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Moneyless Society: The Next Economic Evolution
CAPITALISM HAS FAILED. IT’S TIME FOR RADICAL ACTION.
The evidence is all around us: Humans are squandering natural resources and destroying the environment. There is no real debate about climate change. And with an ever-widening wealth gap, inequality is destabilizing many regions and worsening famine, disease, and civil unrest.
We must change, fast—and yet we hesitate.
“Moneyless Society: The Next Economic Evolution” explores how capitalism throttles Earth’s capacity to sustain life and undermines our deep longing to live in peace and prosperity. Fortunately, it also provides a blueprint for innovative thinking and new structures to replace our outmoded monetary system. In short, “Moneyless Society” illuminates just how much our lives and those of future generations could improve with a new kind of freedom: freedom from money.
We are at a crossroads: we can choose abundance, community, and prosperity, or we can continue down the path toward collapse. The choice is ours.
The evidence is all around us: Humans are squandering natural resources and destroying the environment. There is no real debate about climate change. And with an ever-widening wealth gap, inequality is destabilizing many regions and worsening famine, disease, and civil unrest.
We must change, fast—and yet we hesitate.
“Moneyless Society: The Next Economic Evolution” explores how capitalism throttles Earth’s capacity to sustain life and undermines our deep longing to live in peace and prosperity. Fortunately, it also provides a blueprint for innovative thinking and new structures to replace our outmoded monetary system. In short, “Moneyless Society” illuminates just how much our lives and those of future generations could improve with a new kind of freedom: freedom from money.
We are at a crossroads: we can choose abundance, community, and prosperity, or we can continue down the path toward collapse. The choice is ours.
239 pages, Hardcover
Published November 7, 2022
24 people are currently reading
167 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
December 2, 2022
This book is a refreshing, modern and concise critique of capitalism that leaves behind the typical left vs right dogma and has a good focus on the environment and sustainability. The author gives a pretty detailed description of how a moneyless society might work for a book that is just over 200 pages, while also leaving it open ended enough knowing the technology being developed today with algorithms, artificial intelligence, in agriculture, automation, self driving vehicles, etc. will all help make a society of equal access possible!
August 21, 2023
Good ideas. Now... how quickly could this happen?
January 9, 2024
A great book which shines a light in the right direction. That main thesis is this: capitalism (specifically the profit motive which structures everyone’s life within this competitive system) is the central cause of all major problems we’re now facing as a world, and the way out is a moneyless society. Well done to the author; in clear prose and with convincing arguments, he lays out the problem and offers a solution which seems actionable and realistic. An eminently “shareable” book!
BRIEF(ER) HISTORY OF CAPITALISM
Labour (our work) creates value; so labour is the foundation of all our economic understanding. As soon as they began to make things, our ancestors traded; they then started to farm, which enabled the accumulation of surplus, which necessitated storehouses, wherein farmers deposited their surpluses and received clay tablets (IOUs), redeemable for grain in the future. Profit is the financial version of agricultural surplus, and being able to quantify profit creates an inordinate focus on profit, especially as we come to view money not as a means to valuable ends, but as an end in itself. Society thus comes to value profit for itself.
The incentive for profit within the monetary system ensures the creation of unnecessary, human-imposed limits on goods, services, and information. Why should I share with you if I can hoard information, say, and derive a greater profit? Capitalism emerged roughly 200 years ago (in its current form) when lords and nobles, realizing the gains merchants and traders were making in the transatlantic trades, enclosed their land, kicking peasants off and commodified their wool. With no means of subsistence, the peasants had no choice but to sell their labour; and this is the position that most of us are in today. Without access to land or the tools of production, unless we sell our labour, we starve. Factories sprung up, peasants moved to the cities which swelled, and the modern dichotomy of workers and owners was born.
Owners took advantage of the fact that they had the upper hand; they exploited the workers for increased profit. Private property emerged, which was property owned exclusively by the owners, who owned the profits derived from the labour of the workers and owners were increasingly pitted against one another for the largest profit. Growth became the sine qua non of all companies and competition was enshrined as a holy principle; it was truly a dog eat dog world.
