Will Money Be Missed In A Post Scarcity World?

Let us start this particular musing with a thought experiment. Imagine for a moment if you will, that I have come to visit you one night, and I take you off in my speed of light rocket ship for a day.

When we return, even though it has been 24 hours for us, 506 years on earth has passed, and things are very different.

For a start our economic system as we know it has completely evaporated. There is no money to speak of, nobody living in the depths of poverty or at the height of riches.

All of your basic needs and more are taken care of, there is an abundance of food and housing, and travel is available to all and completely unrestricted.

The question I want to ask you is; what do you do now?

The Root Of All Action?

Before we answer that question, let's pause our thought experiment and spend a small amount of time contemplating what money does for us now.

The primary function of money in society is perhaps without question. We use cash to represent, and transfer value from one place to another. Without it, we cannot obtain food or shelter, without having to resort to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

However there is a secondary function that is often overlooked, and that is one of a motivator, or even perhaps more accurately, an innovator.

We see evidence of this all the time, some of the greatest and most useful inventions of all time came about as a way to gain greater profits. What we don't perhaps take note of too often, is how the potential lack of profits stifles and halts innovation.

Take for instance the space race looked at from a commercial point of view. Now of course we have Elon Musk's SpaceX, but what has taken so long; why is it only now that private interests are seeking to colonise space, almost half a century since man stepped on the moon?

An interesting theory is that the lack of protection of commercial interests is a major factor in why no company has bothered to try and commercialise objects beyond our planet's gravity well.

You see, shortly after we landed on the moon, practically every country in the world signed an agreement that nothing in space could ever be owned by an individual, government, or corporate body.

This means that if you want to set up a company to bring an asteroid back into earth's orbit and mine it, there is nothing stopping my company flying up there and plundering the rock after you do all the hard expensive work bringing it back.

You couldn't take me to court because nobody can own anything in space. This state of affairs is said to be a prime mover in the space race. According to some, without this non-ownership agreement, we may well have advanced in space a lot further than we have thus far.

Whether that particular theory is correct or not, it is hard to argue against the case for profits being a prime motivator to innovate and generally get things done.

So the question remains; what does society do once we don't need money any more; and will we miss it when it's gone?

Let The Games Begin!

If you put a rat in a cage with two buttons, one that gives it food, and one that stimulates the pleasure centre in the brain. Instead of pressing the food button now and again, the rat will instead choose pleasure, and starve to death.

This behaviour is not exclusive to rats, if you could feel satisfaction from just thinking about food, then you too would probably starve. Similar behaviour is seen in chronic alcoholics or drug addicts, preferring their particular chemical pleasures over health and nutrition.

All this means is that we do things because they are pleasurable, this is the inescapable fact of evolution. Be you a human being, or a simple amoeba, you are motivated to do things because they are enjoyable.

Thus when we are freed from doing things because we need to feed our base pleasures of eating and keeping warm. We will need to find new things to keep us going, and where better to look than sport and games?

In sport we can still satisfy another base instinct; to compete, and of course we can still keep score, something we seem to be fairly obsessed about.

Back To The Future

So we've just landed back on good old planet earth after more than half a millennium. I personally am going to go and check out how much extra knowledge I can upload into my brain, then go and check out some of the many game parlours.

I won't miss money, but will you; and what are you going to do in this post-scarcity, new economy world?

AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!

Cryptogee