This was a really enjoyable read and actually helped plugged a few gaps I got from Graeber's work. I personally think his model for where money originated is very solid. Early human tribes work on emotional kinship ties and obligations within the family without a need to precisely account for debts. Money first appeared with city-states as standardized clay tokens used to account for grain taxes owed to the state. Give grain to the city or provide labor and services, get token, give token to tax collector on tax day to keep your city-assigned plot of farmland. But after this point in his book he jumps straight to how gold currency appeared with the rise in warfare in ancient Mesopotamia, but doesn't really give a good explanation why.
Based on what I got from this post, humans are evolutionarily wired to like shiny things, and this gives us a competitive advantage. Instead of lazying around to enjoy the sunset after a good harvest, our ancestors would have used the time to make elaborate collectables for its artistic qualities. Despite collectables not being something you can eat or live in, they happen to be a good insurance mechanism during hard times. Other tribes, though untrusting and hostile, also like shiny things and will share their food with you for collectables during emergencies where you need to depend on the kindness of strangers, turning them into a way to store the value of the leisure time used to create them. I wouldn't call this currency because collectables have no standardized value, its value being entirely subjective based on artistic preferences. One hunter might really like the color of your beads and give you two pheasants. Another might only give you half, but will give you three for your ivory comb instead. But this system is enough to sustain basic barter circles between foreign tribes and account for social obligations over time.
This evolutionary tendency to like shiny collectables combined with standardized states is what I think creates our first metallic coins. King Croesus of Lydia is facing a major war crisis as the ancient near east enters an age of chaos and decides to hire foreign mercenaries. He can't pay them with standardized tax tokens since they aren't his citizens to tax. He can't negotiate a tribute with their leader in luxury goods and jewelry because they're ragtags gathered from all over the land with no single leader. What he can do is melt down his golden collectable statues, divide them into standard units reminiscent of existing tax tokens, stamp them with his symbol, give each individual soldier a coin for every battle they fight, and appeal to our inherent love for shiny things. And so the first gold coin based on the existing idea of clay tax tokens is born.
Graeber clearly explained the process of how gold currency appeared in his book (I recommend you to reread Chapter 8: The Axial Age for this). It’s because states needed some convenient medium to provide resources for the military to continue its conquests, and that was precisely what the military was already pillaging from its conquered territory: luxury items made of gold. So the state had to find a way to enforce people to sell other important commodities (such as food and equipment) in exchange for gold, and that made the state to enforce gold coins as a currency in areas near conquests.
You’re right that the social/cultural value associated with those luxury gold collectibles is an important part of the story. But I don’t think you need any other weird evolutionary argument in addition to Graeber’s view to complete the full picture.
The state could already force people under their control to sell commodities to their soldiers for clay tokens. Why switch to gold, a much more difficult resource to obtain and produce coinage with? Was clay suddenly no longer convenient for some handwavey reason because we're now in the Axial Age, despite being used for centuries before? That's the gap in Graebers book that I don't think he covered adequately.
The reason was because now the various city states needed a way to convince people outside their jurisdiction to also provide goods and services for their wars, and those people could not be cowed into using clay. Clay only works within a states jurisdiction because they could punish counterfeits and ensure it's value among subjects as a tax credit to the state. Outside a state's jurisdiction, foreign soldiers have no guarantee that those clay tokens will continue to be a secure store of value. What if the state you were fighting for collapsed tomorrow? Now their tax credits are worthless. Gold, on the other hand, holds it's value because people like shiny things regardless of which king is stamped on it. But because the gold is issued by a state with their tendency for standardization, now your gold trinkets come in nice standardized units instead of a random assortment of jewelry, what gold would have been used for previously.
I thought these were also already explained in Graeber's book...
A paragraph from Chapter 8:
> Why? The single most important factor would appear to be war.
Bullion predominates, above all, in periods of generalized violence.