And this creates many problems. Because companies must grow at all costs, they must find any way whatsoever of doing this, including cheating, lying, obfuscating, etc; this is baked into the economic system. Whoever succeeds is simply the one who best managed to hide his cheating. (This is never said in the book; I’m saying it.) Value is reduced to sale price, ignoring everything else, including that which cannot be quantified at all. As long as growth is achieved, nothing else matters. Even if the world ends, it doesn’t matter as long as the bottom-line increases. The world is on fire? Doesn’t matter as long as I get my bonus. People are starving and killing themselves? Who cares; as long as share price increases.
EXHIBIT A: CAPITALISM IS KILLING US SLOWLY
The author then cycles through a few ways that capitalism is leading to our slow demise, including skyrocketing inequality, extreme poverty, systemic racism, resource overshoot, through a systems lens. “Capitalism incentivizes exploitation of resources. (…) All these consequences—both human and environmental—are caused by, incentivized by, or reinforced by our market system and the pursuit of profit.”
THE SOLUTION
“What if things like transportation, food, energy; a home and community; opportunities to contribute, learn, grow, and experience our potential; security and comfort… what if all those things could be available without money? The answer: They can be - if we choose to make them so. If we can create the experiences that money currently provides, minus the paywalls, the need and desire for money would be eliminated and money would become obsolete.”
Money is something that is self-perpetuating; I need money because you need money because he needs money because she needs money, etc. But we can bypass the need for money by directly supplying these things to people that need them, not through competition but through cooperation. It’s like that chair game where you put 4 chairs in a square and make people lie on their back, supported by the next person, supported by the next person, etc. If you pull the chairs out from under them, they’ll sustain themselves, without the need for the chairs anymore. The chairs (money) were necessary to get the thing up and running; but now we don’t need them anymore. Same dealio. Once you set up these systems without money as an intermediary, money becomes obsolete as a side-effect of successful implementation.
PRINCIPLES for a MONEYLESS SOCIETY
- Highest good of all: act in the manner in the best interest of all groups, in the long-term. (See Henry Hazlitt’s summary of economics too!)
- Cooperative Economy: individuals and groups work together to share progress, resources, and information, to maximize effort and efficiency.
- Universal Basic Goods and Services (UBGS): everyone in a community receives everything they need to operate, survive, and thrive within that society.
- Social Justice: the fair treatment of everyone, including those who have been marginalized or discriminated against in the past.
- Ecological Balance: the art of consuming less while investing in our environment more; focusing on degrowth, circular economies, and regenerative agriculture.
- Abundance through Science and Technology: conflicting interests from the profit motive keep many of the most effective application of technical progress at bay.
- Liberty and Freedom: unrestricted access and capability to do what one pleases, as long as one’s actions do not bring harm to another.
- Antifragility: the act of something becoming stronger in the face of adversity; anti fragile societies are fluid, dynamic, evolving, understanding, adjusting, decision-making, and collaborating.
THE TRANSITION
But how do we actually get to these amazing societies that aren’t predicated on endless growth and profit. There seem to be 5 broad steps the author identifies:
- Increasing Awareness
- Planning, formation, organization, and mobilization
- Physical infrastructure and systems building
- Expansion, large-scale adoption and implementation
- Full-scale integration and winding down of capitalism
OBJECTIONS
Humans need monetary incentives: “People will still be incentivized to work through the mechanism of positive reinforcement. However, instead of positive reinforcement in the form of money, people will receive it directly, in the form of concrete benefits to the community, praise and gratitude, relationships, and security. (…) Without being paid, why would anyone perform “yucky” jobs like garbage collector and portable toilet cleaner? Fair question. First, the long-term goal is to automate unpleasant, mundane, repetitive jobs to the extent possible; this automation is key to a functional, large-scale moneyless society. But automation is not something that we can implement overnight, so there will be an interim period where these jobs still need to be performed. During the transitional period, people will still be paid to work. Over time, as automation and the UBGS system are implemented, both pay and workloads will be reduced.”
Humans are too lazy: “There may be some people who are content “slacking,” but most people will likely get bored and aspire to achieve something more.” To expand on this, you have a negative view of human nature if you believe this to be the case, but you’re looking at people through the skewed perspective of this particular society which, remember, incentivizes selfishness.
There isn’t enough to go round: “There is enough. There is enough housing to allow for safety and protection to all. There is enough food to feed and nourish everyone. There is enough wealth to grant comfort and dignity to every human being. We have chosen not to distribute our resources in a way that allows everyone a decent standard of living.”
