My good friend and co-author Leif Wenar, in his first tweet, asked this question: “Friends, a utopia query. Keep human nature fixed. Imagine the best possible world. Does money exist?” I could not sleep last night so I decided to give it a thought.…Presently scarce resources are allocated by markets based on money. It's a distribution issue. Is a superior distributional system possible? Marx, of course, thought so.
Global Inequality
99 percent Utopia and money
Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
3 comments:
Yes, money would exist in some form - credits in some kind of account. People are all different. They are always going to want to consume a lot of different kinds goods and services, and they are going to want to reserve the power to make purchases at a time that is convenient for them. Whether the credits are distributed to them by private businesses or government, they are going to need them.
"Presently scarce resources"
Whaaaaaaattt???????
Tom you are drinking the cool aide they are dispensing....
Certain things can become "scarce" if you dont maintain buffer stocks and there are short term disruptions in the just in time supply system but this is an operational screw up not a scarcity...
We probably havent built a new dam in 50 years and now everybody is going all around saying "were out of water!!!!"
Summing up what Branko writes. In a Utopia there would be zero scarce resources. Would there still be a need for money? If everything were a free good?
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