Could a civilization evolve without developing money?

Basically Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Sort of an expansion of a question I asked in the general questions thread about spacefaring civilizations with non-capitalist economies - I decided I wanted to go further. But would it be possible? I'm economically illiterate so I want all of the opinions. :V

I think its technically possible, but they would prolly still have a form of trade (the barter system namely).

Some commonly bartered items (grain, fabric, etc) become a de facto currency and there were civilizations IRL where fiat currencies were not used, or not used widely.

An orbital rocket is an extremely complicated machine. Its components need to be manufactured from a wide range of mined, harvested, and otherwise extracted resources, then assembled in a useful location, and this needs to occur within fairly specific tolerances or it will explode on the launch pad. This requires a widely-accepted, highly-detailed set of measurement standards for every step of the process.

It seems improbable that a civilisation would possess such a rigorous standard metric system but not a standard currency system, especially if that also required negotiating a new barter agreement with different goods for every single trade.

In theory a totalitarian state (by human standards) if nothing else could have a “the government gets to claim a limited or unlimited amount of resources, corporations can claim certain amounts of resources and citizens get a limited amount of food and board by default” system, although that would probably take time to establish.

I could see measures becoming standardised once science starts taking off. is to barter, it seems to me that it needn't be quite so individuated as each trade being entirely separate—there could be standard conversions, like "one bolt of fine cloth equals two sacks of grain; one sack of grain equals one chunk of iron ore; etc.".

Money could theoretically be eliminated, and a society could function without it, but to get a society to the point where it would be a good idea to make it function without money, it would almost certainly need to spend time with money first.

Whether barter or a debt economy evolves, (as both seem to have in different areas), one of them would almost certainly have to happen for a dominant civilization to start doing things. Barter economies are hard to trade in, and debt economies are hard to enforce in, so they've essentially always developed the most useful features of each other. (Barter economies developing trading in essentially favors, and debt economies attaching their favors to physical markers. That is, currency.)

Historically, if a region was in such a state as to not need to develop currency, they didn't develop much else either. (Ancient Egypt had that problem, where it was so well off that there was almost no demand for inventing new things or developing much of a complex economy because of how easy it was to quarry and build when the fields were flooded and subsistence farm when they weren't, so they got stuck technologically for over a thousand years.)

I believe that Aztecs never formally developed money. However, cacao beans were in such demand that they became a de facto money, complete with counterfeiting.

So as Florien says, a moneyless civilization will probably be one that had money and abandoned it, rather than one that never developed it.

Even The Federation in Star Trek, a hypothetically moneyless society, has internal accounting to manage the flow of goods and services. They may not call it money since the typical individual doesn't need to keep track of how much they earn or have, but it still exists.

At a minimum, any society that makes, distributes, and consumes things needs some way to keep track of the value of the things made, distributed, and consumed, and that is literally the definition of money.

"Could a civilization evolve without developing money?"

Yes, absolutely. As was pointed out, we even have a few historical examples.

The real problem is handling competition from other societies that have developed money. Because what money allows a central government to do is pool resources with significantly more flexibility, that is more resources collected more quickly and moved around its territory more quickly for a variety of large-scale projects, like conquering one's neighbor. A civilization without money has to rely on some sort of hierarchical organizing principal (ie, feudalism, tribal affiliation, etc) in order to muster up troops for a campaign, while a society with money can just pay them. This applies also to logistics in the field, except even more so. To supply troops the resources have to be collected from within a given territory and transported to where they are needed. Moneyless societies would presumably depend on some set of reciprocal obligations between elite rulers to collect and move such resources (or collect if from enemy territory at the point of a spear) while more developed societies can just buy it.

So yes, but it isn't stable over time unless the moneyless society is somehow isolated by time or territory from more advanced competitors.

Competition does not actualy encourage developing money infact for Japanese history it's the opposite.

The goverment tried multiple times through history to force people to use money so that it was easier to control, and all the cool people... ie china... were doing it.

They promptly went "I cant eat these things and they have no use to me... why would I want to use them other then the goverment saying I should" and went back to trading in rice and various other bulk goods.

It wasnt until the nation was unified under an authoritarian regime that they were finaly able to go "your going to use money and thats final

However it is worth noting that you still get standardized units of "value" even if it's not traditional money, for a rice based economy it was the "koku" roughly the amount needed to feed one person for a year.

Edited by Imca on Nov 21st 2022 at 5:44:56 AM

To be properly useful, money needs to be both fungible and durable. Diamonds are durable but not fungible, since you can't divide them without destroying their value. Rice is fungible but not durable, since it spoils or is consumed. Having your "money" be something that you also eat is not great. It can lead to severe instability if supply and demand get out of whack.