Capitalism works better than this would: “The nature of the capitalist system itself promotes scarcity, exploitation, and division. The competitive, transaction-based system requires endless activity and disincentivizes the free and open sharing of goods and resources. The reality, though, is that capitalism dooms both sides - dooms everyone - due to the structural constraints of the system itself. The only real, lasting solution is to completely reimagine, redesign, and overhaul the system from top to bottom.”
Free markets are the solution: Truly free markets don’t exist,” as Ha-Joon Chang also pointed out. There are only regulations that benefit those at the top. “Additionally, for a free market to be efficient, we need information symmetry,” and “because of the profit incentive, business owners are incentivized to create barriers to transparency that hide information. (…) You can’t have a system that encourages people to be selfish and expect to get generosity as a result. You can’t design a system to run on competition and expect it to generate cooperation.”
Cryptocurrencies are the solution: “The real problem with cryptocurrencies is that the market system and profit incentive still exist.”
We need the price mechanism: “The argument is that the absence of the price mechanism (or the presence of some central authority that attempts to control resources) would create distortions in the ability to allocate resources, and create problems when determining what to produce, how much, and where to send items.” And the answer? “We are technologically capable of using data gained directly from consumers to determine the details of demand and needed production.”
BRIEF(ER) HISTORY OF CAPITALISM
Labour (our work) creates value; so labour is the foundation of all our economic understanding. As soon as they began to make things, our ancestors traded; they then started to farm, which enabled the accumulation of surplus, which necessitated storehouses, wherein farmers deposited their surpluses and received clay tablets (IOUs), redeemable for grain in the future. Profit is the financial version of agricultural surplus, and being able to quantify profit creates an inordinate focus on profit, especially as we come to view money not as a means to valuable ends, but as an end in itself. Society thus comes to value profit for itself.
The incentive for profit within the monetary system ensures the creation of unnecessary, human-imposed limits on goods, services, and information. Why should I share with you if I can hoard information, say, and derive a greater profit? Capitalism emerged roughly 200 years ago (in its current form) when lords and nobles, realizing the gains merchants and traders were making in the transatlantic trades, enclosed their land, kicking peasants off and commodified their wool. With no means of subsistence, the peasants had no choice but to sell their labour; and this is the position that most of us are in today. Without access to land or the tools of production, unless we sell our labour, we starve. Factories sprung up, peasants moved to the cities which swelled, and the modern dichotomy of workers and owners was born.
Owners took advantage of the fact that they had the upper hand; they exploited the workers for increased profit. Private property emerged, which was property owned exclusively by the owners, who owned the profits derived from the labour of the workers and owners were increasingly pitted against one another for the largest profit. Growth became the sine qua non of all companies and competition was enshrined as a holy principle; it was truly a dog eat dog world.
And this creates many problems. Because companies must grow at all costs, they must find any way whatsoever of doing this, including cheating, lying, obfuscating, etc; this is baked into the economic system. Whoever succeeds is simply the one who best managed to hide his cheating. (This is never said in the book; I’m saying it.) Value is reduced to sale price, ignoring everything else, including that which cannot be quantified at all. As long as growth is achieved, nothing else matters. Even if the world ends, it doesn’t matter as long as the bottom-line increases. The world is on fire? Doesn’t matter as long as I get my bonus. People are starving and killing themselves? Who cares; as long as share price increases.
EXHIBIT A: CAPITALISM IS KILLING US SLOWLY
The author then cycles through a few ways that capitalism is leading to our slow demise, including skyrocketing inequality, extreme poverty, systemic racism, resource overshoot, through a systems lens. “Capitalism incentivizes exploitation of resources. (…) All these consequences—both human and environmental—are caused by, incentivized by, or reinforced by our market system and the pursuit of profit.”
THE SOLUTION
“What if things like transportation, food, energy; a home and community; opportunities to contribute, learn, grow, and experience our potential; security and comfort… what if all those things could be available without money? The answer: They can be - if we choose to make them so. If we can create the experiences that money currently provides, minus the paywalls, the need and desire for money would be eliminated and money would become obsolete.”
Money is something that is self-perpetuating; I need money because you need money because he needs money because she needs money, etc. But we can bypass the need for money by directly supplying these things to people that need them, not through competition but through cooperation. It’s like that chair game where you put 4 chairs in a square and make people lie on their back, supported by the next person, supported by the next person, etc. If you pull the chairs out from under them, they’ll sustain themselves, without the need for the chairs anymore. The chairs (money) were necessary to get the thing up and running; but now we don’t need them anymore. Same dealio. Once you set up these systems without money as an intermediary, money becomes obsolete as a side-effect of successful implementation.
