Yes, she's still relying on "money" in the form of bartering, but what I found most interesting is how little she relies on while still claiming to be happy. Compared to most employed/educated americans, her situation is rather insecure, and many (most?) of us wouldn't tolerate that. I like articles like this that remind me that a) my level of security may be illusory and b) even if I lost it, things might not be so bad.
"Compared to most employed/educated americans, her situation is rather insecure, and many (most?) of us wouldn't tolerate that. "
I'd like to interview her again when she gets really sick (not that I wish her to become ill). Also she seems to have children - maybe if she got really bad, they would take care of her in the end.
She did address that. She said if she gets cancer, she will die, and that is that.
I suppose it would be interesting to see if she stayed with that conviction once she really is sick. But, she's 67 already, and has managed to stick to some difficult convictions already, so I wouldn't bet against her.
Transfer of value in a physical Universe is always a given, so "no money" is a farce in my opinion. Articles like these represent one thing only: destine (not to be confused with destiny). Minimalism, simplicity, declutter, zen, are all manifestations of proactive, deliberate, and mindful thinking.
When your thought is proactive (rather than reactive) and deliberate there is little room for the emptiness that consumerism and facile distractions attempt to fill. What destine creates within is motion. Motion is life.
Hence: negative e-motion = less motion; positive e-motion = more motion. Get deliberate, get proactive, and you get happy, productive, efficient, and simple.
Security is an illusion of the Ego. The Ego being defined as that psychological complex that keeps the body and species alive (hunger, sleep, sex). Necessary, buy only to degree. The Self (psychological, physical, and spiritual whole) seeks growth through change (or, motion) - the life we live is all about keeping up with the Self and not getting bogged down in maintaining our security, let the need for security evolve with the circumstances...
OK, but I think the suggested relationship between motion and e-motion is misleading. It is interesting poetically, but it is not particularly insightful or useful in an argument.
In the normal economy huge bailouts are given to the largest financial institutions, and even larger amounts of unaccounted for money is given directly to military and similar vested interests. It seems to me that the most horrific transactions are rewarded with money: genocide, and destroying the earth.
I actually own this book. I bought it in highschool because I felt I was putting my money into things that I didn't need to, and so I could save money quicker for the cool stuff.
----
I should add, I ended up making money by fixing broken things. A lot of the things weren't even broken! I'd take books to bookstores too. If the homeless only had a place to store broken goods, a place they could fix items, they'd have a resource they could pool into.
There's an idea.
Also, a bag of produce was always a great treasure. Great for compost.
As others here have pointed out, she's not living without money so much as making her own, on the spot, when she needs it - in the form of the very adaptable just-in-time currency known as barter. Douglas Rushkoff's book _Life Inc._ and his recent talks are all about centralized currency's corrosive (or rather, extractive) effect on society and are an excellent source of more economic-hack ideas. Here's his talk from the Web 2.0 conference last week:
“When I needed something, I found that it would just come into my life. My glasses, for example. There was an optician who was a member of the Tauschring and he gave them to me in return for some therapy sessions.”
She still lives with money, just not with the physical pieces of paper.
What is important here though is that they are removing the concept of an "accepted market value" for these services/goods. There is direct interaction between the provider and consumer with out mediation which determines the subjective value for both parties. I wonder what marx thinks about that?
Not really. You can't get away from "accepted market value". It falls out of a small handful of simple axioms. See something like section 2 of http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Price_Theory/PThy_ToC... , which shows (in several steps) how money falls right out of the way people have different valuations for different things.
Barter economies are degenerate cases of market economies, where the transactions costs are higher due to the nonliquidity of the currencies actually being used. This is not a story about a beautiful proof of how money isn't necessary, it's proof that the money-based economy is rich enough to support not-100%-efficient sub-economies as effectively parasites on the main economy. Still true, but a lot less faux-beautiful. Money is still there, just swept under the rug so everybody can feel warm fuzzies about not using money.
Note that this is a separate issue from asceticism; market economies aren't incompatible with owning stuff, rather than stuff owning you, and bartering doesn't enforce asceticism.
The way I see it is there are definitely still markets - it's just that each relationship between person A and person B is a unique market with unique market values for goods and services. "MarketSpace" A->B would actually be different than B->A - so a theoretic ideal situation would be where "arbitrage" ends up benefiting both parties because of their relative markets.
