entirelyuseless comments on Estimate the Cost of Immortality - Less Wrong

-4 Post author: Algernoq 13 December 2015 11:38AM

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Comment author: Xyrik 14 December 2015 09:25:00AM -1 points [-]

Would someone be able to enlighten me on what the cons of a hypothetical situation in which everyone on the planet decides to temporarily get rid of the concept of money or currency, and pool our collective resources and ideas without worrying about who owes who? I mean on paper it sounds great, and obviously this is extremely hypothetical as it's virtually impossible to get all human life on Earth to actually do that, but are there hidden cons here that I'm not really seeing?

I've not really gone into too much thought on this, it was mostly a fleeting thought, and I was curious what others thought.

Comment author: entirelyuseless 16 December 2015 02:41:17PM 1 point [-]

I was thinking about this a bit more. In my first answer, I was talking about what would actually happen if you got rid of money. But the question implies that people are suddenly altruistic ("pool our collective resources"). The problem with this is how you decide who should do what. And it might turn out that the situation posited ("without worrying about who owes whom?") is impossible in principle. Even to keep things going as they are now, someone needs to decide what needs to be done and by whom. Someone needs to decide who should give you the things you need to survive, and how much to give you. All of that implies that someone is saying "A should give X to B" and this is just a way of worrying about who owes whom what.