PRINCIPLES for a MONEYLESS SOCIETY
- Highest good of all: act in the manner in the best interest of all groups, in the long-term. (See Henry Hazlitt’s summary of economics too!)
- Cooperative Economy: individuals and groups work together to share progress, resources, and information, to maximize effort and efficiency.
- Universal Basic Goods and Services (UBGS): everyone in a community receives everything they need to operate, survive, and thrive within that society.
- Social Justice: the fair treatment of everyone, including those who have been marginalized or discriminated against in the past.
- Ecological Balance: the art of consuming less while investing in our environment more; focusing on degrowth, circular economies, and regenerative agriculture.
- Abundance through Science and Technology: conflicting interests from the profit motive keep many of the most effective application of technical progress at bay.
- Liberty and Freedom: unrestricted access and capability to do what one pleases, as long as one’s actions do not bring harm to another.
- Antifragility: the act of something becoming stronger in the face of adversity; anti fragile societies are fluid, dynamic, evolving, understanding, adjusting, decision-making, and collaborating.
THE TRANSITION
But how do we actually get to these amazing societies that aren’t predicated on endless growth and profit. There seem to be 5 broad steps the author identifies:
- Increasing Awareness
- Planning, formation, organization, and mobilization
- Physical infrastructure and systems building
- Expansion, large-scale adoption and implementation
- Full-scale integration and winding down of capitalism
OBJECTIONS
Humans need monetary incentives: “People will still be incentivized to work through the mechanism of positive reinforcement. However, instead of positive reinforcement in the form of money, people will receive it directly, in the form of concrete benefits to the community, praise and gratitude, relationships, and security. (…) Without being paid, why would anyone perform “yucky” jobs like garbage collector and portable toilet cleaner? Fair question. First, the long-term goal is to automate unpleasant, mundane, repetitive jobs to the extent possible; this automation is key to a functional, large-scale moneyless society. But automation is not something that we can implement overnight, so there will be an interim period where these jobs still need to be performed. During the transitional period, people will still be paid to work. Over time, as automation and the UBGS system are implemented, both pay and workloads will be reduced.”
Humans are too lazy: “There may be some people who are content “slacking,” but most people will likely get bored and aspire to achieve something more.” To expand on this, you have a negative view of human nature if you believe this to be the case, but you’re looking at people through the skewed perspective of this particular society which, remember, incentivizes selfishness.
There isn’t enough to go round: “There is enough. There is enough housing to allow for safety and protection to all. There is enough food to feed and nourish everyone. There is enough wealth to grant comfort and dignity to every human being. We have chosen not to distribute our resources in a way that allows everyone a decent standard of living.”
Capitalism works better than this would: “The nature of the capitalist system itself promotes scarcity, exploitation, and division. The competitive, transaction-based system requires endless activity and disincentivizes the free and open sharing of goods and resources. The reality, though, is that capitalism dooms both sides - dooms everyone - due to the structural constraints of the system itself. The only real, lasting solution is to completely reimagine, redesign, and overhaul the system from top to bottom.”
Free markets are the solution: Truly free markets don’t exist,” as Ha-Joon Chang also pointed out. There are only regulations that benefit those at the top. “Additionally, for a free market to be efficient, we need information symmetry,” and “because of the profit incentive, business owners are incentivized to create barriers to transparency that hide information. (…) You can’t have a system that encourages people to be selfish and expect to get generosity as a result. You can’t design a system to run on competition and expect it to generate cooperation.”
Cryptocurrencies are the solution: “The real problem with cryptocurrencies is that the market system and profit incentive still exist.”
We need the price mechanism: “The argument is that the absence of the price mechanism (or the presence of some central authority that attempts to control resources) would create distortions in the ability to allocate resources, and create problems when determining what to produce, how much, and where to send items.” And the answer? “We are technologically capable of using data gained directly from consumers to determine the details of demand and needed production.”
did-not-finish
January 15, 2025Not the vibe right now.. night come back to if later (DNF @ 17% audio)
December 30, 2023
At first, an Utopia. Further reading is an achievable way to have a society with more empathy, respect, and peace.
