A Brief History of Wealth

During the dawn of civilization when man was finding out that his intellect was useful for more than sharpening sticks and building fires, we began to farm, domesticating flora and fauna alike.  Suddenly, we had food that we didn't have to send groups out to track and hunt or tediously gather from plants scattered through the wilderness.  It wasn't perfect--it was still subject to droughts, pests, etc., and it was still laborious--but compared to the previous hunter-gatherer condition, there was now a greater abundance than there had been.

And this abundance brought change.  As we advanced our farming techniques and bred better, more robust, higher yielding crops and livestock, fewer people had to work to feed a community.  Indeed, we had more room for community, with everyone fed by the same farm, we had less reason to compete and more reason to cooperate.  And since fewer and fewer people needed to focus on acquiring food, this opened up opportunity for people to focus on other things.  People could devote their time to specific crafts--building homes or ships, weaving baskets or tapestries, even playing music or telling stories.  The artifacts available to the community increased in quality as the artisans were more free to practice their arts, and new arts, technologies, and even regions or natural phenomena could be explored.

Then, as we advanced, instead of just having the recent kill and some foraged berries, or even just a few varieties of crops, we had all sorts of marketable goods, from breads to beers to beef to blankets to baskets to bowls and beyond, and one can imagine that bartering became increasingly complex.  So, things changed.  Someone, somewhere, decided that instead of trading for things you needed, you could trade for something you didn't need, but which itself could be traded for things you needed.  It had no inherent value (although it was probably originally made from some kind of precious metal like gold that had some kind of value due to aesthetic, workability, and scarcity, but formed into a small disk with no practical application), but because everyone somehow agreed that it could be used to trade for things that had actual, inherent value, then it had value through equivalence.

Suddenly trading was easier.  We had more stuff available to our community, and it was easier for us to acquire the stuff we wanted.  We no longer had to worry about how many fish were equal in value to a pair of sandals, we could just use little shiny bits to trade for the sandals or fish we wanted.
But then things kept changing.  Somewhere along the way, we forgot that these coins had no real value--even as raw material, since they weren't to be used as raw material, that value was abandoned.  Somehow, we thought that because we had established this metric of value, the numbers we applied to things now meant something.  We invented this idea of "wealth".  Some merchants along the way undoubtedly noticed that some customers were willing to pay more for something than other customers would, and they started standardizing prices and tried to maximize the amount of wealth they could accumulate, which makes some sense because more wealth means more stuff.  But the problem was when they abandoned bartering altogether, holding fast to standardized prices, not because they only had so much to sell, but they knew they could sell it for more.  When there is indeed significantly less supply than demand, prices will go up, but sometimes when there is ample supply but enough of the demand will pay a certain amount, the part that would pay slightly less is excluded, resulting in a loss of goods for those consumers and wealth for the merchant (albeit, less wealth than the merchant would have had if the goods were sold at the designated price, but still if he had goods that weren't being sold, the wealth was lost).  We, as a people, began sacrificing abundance for this illusive idea of wealth.

Moreover, we developed this idea of exclusivity--that having something that others did not made you better, even if it meant nothing in practicality, or was available in abundance but simply overpriced.  Whole trades were created based on this concept.  And, worse, still, we combined concepts of exclusivity and our supply and demand to invent artificial scarcities, controlling the markets on certain goods so thoroughly that they could be sold for whatever cost, despite their actual usefulness or abundance.

Others, still, realized they could accumulate wealth by simply manipulating other wealth, moving it from here to there, even in imaginary contexts, and letting people use it a for a little bit but then making them give a little bit more back.  And so new systems were created that were based entirely around this concept of wealth--self-contained feedback loops that served no external purpose except as necessary to fuel their own existence.  Wealth became a whole craft unto itself, despite the fact that wealth, still, had acquired no intrinsic value.

All the while, our society drifted further and further form the things that allowed this wealth to come into being in the first place--abundance and community, which allowed for higher standards of living, specialized artisans, and technological advancement which led to the invention of money and this illusion of wealth in the first place.  Yet money is not bad--it facilitates advancement when used correctly.  Neither are the interplay of supply and demand nor even wealth itself inherently wrong.  The problem only exists because of this further pursuit of exclusivity and the illusion of scarcity.

