Story about the emergence of Resource Based Economy/Society Currently I'm brainstorming/researching for a fictional story based in the future. The future where all the governments united in order to have 1 currency and the power is now residing in the banking system, which are controlled by a dictator. The protagonist is an older chemist that lived though all this change and has been personally affected by the regime change. The antagonist in this case is the dictatorship regime. The protagonist is exposed to the idea that a society can exist without money and he starts a revolution. In the conclusion I want to write about the new world that he establishes that doesn't have currency, but it's rather a resource based economy. If this rings a bell in any way I would be open to leads on these topics, as I would want to make this story realistic.
Your story sounds like something I'd read. Haha the Federal Reserve will kill us all some day. It'd be easier to help if you could give something specific you're stuck on, though.......
The Euro and the Anglo Saxons (post Roman British Society) come to mind. Following the exiting of the Roman's the native Brits went back to living in roundhouses and trading goods at least it appears they did they may of course have used the Roman coins but they didn't seem to mint their own.
That's a tough problem. Global trade becomes impossible, society breaks down, and new governments form that make their own money. Let's say I'm really good at making shirts. There's a guy 20 miles from me who makes the best pants and will trade a pair for one of my shirts. I don't want to go that far but I know a guy who'll do it for a shirt. So it costs me 2 shirts to get the pants. (not very expensive, but twice what I'd pay if I lived next door) Now I want some pants from 200 miles away. Those cost me 11 shirts. I can't afford that, so I can't have the pants. Sure, I could wait for those close to them to trade for them and trade them slowly closer to me, but that takes time and may never get to me. They are also going to become more valuable as they become rarer. Countries fixed that with money that has a set value no matter how far it is from where it's made. Sometimes this can be done with items that are rare almost everywhere (gold and precious gems) but the problem is that there just isn't enough to go around. So I think your new world is going to be a 'primitive' village thing (think hippies). Because I can't come up with a way to pay truck drivers to move food into a city, or how the million people there are going to determine what electricity is worth and divide up the bill for power plant workers. If you get rid of human greed and desire to have nice stuff, everyone can share equally. Then everyone puts what they produce in a storehouse then gets what they need from it. The only other time I've seen a system that doesn't use money is in Star Trek the Next Generation. By solving all energy needs and being able to make most anything they wanted using energy (replicators) you no longer have a need for money. Sorry I don't see a way to keep society and fulfill your goal. I'll be watching the thread though to see what others come up with.
Look up on the history of the Khmer Rouge. They did that. Wasn't too successful. Realistically, if you remove money from this world, or even worse, a world where things have been smoothed out so much that a unified currency and banking system exists, people are going to die for lack of commerce. Billions of people, in fact.
Took me ages to find it lol look up Local Exchange Trading Schemes - they have them in various places around the globe I had forgotten about them but I think they may provide you with an idea of what you are after. Basically it involves earning points for doing favours which you can then exchange with other members of the LETS groups. My local one is New Moray LETs and if you type it into google will give you and informative article on how they run.
In real life, there's a new, Internet-based currency which doesn't need a central bank and is controlled by no-one. It's called BitCoin. If it catches on, it may be considered subversive by the world's governments, since they can't control it, and it can be used to smuggle money, laundry money, avoid sales and income tax, and so on. Anyway, if your heroes decide that a society without money is too utopian, they could try something like that. Maybe a secret currency the government has no control over, and anyone who is caught with it faces punishment.
Thank you guys, this is really useful information and I will research and update this thread with the developments as they happen. I have just started free-writing the characters yesterday night, which is always a fun exercise. I'm just realizing that my idea may have something in common with the movie fight club, which I saw recently. Hopefully I can have enough originality due to research and free-writing
That's simply an artificial (new) currency. There's no difference to money on close inspection, except for the name. There's a reason why money exists. You have to have a measure to value goods and services for quick and rapid and easy exchange. Quite possibly, virtual money is the future. It's simply the next money from gold standard to fiat and beyond. Why not have a currency that is based purely on imagination? I don't quite believe it is controlled by no-one, though. Somebody owns the server, programmed it, has access to the database containing accounts and can pretty much fiddle with the numbers, right?
I understand. But what is the price of a good or a service that is given in GBP based on? The same thing. If you sell me a loaf of bread, you're going to base that price on something (be it the weight of the bread, or the amount of time you spent making it, or the value of ingredients, or a more complicated formula involving all of this and whether you like me or not ) but still, it is exactly the same thing.
I agree with Finhorn. Developing a society that doesn't depend on a currency will take a lot of work to be convincing. Bartering resources works well, in theory. Say you have lots of cheese. The lady next door makes socks and you want a pair, but she doesn't want cheese. She wants corn. Unless you can find someone to accept your cheese in return for corn, you're not getting socks anytime soon. In Star Trek: TNG a cashless society works well because they have solved all the energy and hunger problems so everyone is free to focus on the greater good of mankind, or an individual. But even then, I seriously doubt the Federation is completely cashless. They still have meetings and trade agreements with other cultures and organizations that do use one form of currency or another. There has to be some form of bartering going on.
