Feeling curious, I recently googled “money is just a construct” to see what type of dialogue I would find around that statement.
One interesting result was from the Q&A website Quora and the community’s response to a user question: “Money is above all a social construct. Can we live in a society where it doesn’t exist anymore in the future?”
What I found most intriguing was a May 2016 response by sociologist Koyel Ranu and her discussion of “the idea of exchange, and the idea of reciprocity” where she referenced a Scientific American article that I was not aware of until I read her entry.
That article describes the concept of “behavioral economics” which views the way humans conduct business as an evolved heritage of our species and challenges classical economic theory.
Source: “How Animals Do Business” (Scientific American, 4/2005) by F.B.M. de Waal
Interestingly, Ms Ranu also stated in her Quora response that: “Social change doesn’t come in big upheavals, unless we’re talking a revolution or a coup d’état, and even then, they are precipitated by a range of social causes. Social change comes in increments, and very small increments in that.”
In case you haven’t noticed, the COVID-19 pandemic has created a period of big upheaval and that makes Humanity ripe for social change on a global scale.
However, going against our “animal nature” and giving up on reciprocity mechanisms that drive financial transactions will require incremental changes, but we must accept that the old way of transacting cannot continue. The idea that “I will give you this if you give me that” is so ingrained in our primal brains that we need to evolve beyond it and choose to say that “I will give you this because you need it and I don’t expect anything in return.”
That must be the new social construct.
