These species level threat things like this and climate change could be solved overnight if you just removed the concept of money. It’s mad how we hold our economic system above these sorts of possibilities. I don’t have a utopian answer to how to balance things in the right way but it’s just interesting to me that we have the material capability to do this stuff, but because of a monetary system that isn’t physically real (but is in reality) we can’t.
Coordinating how we expend resources, and on what, is always the biggest problem, by far, and that would be true under any system I can think of. Money is a very imperfect solution to the problem, but that doesn’t mean money is the the problem.
A lot of people’s thinking about these issues essentially starts with “assume a benevolent dictator.” That’s a big assumption!
Fewer gripes about capitalism; more grooming of the global bug tree.
The nice thing about money driving human behavior is we have a functioning society while still maintaining most personal freedoms.
Money sucks but it is an effective way to trick our self-interested brains into creating value for society. It leverages our own greed to make us hard-workers. It is a way better lever than fear or compassion.
> Money sucks but it is an effective way to trick our self-interested brains into creating value for society.
The only reason why I'm not creating more value for society (I have some social side-projects that never get my entire attention) is money. My NGO self-funded projects cannot compete with my salary working for a shit startup producing no value for society whatsoever but burning through VC money.
Ok let’s just ignore the money aspect then. In this case we are talking about radiation shielding, which is made from metals that have to be mined at great environmental cost and then smelted with lots of energy input. That environmental impact is not worth mitigating such an unlikely risk.
For one thing, if you try to get rid of money, you'll quickly end up inventing it again just to manage complicated distributions of resources. You might not call it money, but it will acquire all the same connotations.
For another: Consider what happens if you try to get rid of money, then run a major grid-hardening project. Who builds/works in the factories you need? Why do they do that instead of writing poetry or going fishing? How do they eat? Someone has to grow the food, right? Apply the same questions recursively.
We've had one big shot at trying to solve those problems without a market. It was called Communism. Didn't work so well. And they still had money.
>We've had one big shot at trying to solve those problems without a market. It was called Communism. Didn't work so well. And they still had money.
That wasn't communism, they they tried to call it that. That was "authoritarian socialism", an authoritarian single-party system with central planning. It had money just like any other economy; the big difference is that central government planners decided how the market would run, what would be made by factories, etc. It failed largely because central planning doesn't work very well. In theory, maybe if some smart AI were doing the central planning with plenty of feedback, it could work really well, but the way the Soviets tried it, it was a big failure.
Still, your point stands: the system still needs money. As long as individuals can make their own individual choices about things, they need money as an exchange of value and way to limit resource consumption. Otherwise, what's to stop a few mentally ill people from grabbing everything off the store shelves for themselves? Or to keep a large fraction of people from taking too much. leaving nothing for everyone else?
I don’t disagree at all. I was mindful to say that I definitely don’t have a utopian solution. I just meant that if the world really needed to do something we had the capability to do, but not the money or be wiped out, I would like to think we did it instead of just saying bye to the planet because we don’t have enough overdraft :’)
You seem to think the money supply is fixed. It's not. We saw this just recently with Covid: governments simply printed more money to give out as assistance payments. That's exactly what would happen in your doomsday scenario: the government orders stuff to be built/done, then prints up the money to pay people to do it, then worries about inflation later after the crisis is over.
In fact there are about 750,000,000 people alive today with no access to electricity. That's not to say they could all live off the land if society falls apart, but someone's going to survive.
