Money is merely a means to decouple the promise of payback from the promiser.
Without money, you have to trust Joe to help you can tomatoes next fall since you helped him plow his field. With money, Joe can pay you to plow his field, and you can pay Sally to help you can tomatoes (because Joe moved to another town).
Sure, but the emergent effects of money on society--especially with computerized banking--are quite a bit more significant than the fundamental innovation. Computers are merely for shuffling 1s and 0s around.
Well yeah. My comment was originally much longer, pointing out some of the things that money enabled.
But I was responding to his view that 'money is an illusion'. I was trying to point out that it's not an 'illusion' (whatever that means), and we didn't just make it up for fun or so some people could be rich and others poor. It serves a fundamentally valuable purpose.
It very well could be the knowledge he has gained while living without money that will go toward educating masses of people out of work in our increasingly struggling economy moving forward.
More people are losing jobs, homes, credit. Debt is increasing. How many people will know how to correctly identify edible cacti?
I was thinking of my grandmother who survived the great depression. She has so much knowledge up there in her brain. How to can tomatoes for the winter. How to store potatoes in holes to keep them fresh during the cold months. How to stuff the gaps in the logs of a cabin with mud to stay warm.
Countness numbers of the x-generation, y-generation, and even the baby boomers are going to die, simply because they do not know how to survive without money and a job and a grocery store.
I feel lucky. I can go out into the woods and find an animal and kill it and skin it and cook it and eat it. Many of my friends can't even eat meat with bones in it because it reminds them it was alive.
"I can go out into the woods and find an animal and kill it and skin it and cook it and eat it."
What animals?
If society collapses to that point, deer will be hunted to extinction in a matter of months, if not weeks, with smaller critters probably not getting hunted to extinction after that, but certainly to the point you won't find them readily anymore. There's still too many people with the skill to do that for you to survive.
Thinking that you can Davy-Crockett your way out of a societal collapse is underestimating the number of people who can still hunt, or overestimating the amount of resources actually available. The brutality of such an outcome would be well beyond what I've seen any survivalist even faintly dream of, because if they looked at the truth (such as, "city folk are not a homogeneous mass of morons who would instantaneously starve to death, there'd still be enough to move out and cause trouble") they'd realize that it isn't a matter of "ensuring survival" so much as "incrementally increasing my odds of survival from the low single-digit percentages to the high single-digit percentages", which is way less fun to fantasize about.
What this guy does is not scalable. wmeredith is exactly right. There aren't a whole lot of lessons to take away, except perhaps that we need less than we think we do, but that's hardly news anyhow.
You know, when I'm trying to get code to be scalable, making it need less (less memory, less CPU time, less bandwidth) is a pretty key technique. I think that's true of human life too: if we can get by on less, more of us can survive.
Actually, part of my point is about the firearm aspect of nonsurvivalists. # of armed people >>> # of survivalists. This is part of the reason I've not dedicated a whole lot of time to survivalism.
> "Countness numbers of the x-generation, y-generation, and even the baby boomers are going to die, simply because they do not know how to survive without money and a job and a grocery store."
What? The only reason people would need to be able to hunt their own food in our society is if that society totally and utterly collapsed. And not just a collapse of the government... I'm talking mass-fatality pandemic, nuclear holocaust, or zombies. Something that wipes out any local community that could band together and support itself. If anything that drastic happens, the average gen X'er/Y'er has a lot more to worry about than finding food (which can be scavenged for a while)... like surviving the initial die out, or roaming bands of looters.
Not where I live. 5% of my state suffers from "food insecurity" which means they dont know where their next meal is coming from.
I went on a field trip as a child through a state park and the game ranger warned us all, he said, "Don't poach deer kids. If you are hungry and your parents want to poach deer out of season, tell them to call me and we'll help."
He wasn't saying this as a joke. Many families here do procure a lot of their meat from hunting and fishing. A white tail deer can give you 100 lbs of meat. Thats $300-400. Rabbits, squirrels, quail, dove. Commonly eaten around here and much cheaper than the meat section at Wal-Mart.
Once, at wal-mart, I was checking out and a large family in front of us was buying chicken in ten pound bags and I could smell it -- it was cheap because it was rotten. It smelled foul. Thank goodness the check out lady smelled it too and told them to go grab a different bag. I think perhaps some had leaked out and tainted the outside of the bags.
I actually do think that some people may starve. I asked my grandmother what her thoughts about the current financial situation, remember, she survived the great depression and she said, "I haven't seen anything like this."
It's worse than we realize. Our faith in the system has collapsed. We don't believe in it anymore. That isn't something that can be fixed by flooding society with more imaginary paper money.
"I asked my grandmother what her thoughts about the current financial situation, remember, she survived the great depression and she said, "I haven't seen anything like this.""
I'm curious what, exactly your grandmother is seeing now that is worse than the great depression?
