be, “Well, why doesn’t the plumber say if they get eggs and bread now, they’ll come and fix your toilet later if needed?” But that sort of re-invents credit, right? “I’ll trade 3 future plumbing problems for 3 boxes of eggs now.” If you have that, why not money?
So basically, money is very useful. It can be traded for many things you otherwise wouldn’t be able to get if you were only able to offer as barter a specific item that might be rejected by the other person you want to barter with. Money is a “universal” trade good, and it’s also easy to store (you don’t have to have lots of physical room to store your Universal Trade Good).
The BEHAVIOR of people surrounding this very useful thing can absolutely be suspect, depending on the person (greedy sociopaths hoarding wealth)–but that’s a human thing, not because money is innately a bad thing. It’s a social problem, not a technology problem. You could totally have a greedy hoarder storing up a non-money trade item too…see people and toilet paper/sanitizer during Covid.
Modern society is only possible because of global trade networks. Global trade networks would never work without currency. If a person spends all their day fabricating metal sheets they need a way to buy bread to feed their family. Otherwise we’d all be back to farming our lives away.
There is also a meta discussion here on liquidity (how easy it is to exchange something). People want currency because it is easy to exchange. Your landlord might be okay with getting paid in a mix of gallons of milk and some cuts of beef, but most will not. Trading for “non currency value” is not uncommon. You might get paid with stocks depending on your work. If you buy a car you might trade in your old one.
Those are 2 very different questions
Maybe it’s not as essential as one is led to believe. The book Debt by David Graeber deals with the very question you asked. I highly recommend you check it out.
I can’t really summarise it well since I haven’t finished it myself, so maybe peruse the Wikipedia entry. But the first couple of chapters try to answer your question
We live in capitalism
Idk why the correct answer always attracts several down-votes on Lemmy. This is literally it… Money is useful because it can be used as payment, it can be exchanged for goods… The reason why our whole lives revolve around it is because we have shaped society to be that way… We call that capitalism.
(And with knowing the proper term for it, everyone can just look it up on Wikipedia and learn about the history and how it’s all linked.)
You can either barter or you can have currency. Currency is the means through which the economy functions. You need something abstract to indicate value. That’s currency.
In a post-scarcity society, when everyone could just get everything they wanted whenever on a whim just because, we could get rid of it. Could. Probably wouldn’t. That society is a fantasy. But it’s nice to dream of.
Barter was never a thing in daily life. No anthropogist found evidence for that. Trust based systems were used, but those don’t work well when they population increases and interaction with strangers happens more. That’s where currency takes over.
Why currency is the most important thing right now? Because currency at the moment is status and many people seek a high status on society.
It’s not because we require currency in order to meet our basic needs?
Today, yes. We’re dealing with a few billion people with stuff shipped across the planet now.
Because it gives the ruling class something to hold over the poors so the rest of society is so terrified of becoming poor they forget that they’re being used as literal slaves for the state
This is the crux of it. Currency is essential because it allows people to exchange goods and services in a timely manner. What it is used for today is not essential to the individual.
Today 100 different people could think up a 100 different ways to streamline the exchange of goods and services without using fiat currency. The reason we don’t is because it would take power away from those who covet it and most people don’t understand they are being used.
Step 1: Hoard a bunch of stuff no one really cares about.
Step 2: Wait until you’ve hoarded the majority of that stuff in your local area.
Step 3: Start telling people how important the thing you’ve been hoarding is.
Step 4: People are dumb and actually start believing the useless thing you’ve hoarded is actually important.
Step 5: Enjoy your new status as the man who convinced everyone something completely useless was important.
Currency is an energy equivalent in human society. I’d say our current ridiculously exploitable system with greedy for profit banks, rampant credits, tax havens, exchange rates manipulation, dividends and stock market micro trading leaves a lot to be desired, yet it is still incredibly convenient and relatively stable even with all the major crashes. Beats barter that’s for sure.
We are focused on it because life itself is based on burning energy to sustain itself. Any plant would be happy to get more nutrients and sunlight like every animal would gorge itself to get some of that fat on their bones. It doesn’t matter that it’s sometimes to the detriment too - it’s just wired that way in the DNA, because scarcity is way more common than abundance and if this balance crumbles then it’s just a matter of time before abundance turns to even more scarcity due to overgrowth/desertification/overpopulation.