There's a very simple reason for that. Gold and silver coins are distin
guished from credit arrangements by one spectacular feature: they can
be stolen. A debt is, by definition, a record, as well as a relation of
trust. Someone accepting gold or silver in exchange for merchandise,
on the other hand, need trust nothing more than the accuracy of the
scales, the quality of the metal, and the likelihood that someone else
will be willing to accept it. In a world where war and the threat of
violence are everywhere-and this appears to have been an equally ac
curate description of Warring States China, Iron Age Greece, and pre
Mauryan India-there are obvious advantages to making one's trans
actions simple. This is all the more true when dealing with soldiers.
On the one hand, soldiers tend to have access to a great deal of loot,
much of which consists of gold and silver, and will always seek a way
to trade it for the better things in life. On the other, a heavily armed
itinerant soldier is the very definition of a poor credit risk. The econo
mists' barter scenario might be absurd when applied to transactions
between neighbors in the same small rural community, but when deal
ing with a transaction between the resident of such a community and
a passing mercenary, it suddenly begins to make a great deal of sense.
Graeber’s model is refuted by the existence of pre-fiat currencies, the Wampum, the Chinese copper cowrie, and Bitcoin. Where Bitcoin is a currency but just deflationary like gold. Optimal currencies of course are inflationary or stable [1].
[1] This is a simplification, the real optimal rate of inflation is really -0.8% as shown in the seminal paper The Optimum Quantity of Money.
There's another way to frame that argument. The spike in window repairs and glass demand will incentivize glass factories to invest in technological advancements to make cheaper and better glass. Investments they would not have made otherwise because there wasn't enough demand to spread the fixed investment cost across and make it profitable. After all the windows are repaired, the glass factories still retain their capital investment and technical knowledge, are producing glass cheaper than before, out-competing their counterparts abroad, and maintaining a global technological lead in glass production.
Bastiat's parable doesn't account for the sticky effects of capital investment. The glass makers in his stories only replace windows with old techniques and never use the spike in demand as an opportunity for technological development.
Currently the US has spurred the development of military technology by fighting a 20 year war. It's just that the destruction has happened on a non-electorate population. LA and NYC vote.
Planned obsolescence is also a form of this. Why build a phone that lasts 10 years when you build one that lasts 4, convince people to throw away perfectly working phones, and funnel the additional annual sales volume into technological research?
In San Francisco, people aren’t surprised to have cars broken into multiple times a year at this point. The only change I’ve seen is more auto glass repair companies. Sometimes we are stuck with “perverse incentive”
> There's another way to frame that argument. The spike in window repairs and glass demand will incentivize glass factories to invest in technological advancements to make cheaper and better glass.
This is so, but that cheaper and better glass is unlikely to be tougher and less prone to breaking.
There's a global debate happening today about whether complete free market allocation of investment is best, or whether East Asian state-lead investments into technological advancements is. If the free market was all we need, then why should the government invest into scientific research?
If you're in a situation where a state is after you, cash or bitcoin isn't going to help. If they decide you owe them hundreds of millions, they'll claw it from you when you try to spend that cash on oil and find out your tanker was intercepted in the Indian ocean and its contents sold off to pay the state.
The article's description of global momentary systems being colliding whirlpools is very apt. The international arena is a game played by giants, where individuals travel and do business with their permission, and we very quickly find ourselves unpersoned if we piss off our home whirlpool and can't find another to jump into. Most of us that stay comfortably in the center of a whirlpool don't even notice it. But criminal groups, political dissidents, international corporations, and even someone dealing with cross border taxes and payments will know how bad the waves on the edges can get.
If you subscribe to MMT, the IOU here is that the government promises not to throw you in jail for failure to pay taxes if you give them some tokens every year. If you own land within the boundaries of a state, and you decide not to answer the door when the tax man shows up, you'll quickly find out how much ownership you really have.
If you decide to go full nomad and never "own" anything, the tokens still work as IOUs in the eyes of the state. Try paying bus fares (public infrastructure fees) or parking tickets (fines/taxes) in bitcoin or gold.
Money is an IOU to be free from state violence in return for economic productivity and corvee labor.
On the one hand, they're right to cringe at the tone-deaf socialist era government communist propaganda. "How do you do fellow kids" with a communist flare. Clearly produced by cadres in their 60s in a communist bubble.