Or quite possibly it's not worse than you think at all. I don't think you can speak for all with your notions of faith and belief. Economics doesn't need you to believe in it or have any faith in it. Its grounded in real and concrete math. Just because greed and poor practitioners of the science caused some instability in the system doesn't mean we need to resort to such outdated notions as faith.
"it was cheap because it was rotten." - that doesn't make sense. I presume when the woman at the check out told them to find another bag it was the same price. Selling rotten food for a discount price will get Wal-mart into court.
"I asked my grandmother what her thoughts about the current financial situation, remember, she survived the great depression and she said, "I haven't seen anything like this.""
My parents and I lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is nothing. This is nothing compared even to the last 5 years of the Soviet Union's existence.
You can go to the store and buy cheese. We had to make our own. Wake me when you can't buy cheese in stores anymore.
"I asked my grandmother what her thoughts about the current financial situation, remember, she survived the great depression and she said, "I haven't seen anything like this.""
I'm sorry, but in what way does the current financial turmoil even approach the Great Depression?
As much as the media likes to say 'worst X since Great Depression', that doesn't mean X is actually anywhere near as bad as the Great Depression. And before you start digging up obscure values of X that actually are statistically worse in some way, point me to the 25% unemployment and millions of middle class folk turning into migrant workers and living in their cars.
It's worse than we realize. Our faith in the system has collapsed.
What do you mean "we"? I think the current housing bubble collapse may end up being something bad like Japan's Lost Decade spread all over the world, but it will be nothing like a return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle anywhere in North America.
Hunting and fishing can also, sometimes, give you better quality of food than you could otherwise afford. I always grew up with smoked salmon on the cheap because we caught it ourselves and own a smoker. Fishing isn't a cheap hobby but it sure gets you a lot of fish out of the deal--often more than we could eat ourselves. And the fish are a lot fresher than anything you could buy.
"I actually do think that some people may starve."
Yes, that's been happening for a long time in the US; as you said, 5% of your state (and many others) suffer from food insecurity. The rates are going up now, I'm sure.
'I asked my grandmother what her thoughts about the current financial situation, remember, she survived the great depression and she said, "I haven't seen anything like this."'
I would like very much to hear what your grandmother has to say in more detail.
What you were agreeing with is the proposition that people might starve, by implicitly claiming that some people in the United States already do starve. Where? Has anyone in the United States, and I mean anyone, actually died of a cause attributable to undernutrition caused by anything other than mental illness in the lifetime of anyone posting here? Who? There are people in the United States who cannot buy food out of their own family budgets, and there are children who are not well fed by their neglectful parents, but I don't think there is any adult who actually lacks enough food to live. Where is the example?
The WHO's figures are that in 2002, in the US, about 7400 people died of "nutritional deficiencies", broken down into 4300 deaths from "protein-energy malnutrition" and 2500 deaths from "iron-deficiency anaemia". That's a total death rate of 2.5 per 100 000 population that year. It's not one of the major causes of death, it's less common than suicide and far less common than diabetes, and it is indeed much more common in many other countries (the rate in Cameroon, for example, is five times higher) but it's a little higher than the estimates for more socialist countries like Canada, Sweden, Japan, and especially Finland. (But not France.)
If that rate were typical over our lifetimes, which seems optimistic (surely the rate was much higher in 1932, and for that matter in 2009) that would add up to a few hundred thousand deaths by starvation over the last 80 years.
These rates don't include deaths in which malnutrition was only a contributing factor. Malnutrition grossly increases the risk of death from infectious diseases, for example.
If you think that out of those hundreds of thousands of deaths, not a single one was caused by anything other than mental illness, you are the one with the mental illness. In fact, I think that just by posting your comment, you have demonstrated that you are really out of touch with the reality of what's happening in what I assume is your own country. You need to adjust your estimates of your own competence downward by a few orders of magnitude in order to have a chance of having an opinion that is worth something. Right now you're living in a dream world.
Figures from the World Health Organization Global Burden of Disease report from 2004:
I was looking for the same WHO statistics you refer to while you were writing your reply. I see we both found the same landing page, but you are referring to figures that thus far neither of us can find on a specific webpage giving figures for the United States. Where did you get them?
Using some of the keywords you kindly provided, I Google and see lower mortality figures for the United States, by more than an order of magnitude, I think. It also appears that most cases of malnourishment in the United States are secondary to disease states. Remembering that my dad was paralyzed and unable to swallow for the last six years of his life (he was fed by a gastric tube, with the help of a relative) brings to mind examples of people who could starve to death in the United States, although they wouldn't be able-bodied people who were not eating because they can't afford to get a meal.
(The numbers I am finding on the above site, which claims to be based on WHO statistics, don't back up the numbers in your reply, which evokes my curiosity about how we can a primary source for the official figures.)
Let's keep following up on this. I'll ignore your invidious personal criticism [smile] in the interest of getting the facts on the issue. What magnitude of problem are we talking about in the United States by the standard WHO definitions, which I accept as an authoritative count of deaths by malnutrition in each country? How many of the United States deaths are secondary to neglectful caregivers of minors (a problem I acknowledged in my first reply) and how many are secondary to adult medical complications (an issue we both forgot in previous replies)? How do the United States figures compare to specific countries elsewhere in the world?