Example:
I can re-build volkswagen/porsche engines. While the market value for this is roughly 1.5k usd in labor I would gladly do it in exchange for you staining my arcade cabinet - a service with a roughly 300-500 usd value.. I would feel like I was getting a killer deal and so would you.
Is that "degenerate" because it is not optimizing exploitation or do you mean that in another sense of the word?
It's mathematically degenerate for the reason you mention; between every pair of people, you have an independent "market". This greatly limits the ability of the markets in question to do anything remotely economically efficient. Follow the link I posted and read for a while, and it'll take you through the process of deriving the concept of money from a set of those markets. (Well, sort of; it comes at it from a different direction but it's equivalent.) The real world is more complicated.
Incidentally, the model in that book will be mathematically degenerate in the other direction, at least for most of the book, because it goes to the opposite extreme of completely ignoring transactions costs for a while. Reality is, as usual, somewhere in between, but it is much closer to the market-with-money model than the everybody-is-bartering model.
So, I'm using it in the math sense, not in a moralistic sense.
If the phrase "market efficiency" is striking fear in your heart, remember that what that means in reality is that the barterers are closing themselves off to better deals and reducing their wealth vs. what they could be doing.
So, if that's true, why are they bartering? In the real world, money does involve a certain floor of transaction costs, imposed by the government for tax reasons. (I'm not saying I disagree with this, just that there are costs.) Things near the boundary of those costs can be worth just bartering, or selling "under the table". But it's effectively impossible to "barter" your way to a car or a house. (Yes, I know it's been done but it's generally a gimmick.) It can also be possible to barter between two people who simply have no money, in which case the reduced efficiency is a tradeoff you have no choice but to make. (One of the worst things about being poor is how it can lock you away from the very higher-efficiency economic transactions that you need to escape from poverty.) But like I said, it's not the awesome blueprint to a new economy (which I realize wasn't explicitly said in the article), it's a special case that has little general application.
There was a story a while ago when IRS went after someone who was fixing their friends' and neighbours' cars and didn't ask for money in return. He was retired and he liked working on cars and he did it for free. IRS claimed he should have reported it as income.
In respect to money being a measure of wealth, was he "theoretically" becoming wealthy and acruing "good will". Later by changing his mind and asking for favors from his neighbors he could "cash in" his "good will" but avoid paying income and sale taxes on it.
How did the IRS get on this guy's case? There's no paper trail. I find it hard believe that one of his friends or neighbours went to the IRS and said, "This guy fixed my car and didn't charge me! You'd better investigate him."
I'd say those bartering services are definitely a gray area or illegal because they avoid the taxes. But that they even caught on to the accrued good will seems impressive.
Edit: don't shoot the messenger, I did not create the laws
That bit and the spirituality angle indeed was unsettling but I posted this here maily because of the 'service/goods bartering' angle which seemed like a cool hack.
because it (re-)introduces a social element to the exchange. It may not be for everything and everyone, but it would give me a sense of enjoyment to exchange e.g. some computer-repair services for something else I need in my neighborhood. Nevermind that I would get to actually interact with the people around me. Definitely a feature not inherent in money.
Fair enough, although I don't think money prevents people interacting and trading locally. Not sure if forcing them to do so is a good thing.
Or rather it depends - for people like the woman in the article it is probably a good thing, because she excels at social interactions. If her world order would become the norm, the people less skilled in social interactions would lose out. So it is not fighting for a better world - it is just everybody fighting for a world order in which they have the best cards on their hands.
That said, if you open a PC repair service, the likelihood that the hairdresser in your neighborhood would come to you with PC problems seems high. If you don't offer repair services in your neighborhood right now, I wonder why not? My guess would be that your computer skills are probably more valuable than what you could earn with repair services (typically better paid than haircuts, so would you be willing to exchange 1:1?).
"Or rather it depends - for people like the woman in the article it is probably a good thing, because she excels at social interactions. If her world order would become the norm, the people less skilled in social interactions would lose out."
Yep, as an introvert, this is the part that would terrify me about adopting such a lifestyle.
Money allows a lot of worth to be removed from the system without any positive input and a huge amount to be removed solely on the basis of improved liquidity.