It's up to us to trigger the transition period and hit moneyless society.
It's up to us to trigger the transition period and hit moneyless society.
June 15, 2025
pro-topia or not, the future sounds bright. good luck, humanity!
The biggest challenge is the one I explore in my book: Charlotte’s Game: The secret strategies of modern dating, why we play them, and how to disarm the battle of the sexes
A moneyless society sounds utopian—straight out of Star Trek. But pessimistically, what continues to fuel human ambition (and often, dysfunction) is the insatiable nature of the “baddie” and the billionaire. Our pursuit of status, power, and validation is tangled with deeper evolutionary drives.
Hypergamy—the instinct to date up—and the constant chase for superlatives (the hottest, richest, most powerful) keep the arms race alive. If we don’t address the sexual marketplace and how it shapes modern behavior, we’ll struggle to make progress on inequality or consumerism. After all, men still feel pressure to compete, succeed, and signal value to meet the often invisible standards of women, who (biologically or socially) gatekeep access to sex.
This isn’t a critique of women—it’s a systems-level look at how dating economics mirrors and magnifies global ones. Charlotte’s Game dives deeper into these tensions, and offers a framework for stepping outside the game entirely.
The biggest challenge is the one I explore in my book: Charlotte’s Game: The secret strategies of modern dating, why we play them, and how to disarm the battle of the sexes
A moneyless society sounds utopian—straight out of Star Trek. But pessimistically, what continues to fuel human ambition (and often, dysfunction) is the insatiable nature of the “baddie” and the billionaire. Our pursuit of status, power, and validation is tangled with deeper evolutionary drives.
Hypergamy—the instinct to date up—and the constant chase for superlatives (the hottest, richest, most powerful) keep the arms race alive. If we don’t address the sexual marketplace and how it shapes modern behavior, we’ll struggle to make progress on inequality or consumerism. After all, men still feel pressure to compete, succeed, and signal value to meet the often invisible standards of women, who (biologically or socially) gatekeep access to sex.
This isn’t a critique of women—it’s a systems-level look at how dating economics mirrors and magnifies global ones. Charlotte’s Game dives deeper into these tensions, and offers a framework for stepping outside the game entirely.
Read
December 29, 2024Moneyless Society" is an eye-opening exploration of alternative economic systems and the possibilities of a world without traditional money. The ideas in this book are incredibly thought-provoking, especially for those who question the sustainability of our current financial structures.
If you're diving into similar research or working on an academic project related to economic theories or societal models, I highly recommend checking out https://academized.com/pay-for-thesis. It's a great resource for anyone who needs assistance with thesis writing or developing in-depth academic papers on complex topics like this. It could be particularly useful for structuring and presenting ideas inspired by this book.
What did you think of the author's proposed solutions? Do they feel feasible to you?
If you're diving into similar research or working on an academic project related to economic theories or societal models, I highly recommend checking out https://academized.com/pay-for-thesis. It's a great resource for anyone who needs assistance with thesis writing or developing in-depth academic papers on complex topics like this. It could be particularly useful for structuring and presenting ideas inspired by this book.
What did you think of the author's proposed solutions? Do they feel feasible to you?
December 23, 2024
good explanations, thorough research and solutions. the holistic way in which the concept of a moneyless society is tackled is admirable. as someone who agrees with the concept in principle already, there were points i didn’t necessarily agree with; however, for people who are more rooted in capitalism as an end all be all, this book will undeniably make you think about the possibilities of a different way of life and is written in such a way that even the most staunch capitalists will have to nuance their views.
April 9, 2025
You will own nothing and you will be happy - the communist version. No amount of disclaimers will convince me this is not communism. Laughable level of understanding of economic concepts and the good old capitalism is doomed by its own contradictions argument. The only virtue is the insistence on not enforcing this new utopia on people with threats of violence which makes this a benign daydreaming exercise.
I was expecting more than the usual "oh, imagine, everyone will just work for the good of society and everything will be free".
I was expecting more than the usual "oh, imagine, everyone will just work for the good of society and everything will be free".
March 5, 2025
It's not an easy read but has some interesting concepts. It would have been nice if a certain someone in the Whitehouse bought into the philosophy but clearly, a Protopian World would never be in his vocabulary.
December 29, 2024
I like this book!
Thanks.
Thanks.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews