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 It had no inherent value (although it was probably originally made from some kind of precious metal like gold that had some kind of value due to aesthetic, workability, and scarcity, but formed into a small disk with no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.