There's a third attribute as well: scarcity. Money needs to be difficult to create, such that anyone can't have as much of it as they want just by saying so. Leaves make very poor money because they literally grow on trees.

Edited by Fighteer on Nov 21st 2022 at 3:40:12 PM

While the needs are correct, I was referring to actual historical events as a reference showing that currency adoption is not always a given.

Also properly stored rice lasts longer then paper bills... indefinitely for white rice, but the tech for that didnt exist yet, so its it's a decade or two for brown rice as long as you maintain a low oxygen environment.

Grains keep a while, your biggest problem is pests.

And TBH I would argue the consumption is actualy what allowed it to work as a system of economic value, since it would be removed from circulation by well... being eaten as more was produced you managed to keep the rarity even on an item you can literaly just grow more of.... it was also easy for commoners to understand the value of "you need to eat to live"

Edited by Imca on Nov 21st 2022 at 5:16:12 AM

Yeah, food-as-currency is not unusual.

In practice, physical (metal or paper) currency was for the upper classes and soldiers almost exclusively, but it usually existed in some form. It's just that usually if a subsistence farmer got their hands on any, they'd immediately trade it away for something they could use. Highly agrarian societies may never bother with the metal or paper currency at all, but they rarely bother to invent much technology that isn't specifically for farming. But most developed SOME medium of exchange which was treated not just as resource in its own right, but as something that could be exchanged for both goods and services, which is the important bit.

That's the thing, though: these food-as-currency economies only work when most people are subsistence farmers. You need a more stable medium of exchange if you're ever going to grow beyond that.

>That's the thing, though: these food-as-currency economies only work when most people are subsistence farmers. You need a more stable medium of exchange if you're ever going to grow beyond that.

Not really. In a subsistence farming community money is virtually worthless. if it's not being stolen by bandits it's being stolen by wandering armies or diseases. If the harvest is good, everyone's harvest is good and food is worthless. If the harvest is bad, it's bad for everyone and so it's of infinite value.

Suitable, capable institutions and the state administrative power to support it are infinitely more valuable than money.

Not to mention that the primary currency for most of human history was credit and not barter. i pay you today, you pay me back tomorrow. In fact, both writing and currency developed precisely to make credit easier. Money as a form of fungible credit (i have a paper slip that says you owe me $100 bucks, but then if i owe a third party $100 i can simply trade the debt). And writing as a way of keeping track of debt in the first place.

And this is where things get thorny because what really constitutes money? In theory our modern digital money is vastly more like ancient credit systems than it is of the monetary systems of the past. I would argue that money is basically a fundamental concept in human society where we simply assign it some metric of worth.

Edited by devak on Nov 22nd 2022 at 9:02:26 PM

The problem is that informal credit only works with people you trust and past 150 people it becomes impossible to maintain a social link to base that trust on. Sure, you can make a deal for this guy to pay you back next month but what stops him from simply scarpering off and never returning? What if you need to cut a deal with someone you've never met? Food-as-currency and informal credit works so long as you've only got a village to work with but once you're working with thousands or tens of thousands of individuals the system breaks down.

Then there's the issue of perishability. Before pasteurization there's a limit to how long you can stockpile food. Food spoils so there's an ongoing pressure to spend it. That means no saving up for a big project or keeping some on hand for a disaster. Transporting food beyond a certain distance is only practical for luxuries. Paying someone on the other side of the nation simply can't be done with food.

Fiat currency could be considered an endorsement for a formal credit system but keep in mind that it was a LONG road to fiat currency with a lot of false starts and people thinking that printing money means printing money. First, you need people to get used to trading a commodity of questionable worth (gold), then get them to trade a good of zero worth but represents a good of questionalb worth (gold standard), before finally getting people to trade using a good of no inherit worth at all (fiat paper money). Even then there's a lot of pitfalls with the one who makes the money trying to cheat.

tl;dr, you kinda need to go through commodity money as a middle step when making bigger economies.

Not necessarily.

The middle steps are easy to make, but the thing is, gold is itself a fiat currency, just one that's very difficult to control the amount of. There are essentially no practical uses for gold pre-electronics. Gold isn't a commodity of questionable worth, it's a commodity of zero worth that people said had worth for centuries.

And when you had shells as currency, or other otherwise useless things as currency, which did happen, those too were fiat. They weren't backed by anything. Fiat currency existed long before paper money, and arguably, paper has more use-cases than gold throughout history. The only reason paper with numbers on it didn't become popular as fast is because it wasn't particularly durable, and was difficult to produce. Effective printing which prevented counterfeiting to some extent was extraordinarily difficult without presses or some form of automation. Rice, cocoa beans, and many food-based trade goods that functioned as currency are able to keep for decades if stored properly.