On the other hand, the current nationalist Chinese bubble is not that much better. Listening practice on Bilibili would be a lot better without the equally tone deaf comments about how all their neighbors are puppets of the US without any personal agency and owe their culture and history to 5000 years of glorious Chinese civilization. The current anti-Chinese sentiments in the west would be far worse if your average American spent even 30 minutes on Chinese websites. They can complain all day about how biased BBC is towards China (arguably true), but I don't see CGTV overtaking BBC globally in popularity anytime soon. One whiff of that smug self-superiority is enough to make anyone regret learning Chinese.
Nationalists everywhere are insufferable. The aspiration for "lovable" PRC propanda is just aspirational. IMO very little chance PRC will be able to out-propagandize west/US especially among west/US aligned partners. Language/cultural divide too big. I think domestically people will just settle for less cringy interntionational rhetoric, which itself is a losing game since western media will interpret translations with liberty regardless. It doesn't matter that PRC citizens are relatively apolitical on the whole, with 1.4B population statistics there's will always be too many absurd nationals to paint narrative. Really PRC strategy of maintaining different internet/cultural bubbles and targetting msgs at more receptive Chinese diasphora audiences is on point. Once attempt at "lovable" propaganda fails, PRC will pursue Russia style disinformation because ultimately that's whats most pragmatic given the divide and realities of competition. Also more of those PRC cartoons that called out western hypocrisy that was well recieved domestically and made western media look ridiculous by coordinated labelling them photographs. Or calling out Canadian indigenous drama, Australia enviromentalism etc, stuff that has had more ramifcations on the domestic politics of Canada and Australia leaders than west pressing on XJ/HK/Tibet, which Xi doesn't lose sleep over.
The climate doesn't care about per capita, but people do. And solving climate change involves a global effort, but if you insist on shoving most of the burden to the global south who never had a chance at a first world lifestyle, they'll just tell you to screw yourself. You want to insist on bringing your accumulated centuries of carbon emissions onto the lifeboat, while telling everyone else to impose quotas on their luggage, then they'll be happy to drag you to the bottom together.
Using drones wasn't going to dramatically increase the damage someone like the Boston Marathon bomber did or decrease his chances of getting caught. Would be domestic terrorists are deterred by the fact that they are domestic and will eventually be arrested given the dragnet of internet and CCTV surveillance we all live under, not because they can't somehow fly a bomb into a stadium instead of leaving a pressure cooker backpack. Drone availability is way down on the list of things a normal person would consider before deciding to pick up domestic terrorism. Top of that list is probably whether they can win a shootout with the police force when a dozen swat vans inevitably show up at their address.
Bombers flying towards the political capital = launch the nukes.
Navy sunk and the enemy is setting up a blockade = maybe we'll go be north Korea instead of giving up existence here.
Both sides burn through all their high tech armaments and don't have enough to really keep fighting = truce for 3 years so we can build more shit for the next war.
Depends on the country. A blockade for some countries would be basically death due to food imports being absolutely necessary. So they would probably start with lobbing nukes at the blockade which would likely escalate to nukes getting dropped on cities. If China for instance couldn't beat the US Navy and the Navy started blockading, a nuclear response on a carrier group starts looking attractive.
A country like US that can (for now) basically feed itself might have different lose conditions, though an effective blockade on a country like the US seems like it would require most of the world refusing to trade in any case.
There is also the egos of the various leaders at play. All it takes for example is a US president that decides he wont be the one who lost WW3 and decides that the other side will blink and let him/her get away with a first strike. For countries with unstable leadership this might even work! If you can take out for example Putin right off the bat, would whoever is next in charge want to get revenge for him if the Americans/Chinese/whoever reach out to the successor and offer them a sweetheart deal? after all accepting the deal means the world wont end....
It might also be instructive to compare with medicine or law. These practitioners are also liable for their actions, have to be licensed by a professional organization, and can have their credentials revoked in the event of gross incompetence. Software designers have none of these burdens.
