Aboriginal people can live life without money because Providence does not put a price tag on anything. They might have to walk some distance to fetch water daily for their living, whereas we have the convenience of piped water that we have to pay for. For energy, they have to go and collect wood, while all we do is to turn on a switch. Aboriginal people have to be very careful with their food so they do not waste it since it takes quite a bit effort to collect, hunt or grow it before processing it to something edible but for us in villages, cities and towns food is all around us even out of season or foreign foods. All we need is money to buy it. From these simple comparisons one can surmise that money is a conveyor of convenience, that it is a fruit of progress in the evolution of human civilization. If this is the case we should expect that the quality of civilized city life be much better than living as aboriginal people. Yet this may not be necessarily true. I believe the concept that time-is-money skews the quality of living in communities. It has created a pursuit for wealth that has turned money from a convenient form of barter to something very different.
Aboriginal folk and we national people live in two different paradigms. They live in a paradigm where there is no need for money and we, where money is a living and life essential. The effect that money has on time in one paradigm and the lack of it in the other has created two modes of living. The former has created the 'rat-race' and the other oblivious living. Pondering these two paradigms makes me wonder if the development of money is actually progress or otherwise.
Two striking differences appear when aboriginal communites are compared with cities. The most obvious is their size. Aboriginal communities are naturally smaller than cities. They are more akin to villages but may be even smaller than that category. Their constraints in population is simply ecology. So much land can only provide so much resources for so many people. If their community grows to a certain number, then a natural split in the community occurs and groups diverge for equitable distribution of resources. Whereas modern cities emerge by efficient provision of resources to its community mainly through the means of commerce. Thus the more efficient a city, the bigger its community. It is the advent of money that makes city living possible, because people can get paid for their effort and that wealth allows one to procure whatever ones needs or wants maybe. In an aboriginal society money can be a choice or even be irrelevant because it does not need to be used to procure basic needs which is free for all less effort. Aboriginal communities are based on cooperation of the entire population working as a team to collect all the necessary resources for everyone. This brings to mind the second striking difference between these two kinds of community. This difference is the dearth or complete lack of stratification in the aboriginal communities compared to the communities in the cities.
Stratification in a community are its hierarchies or classes. The 'rat-race' of modern living driven by time-is-money creates classes and caste, rich and poor and the phenomenon of poverty. How does time-is-money create all these conditions? To understand that let us understand simplistically how an aboriginal society works. Aboriginal societies are based on cooperative living. All able members of the society work together to gather resources. Men and women have their distinctive chores and all of them work together. This kind of living for them is not a choice but an imperative. By working together and sharing their effort everybody benefits from efficient gathering of resources. Whether it is defending the community or collecting water, all chores are considered equally important for the community. In these kinds of communities the members have no need to want more than another member or even to stand out differently. Even the leaders of these societies fulfill a role out of necessity instead of status and their lifestyle is the same as all other members of the society. Thus apart from age and gender there are generally no other significant stratification in aboriginal societies. Everybody is cared for by others, nobody is richer or poorer than anyone and poverty is a consequence of natural disasters, not the lack of personal wealth.
Modern cities however are a wealth of class and diversity. Glorious opulence and abject poverty can exist in the same community. Poverty in cities have nothing to do with the lack of resources, instead it is the lack of wealth to purchase resources. To me this situation is possible because wealth is controlled by money and the distribution of money is based on the worth of an individual's time. Somehow every individual's time is valued differently without taking into account the value of the work that they do (any economist out there care to explain this phenomenon?). For instance nobody will deny the important work that janitors do. Their work is as crucial to the functioning of a city as that of the policemen, harbour masters or the mayor, yet the janitor is paid the least. In an aboriginal society the janitors work will be considered the same worth as everybody else's, but in a capitalistic society they may earn so little that they may not be able to afford the most basic standard of living. Capitalistic societies, which just about all cities in the world subscribe to, condones this disparity in wealth distribution.
Capitalism evaluates worth of time based mainly on intellectual, academic, social or even political acumen. While capitalism gives freedom for any member of a community to accumulate as much wealth (through many forms of commerce) as they can muster based on their effort and ingenuity (this is the rat-race) it does not condemn exploitation as a means of generating wealth. If exploitation is present, which it usually is in capitalism, the gap between have and have-nots will be wide enough for class consciousness to perisit. Thus the birth of a disharmonious city where money is controlled by the elite and powerful and time is exploited from the lower and middle class of the city.
In the previous Pondering article on Time is Money, I reviewed some websites that gave ways of calculating the worth of one's time. Do you think you are getting paid enough or does your business earn you enough for your basic livelihood? I ask this because inflation of living expenses is a global happening that may be entering into the status of a crisis. It amazes me that there is no real value in the marketplace for human effort. While prices of commodities can float in stock markets, human effort has no place in the trading floor. This means that even if the price of fuel per gallon goes up and your transportation cost to work increases, there are no avenues for automatic increase in salary to offset this increase in living expenses. While all businesses and institutions depend on the people running them to get to work on time, there is no market force to provide monetary value to this human effort. Worse still most companies will gladly pay all their directors and upper level employees transportation expenses, but lower staff can be denied such benefits. Fuel prices is just one example, the cost of all other important commodities such as food, water and housing are also tied to the fluctuations on the market floor.
Despite its shortcomings, capitalism is obviously here to stay. Given a choice I think most of us still prefer living in our cities, towns and suburbs instead of subsistence living in nature. However I don't think we should put up with capitalistic exploitation of human effort. In my non-economist simplistic view, I see that the problem of disparity in capitalistic societies arises in the fact that inflation of essential commodities bears no effect on the value of human effort. If a relationship is forged between the two and inflation is factored directly into human the value of effort, then the worth of one's time will reflect the actual value of one's effort and not a value that favours capitalistic exploitation.
I believe we need some kind of universal financial mechanism to be set in place for minimum wage per hour of human effort to float with inflation of necessary livelihood commodities. If such an mechanism is in place I believe inflation of essential commodities will naturally ease and poverty can be averted for those willing to work for an honest days salary. Until then the upper echelon of capitalists will always find ways of exploiting the middle and lower income groups by arbitrarily controlling their hourly wage. However, we do have a choice. Either force for more equitable change in wealth distribution or simply cast it all away and live in the bosom of pristine nature instead of man-made-nature.
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