The villager parable is too egalitarian. That's not really how it worked.
For most of history, peasants were sustenance farmers, meaning they grew their own food and if the harvest was bad, they could starve. For them, there was no such thing as insurance and they really needed ways to reduce risk. For example, they'd feast their neighbors so that when times were hard, the neighbors would hopefully help them out in turn. Investing in close-knit relationships isn't like barter - it's more like informal credit. Kinship networks still work something like this today.
And this meant they didn't really need money. Social obligations were everything.
But how do people who aren't peasants themselves get food? By extracting rents and taxes, in return for protection and certain services, perhaps plowing fields. Local "big men" might take payment in kind, but for a more organized government, they'd collect taxes using money, which gave the peasants incentives to grow and sell food for money.
So villages would monetize or demonetize depending on the state of nearby governments. A monetized society allows people who aren't farmers to buy food. It allows cities to exist. Therefore, civilization was built on military force, taxes, and rent extracted from peasants, who were the basis of a mostly agricultural economy.
Be glad our civilization isn't built on sustenance farming anymore.
> Be glad our civilization isn't built on sustenance farming anymore.
Oh sure, but that doesn't mean we have to accept as normal governments where leeches enriching themselves and their fat friends manage to create public debt of more than 100% of the GDP and make the money printer go brrrrrr everytime there is problem (which is another gigantic problem in itself).
A country like France is officially 57% of the GDP in public spending for terribly bad services in return. Poor education, hospitals in terribly bad shapes, no doctors in villages, insane taxation (France has 400 different taxes, more than six times the number of taxes Germany has, for example) and an insane number of useless public servants working on collecting those unnecessary taxes.
It's too easy of a mental shortcut to say: "We don't live in caves anymore, with the men hunting and the women feeding the kids, so everything we did was obviously perfect".
BTW we had universities, roads, ships, etc. at a time where the effective tax rate on farmers was something like 2% yearly.
And Greece and Rome were advanced civilizations.
"By extracting rents and taxes" makes a lot of heavy lifting: there's quite a difference between something like a reasonable yearly tax rate on income/production and a planned economy.
skybrian · · focus · HN ↗
For most of history, peasants were sustenance farmers, meaning they grew their own food and if the harvest was bad, they could starve. For them, there was no such thing as insurance and they really needed ways to reduce risk. For example, they'd feast their neighbors so that when times were hard, the neighbors would hopefully help them out in turn. Investing in close-knit relationships isn't like barter - it's more like informal credit. Kinship networks still work something like this today.
And this meant they didn't really need money. Social obligations were everything.
But how do people who aren't peasants themselves get food? By extracting rents and taxes, in return for protection and certain services, perhaps plowing fields. Local "big men" might take payment in kind, but for a more organized government, they'd collect taxes using money, which gave the peasants incentives to grow and sell food for money.
So villages would monetize or demonetize depending on the state of nearby governments. A monetized society allows people who aren't farmers to buy food. It allows cities to exist. Therefore, civilization was built on military force, taxes, and rent extracted from peasants, who were the basis of a mostly agricultural economy.
Be glad our civilization isn't built on sustenance farming anymore.
TacticalCoder · · focus · HN ↗
Oh sure, but that doesn't mean we have to accept as normal governments where leeches enriching themselves and their fat friends manage to create public debt of more than 100% of the GDP and make the money printer go brrrrrr everytime there is problem (which is another gigantic problem in itself).
A country like France is officially 57% of the GDP in public spending for terribly bad services in return. Poor education, hospitals in terribly bad shapes, no doctors in villages, insane taxation (France has 400 different taxes, more than six times the number of taxes Germany has, for example) and an insane number of useless public servants working on collecting those unnecessary taxes.
It's too easy of a mental shortcut to say: "We don't live in caves anymore, with the men hunting and the women feeding the kids, so everything we did was obviously perfect".
BTW we had universities, roads, ships, etc. at a time where the effective tax rate on farmers was something like 2% yearly.
And Greece and Rome were advanced civilizations.
"By extracting rents and taxes" makes a lot of heavy lifting: there's quite a difference between something like a reasonable yearly tax rate on income/production and a planned economy.