I must ask: Why cannot everyone be wealthy?  In this age of mass-production, we have the technology available to further automation and make goods of ever increasing quality widely available, but because the focus is on the money and not the products, the consumers, or the community, money and quality are both sacrificed in the end.  Yet if we increased automation where possible, we'd decrease manufacturing costs and increase standard of living.  Most people see only that people would be put out of jobs, but fewer would have to work in families as the cost of living decreases, and there would be more room for pursuit of other careers, much like when agriculture opened our society initially to the opportunity for specialization.

I believe if we embrace our abundance instead of hiding it under the guise of exclusivity for the purpose of wealth, we'll take strides forward similar to those taken when we first became civilized and invented money, back when we still understood that it was simply a tool to facilitate society instead of something to be pursued in and of itself.  The problem is not the illusion of wealth, but the idea that wealth is the primary motivator instead of just a product of grander motivations.

As discussed in my last entry, we already have new means available for accessing global niche markets, and moreover certain new internet-driven concepts like choosing what we pay for albums demonstrates that our economy is shifting, but not enough on its own.  There is still room for us to remember that money is a tool, not a goal, and that wealth is something we get for being better craftsman and innovators, not something we get because we seek wealth alone.  We need only shift our focus to community, choosing to cooperate instead of compete, as discussed throughout my entries, and we can achieve a new abundance instead of unnecessarily reverting to the bitter competition of a hunter-gatherer society.  We can all be wealthy.

Occupy Our Street

Our businesses are run by businessmen, economies influenced by economists, and markets dictated by marketers; we should not be the least bit surprised when much of the machinations that drive our society are themselves driven by and for pure profit.  We should not be surprised that when we let only some of the players determine the rules for the game, those players come out ahead.  Yet somehow this is exactly how we seem to be, and so when we fight the corporate corruption or self-sustaining systems of wealth, we do so in their court with their rules, and we accomplish nothing but reinforcing their apparent power.
Yet these corporate constructs are just that—artifacts of our society that only hold power if we give them power.  Money is a form of communication—granted, not in direct parallel with language, but it is a form of communication.  And like words, the meaning of money is not inherent—there is no special law in the universe dictating that money has any inherent value, power, or meaning, just like there is no innate property of the letters or phonemes that make up a word like “ant” that give it meaning independent of our attributions of such.  As such, money is at its best a tool to facilitate certain exchanges between people, and at its worst an illusion, too often used to manipulate and control.
Now, I am certainly not arguing against the idea of money or currency.  Money is a necessary part of our society, at least for the foreseeable future, and it is a useful tool for our society.  All I wish to do is remind us as a whole that money is only a tool or a symbol, and it has no real power.  If we blame our failures on money itself, it would be like blaming our loss in chess on the pieces.  Of course, neither can we expect the other players to simply let us win.  I’ve expressed in previous entries that life is very much not a competition, unlike a game, and I explained why we should be motivated to choose cooperation over competition whenever possible, but we cannot expect everyone to simply accept this philosophy outright, especially when they are apparently quite successful in lieu of it.
Neither, though, am I saying we, just this once, compete against those who will not cooperate.  We have no need to make those who currently control the game change things, nor should we ever be surprised when our fist-shaking and finger-pointing fail to inspire them to do so.  Instead, we should simply change the rules ourselves.  We need only essentially play a different game—one of our own design that uses money only as the tool it is and not as some all-powerful, all-motivating force of the universe.
We can instead let other factors motivate us.  We can cooperate and still come out ahead, all the while happier and with better friendships.  We can make our decisions not only as consumers but as producers or service providers not on simply costs and profits but on quality, creativity, and ingenuity.
Gandhi said "Be the change that you wish to see in the world," and as I illustrated in previous entries, changing the world really is as simple as being a better person and helping other become better people, and the same strategy applies to business, politics, society, and anywhere else we find that needs changed.  I have seen that there are a lot of people out there who want to change the economic machine, but instead of occupying Wall Street, where we as literally as possible play in our opponent's court, we should simply move the game to our courts.
Moreover, the progression of our technology is facilitating a new shape for our economy.  Kickstarter has made investing not about expected financial returns, but investing in things we feel deserving.  The internet has moreover facilitated the existence of niche markets not fueled, designed, and dictated by corporations but by small businesses and individuals.  So, in addition to my usual message of cooperation, here I encourage all of us to utilize these technological tools available to facilitate a better economic environment, but at the same time to not rely on them to fix things for us.  It is still us who make the rules, and it is still us who play the game.  It is still us who decide if we play co-op or versus.  Most importantly, though, it is us who decide what game we play.