There is no particular reason, that if someone had a printing press but didn't have any particular currency, they couldn't decide that paper could be worth more if it had a higher number on it. (Though in practice, that would probably be a very interesting currency, likely the higher denomination currency would have much nicer designs than the low denomination currency to justify the difference.)

Adding to Florien's response above, the issue here quoted could, I suspect, be worked around by having the civilisation in question be one of a network of villages:

Each village would be a community small enough to allow for trust-based trade within its bounds. And each would appoint a single "village trader", a person whose work it is to deal with other villages.

These "village traders" would only deal with other "village traders", and since each village would have only one, and since a given village would likely have only so many villages in direct proximity, each "village trader" would need to know only a small number of other "village traders"—few enough, I imagine, that they could maintain trust with those traders.

And likewise, as the civilisation grows, a new layer could be added, of "cluster traders" who represent groups of villages to other such groups.

Such a civilisation would, I imagine, develop relatively slowly (as goods and services would flow relatively slowly, I daresay)—but it seems (to my admittedly layman's perspective) to be one that might nevertheless function.

@Florien I should clarify that I was using gold as an example. Of course you can use almost anything as currency, it just works better so long as it's reasonably durable, reasonably rare, and not needed for anything else.

Also, gold does have some intrinsic value. It is shiny and useful for decoration. Yes, that's not much in the grand scheme of things but you could melt down gold coins into jewelry or statuettes.

@Ars Thaumaturgis That might lead to the village traders developing currency anyway. The merchants would be socially tied to their home village and wouldn't have ties to other merchants to rely on informal credit and they'll still run into the coincidence of wants and need to visit a dozen villages to find something this one iron trader will trade for.

Then there's the issue of traveling expenses. Travel more than a couple weeks to transport grain and you've eaten all your goods. You could forage off the land but only if the land isn't owned by someone. Horses can live off of grass alone but every acre of grassland is an acre not being used as farmland. No currency means you can't buy supplies along the way and that's going to hurt travelers of all kinds.

Edit: What I'm trying to say is that Currency evolved organically and ended up fixing a lot of problems. Yes, hacksilver isn't exactly minted but neither are cowrie shells.

Edited by Belisaurius on Nov 24th 2022 at 1:04:45 PM

It might, of course—but it might not.

Not necessarily: while I do agree that they would have social ties to their home villages, through dealing frequently and primarily with the other traders they would, I imagine, develop ties to them too.

I would imagine that they would be empowered to trade according to their judgement, and drawing on the full surplus of their village.

It would, of course, be a slow system: trades wouldn't happen swiftly. But a slow system, and thus a slow society, isn't necessarily a huge problem.

Sure. But there are likely ways around this—perhaps central trading-locations.

As for forage, I imagine that such a society wouldn't grow all that quickly, and so wouldn't lock down quite as much land per village.

>The problem is that informal credit only works with people you trust and past 150 people it becomes impossible to maintain a social link to base that trust on. Sure, you can make a deal for this guy to pay you back next month but what stops him from simply scarpering off and never returning?

This is, notably, also an issue in states with currency. Money doesn't fix this issue. Institutions, however, mitigate it. Someone running with your money is a lot less effective if there's a police to chase you and forging documents is a lot less effective if there's a justice system to put you in jail for that.

Then there's the issue of perishability. Before pasteurization there's a limit to how long you can stockpile food. Food spoils so there's an ongoing pressure to spend it. That means no saving up for a big project or keeping some on hand for a disaster.

Food isn't a currency and these sort of civilizations don't work on currency. You spend food to maintain ties, and then those ties help you out. Need help with the harvest? your neighbor sends help because you helped them. As i said before, money was largely worthless. It was something for the elite.

Gold has multiple uses outside of electronics. It’s highly corrosion resistant which is one of the classical reasons it was favored over silver which tarnishes effortlessly as well as other classical antiquity materials. It was used for coinage, weights and measures, finishes and paints and more in pre industrial times. Its relative rarity was the reason why uses outside of art or finance or government were few, not absence of practical uses.

Yeah except coinage is because gold has a grossly overinflated value, and is a coinage. It's a currency based on the value of gold, which is a use that only comes up if gold is thought to have significant intrinsic value, so that right there is circular. Besides, the vast majority of historical coinage was silver, copper, and bronze.

Using it for weights because it doesn't degrade the same isn't much of a big deal, lead can do as much perfectly serviceably for pre-industrial measurement purposes. As for pigments, that's just a question of "do people think shiny paints are aesthetically a good idea when other paints aren't shiny", which they very well might not.

There are almost no use cases for gold in antiquity that don't either have a cheaper, easier substitute that functions serviceably, or are based on gold having high intrinsic value, or rely on subjective appeal which may not be reasonable to assume exists in a given culture.