Suppose I have chickens I sell at £5, outside forces reduce the value of that £5 such that chickens are now worth £10. If previously a haircut was £5, and is since I cashed up now £10 (inflated the same as the chicken did) then because I use money I've lost 50% of the value of my chicken; simply by using money. If I swapped that chicken for a future haircut then it wouldn't matter what inflation does or the charges banks put on transactions or how competitors try to low-ball the hairdresser out of existence. I get a haircut, they get a chicken.
You can not escape the speculation, though. Either you speculate on money losing value, or on gaining value (or staying the same in value). In your example, if you sell the chicken for 5$ and through outside forces haircuts become so cheap that they only cost 1$, using money is better for you.
Also, the equivalent to outside forces devaluating the money would simply be the hairdresser dieing or moving away - then he got your chicken for free, because you can not call in your future haircut anymore. At least with money, you can still go to another hairdresser.
The problem is that in a recession like we are in now, money can be difficult to come by. But your skills are just fine. And you still have stuff that can be exchanged for other stuff. Bartering clubs were quite popular in the 70's and early 80's when the economy was bad for this very reason. Wouldn't be surprised if they become popular again.
Not necessarily
I want to cut your hair and it would take me 15mins.
But in order for you to pay me $10 I need a company, and liability insurance, and medical cover, and a business license, and an accountant and a GST/VAT account.
So I have to charge you $20 to cover the inefficiency
I don't think that is true in general. First, you can not evade tax laws just by not using money. What if all companies decided to pay their employees only in "things" instead of money, should they all really be exempt from taxes? Like instead of earning 2000$, you would earn "a new TV and a Microwave, and 10 haircuts".
It doesn't work that way. (Debate about the usefulness of taxes elsewhere please - the fact is atm the government wants our money/part of our production. It is not a result of the existence of money).
Also, you don't need to have a business if your exchanges are below a certain threshold, at least not in Germany. I am fairly certain it has to be similar in the US.
"She still lives with money, just not with the physical pieces of paper."
The pieces of paper, or the equivalent numbers on a bank web site, check, etc., are the common meaning of money in normal conversation. In every day English, I think that exclusively relying on direct bartering does qualify as "living without money."
Submissions dealing with minimalist lifestyles keep recurring on HN. Why does living with little interest this community so much? I'd speculate that it's because most people here have some kind of work they love, and this makes them realize they don't need much else, but I don't really know. It doesn't seem to interest people outside here as much.
Affluence masks the fact that the average American's relationship with material posessions is fucked up. I imagine that most of the people who vote up these stories have an inkling of that in themselves.
People need frequent reminders that material possessions are not necessary for happiness to counteract the cognitive biases and societal pressures that are perpetually indicating the opposite. To go without such reminders in the face of economic reality is extremely stressful, leading to depression, anxiety, and the growing problem of pathological hoarding. There are even now several television shows on the subject, one in the same format as the show about drug interventions. It really can get that bad for otherwise well-adjusted people trying to cope with the difference between what they need and what they want.
The truth is that you can never have enough of what you don't need, and sometimes you need the example (if not the experience) of someone living very close to the edge to illuminate the problem in your own life.
Less charitably: There is a widespread meme associating simpler lifestyle with productivity, and many people here have a craving, if not an addiction, to "tips" or "hacks" to enable them to be more productive, or at least seem more productive. Because they profess to have obtained a desirable state, people with unconventional lifestyles are just as common a subject as famous historical figures or business leaders. The idea being that if you emulate something this woman or Thomas Jefferson or Steve Jobs did, you can achieve great things as they did. The term "productivity porn" is apt.
In essence, many are just looking for another way to get more of what they want, rather than learning to want less. Two sides of the same coin, so to speak. Both present at HN.
Probably because when you are trying to startup you need to live that minimalist lifestyle, at least in a business sense. Think about the term ramen profitability.
Also pg wrote an article about getting rid of "stuff" at one point.
Maybe it's a Maslow's Heirarchy thing? You know, if your primary need is for something intellectual (for example), then getting that need met will likely reduce your feeling of need for material stuff. And if you are doing that and surrounded by North American Affluenza, then articles about living with less materially are meaningful for trying to understand yourself.
