Note that the Somali warlords don’t extract or refine gas themselves, they barter for it from better organized nations. Heck, according to the article the vehicles were paid for by misguided foreign NGOs.
My vote for most valuable insight applying as much to natural fitness as to economic behavior it is this:
The most important part of the environment is the humans and what they are doing. If I and my merry band of 100 or 1000 or even 1000000 or even 1000000000 tribe members are contemplating how we should supply ourselves with food, shelter, weapons, entertainment, & c., we should first, foremost, and with great care look to use what is already developed, invented, and produced by the rest of the world. You were concerned about warlords having trouble extracting or refining oil, but you stumbled upon the reasonable assumption that obviously the Toyotas are going to come from Japan and don’t need to be produced by the warlords.
Even in the US, about the single most effective source of new cool stuff yet to grace the surface of the earth, we drive Toyotas. And BMW, Mercedes, Fiat, Volvo, Hyundai etc. We get wine, cheese, movies, etc. from everywhere else. In some self-fulfilling sense, we import about as much as we export.
Could we go it alone? Sure. We’d probably be about 90% poorer. You can quibble over whether we’d only be 20% poorer or 95% poorer, but if you at all immerse yourself in a study of where stuff comes from, the expense of inventing vs copying, the benefits of mass production and massive specialization, you will absolutely unavoidably get the sign of the effect right.
My point is that in the “whole world adopts anarchy” scenario the warlords wouldn’t be able to use trucks. Heck, without the NGOs’ money they probably wouldn’t be able to use trucks.
Indeed, you don’t have to do everything yourself. But trade is just one way of getting something from others. Another way is simply taking it, with force. In biology (“natural fitness”), as Greg Cochrane puts it, the usual way is “Let George do it, and then eat George.”
But trade is just one way of getting something from others.
Yes nice summary of the original point of the entire thread. Money (which is trade, n’est-ce pas?) is just one way of getting something.
And the argument has been can we get more of something by abandoning money. And you and I have pretty much been saying “almost certainly not, what proposal do you have that hasn’t already been discredited?”
Mais non, money is not “just” trade or “just” one way of getting something. Off the top of my head, money has multiple roles which include being:
medium of exchange (that’s trade)
store of value
Which is time shifted trade. I.e. I trade a perishable good now (like my labor or a bottle of milk) for some money, I store it for a while, and then I buy something with it. I can’t imagine that this is anything more than a description of what we mean when we say “store of value”
way of measuring and comparing the value of different goods
And how does money do that? By being used to trade for different goods, money provides a common denominator for an externalizable ranking of values. (my internal ranking of values, a 25 cent caramel is worth much more than a few $10s of bucks for some sea urchin served in some restaurants as a delicacy.
But if two of these three functions seem like something other than trade to you, enjoy.
Note that the Somali warlords don’t extract or refine gas themselves, they barter for it from better organized nations. Heck, according to the article the vehicles were paid for by misguided foreign NGOs.
My vote for most valuable insight applying as much to natural fitness as to economic behavior it is this:
The most important part of the environment is the humans and what they are doing. If I and my merry band of 100 or 1000 or even 1000000 or even 1000000000 tribe members are contemplating how we should supply ourselves with food, shelter, weapons, entertainment, & c., we should first, foremost, and with great care look to use what is already developed, invented, and produced by the rest of the world. You were concerned about warlords having trouble extracting or refining oil, but you stumbled upon the reasonable assumption that obviously the Toyotas are going to come from Japan and don’t need to be produced by the warlords.
Even in the US, about the single most effective source of new cool stuff yet to grace the surface of the earth, we drive Toyotas. And BMW, Mercedes, Fiat, Volvo, Hyundai etc. We get wine, cheese, movies, etc. from everywhere else. In some self-fulfilling sense, we import about as much as we export.
Could we go it alone? Sure. We’d probably be about 90% poorer. You can quibble over whether we’d only be 20% poorer or 95% poorer, but if you at all immerse yourself in a study of where stuff comes from, the expense of inventing vs copying, the benefits of mass production and massive specialization, you will absolutely unavoidably get the sign of the effect right.
My point is that in the “whole world adopts anarchy” scenario the warlords wouldn’t be able to use trucks. Heck, without the NGOs’ money they probably wouldn’t be able to use trucks.
Indeed, you don’t have to do everything yourself. But trade is just one way of getting something from others. Another way is simply taking it, with force. In biology (“natural fitness”), as Greg Cochrane puts it, the usual way is “Let George do it, and then eat George.”
Yes nice summary of the original point of the entire thread. Money (which is trade, n’est-ce pas?) is just one way of getting something.
And the argument has been can we get more of something by abandoning money. And you and I have pretty much been saying “almost certainly not, what proposal do you have that hasn’t already been discredited?”
Mais non, money is not “just” trade or “just” one way of getting something. Off the top of my head, money has multiple roles which include being:
medium of exchange (that’s trade)
store of value
way of measuring and comparing the value of different goods
In particular, the last role is vital for the informational function of money.
Mais non, money is not “just” trade or “just” one way of getting something. Off the top of my head, money has multiple roles which include being:
medium of exchange (that’s trade)
store of value
Which is time shifted trade. I.e. I trade a perishable good now (like my labor or a bottle of milk) for some money, I store it for a while, and then I buy something with it. I can’t imagine that this is anything more than a description of what we mean when we say “store of value”
way of measuring and comparing the value of different goods
And how does money do that? By being used to trade for different goods, money provides a common denominator for an externalizable ranking of values. (my internal ranking of values, a 25 cent caramel is worth much more than a few $10s of bucks for some sea urchin served in some restaurants as a delicacy.
But if two of these three functions seem like something other than trade to you, enjoy.