It sure ought to be possible to get the WHO figures directly from the Web, but I'm still searching. The keywords in your reply were helpful for finding other sources.
The NationMaster number is 0.056 per 100 000 population per year. I don't see how to square that with the 50× higher numbers from the WHO spreadsheet.
Thanks for the reminder of adult medical complications.
The US figures seem to be in the normal range for OECD countries, although maybe toward the high end, and they are much lower than the worst countries (typically those in the middle of a war).
Thanks. I learned something about finding WHO statistics with your help.
I think the conclusion here is that people in the United States who die of severe malnourishment do so mostly because they have diseases that impair their eating (something I didn't consider at all in my first reply). So I learned something else today.
In the overall context of this thread, I am not particularly worried that the economic crisis we are now in is going to push my family, or even much poorer families, into starvation. People will still buy and sell and trade and (in North America) mostly eat very adequately.
On the other hand, it's still totally implausible that the answer to "Has anyone in the United States, and I mean anyone, actually died of a cause attributable to undernutrition caused by anything other than mental illness in the lifetime of anyone posting here?" is "No," even if you modify the question to exclude not only starvation due to insanity, but also starvation due to the powerlessness of children and starvation that's secondary to some other illness. The odds ratios would have to be hundreds of thousands to one.
On the contrary, thinking about the figures some more, I'm sure that by far the typical case of a United States person who is reported to the WHO as having starved to death is an old person with other severe medical issues who couldn't digest food, or who ordered his physicians to cease tube-feeding as a way to die "naturally." (I know of cases of each, upon further reflection.) Such deaths are an individual phenomenon, regrettable to be sure, but not a societal phenomenon in a country where eating without paying out of pocket is a charitable service enjoyed by millions each day.
If we were talking about typical cases, we wouldn't be talking about starvation at all, or about the US; we'd be talking about people in India dying of heart attacks and pneumonia. I don't know enough about how cause-of-death coding works in the US to know whether you're right about the cause-in-fact of typical deaths coded as due to nutritional deficiency.
But your claim wasn't that starving to death was atypical. Surely we can all agree that it's atypical. Your claim was that it hadn't happened even once in our lifetimes, except due to mental illness. That's the claim that outraged me.
It's true that there are a lot of charitable services in the US. There are people they don't reach, as I'm sure you know.
My first reply to you consisted of a series of questions, asking for more information (which you kindly provided). No, my claim was that the current economic crisis, however severe it becomes, will not make starvation typical in the United States. It is atypical now, it was atypical during the Great Depression, and it will continue to be atypical everywhere where people can trade freely and participate in economic exchange without government interference. The last mass famine in a country that should have had climate and agricultural advantages enough to prevent famine was in China, during the Great Leap Forward (around the time I was born). That famine had such a high death rate that the missing people of certain ages in certain regions were readily apparent when China conducted a census decades later in the 1980s.
What you were agreeing with is the proposition that people might starve, by implicitly claiming that some people in the United States already do starve. Where? Has anyone in the United States, and I mean anyone, actually died of a cause attributable to undernutrition caused by anything other than mental illness in the lifetime of anyone posting here? Who? There are people in the United States who cannot buy food out of their own family budgets, and there are children who are not well fed by their neglectful parents, but I don't think there is any adult who actually lacks enough food to live. Where is the example?
It's true that that's mostly phrased as questions. I didn't provide answers to the questions of "who" and "where is the example", but I was (and remain) outraged at your false assertion that "there is [not] any adult who actually lacks enough food to live," and the accompanying questions. The total death rate from undernutrition in the US is somewhere around 20 people per day, if the WHO is to be believed.
I don't think there is any place where people can participate in economic exchange without government "interference". Maybe in Somalia and parts of Afghanistan and São Paulo, but I think it's more a question of the form of government than of its absence.
Amartya Sen argues that there has never been a famine in a democracy, regardless of climate or lack of agricultural advantages. For a while I thought perhaps the 2001 economic collapse in Argentina was a counterexample (read some Economist articles from 2001 and 2002) but since I've moved here, I've heard that although starvation was more widespread than normal, it didn't rise nearly to the level of a famine.
So I agree with your reduced claim: people in the US are not going to suffer a famine unless the country descends into open violence or despotism. Deaths from undernutrition are presumably rising, because the current economic collapse is hitting the poorest people hardest, just as it did here in Argentina. Some people, as pj speculated, will starve. But it's not going to be like the Great Leap Forward, or the regularly scheduled famines under the British Raj, or the famine from Ukrainian collectivization. Cancer and heart disease will probably still be the leading causes of death.
Man, that brings back memories...I felt like Bubba back when I was in second grade...venison burgers, venison chile, venison steaks, venison soup, venison tips, etc etc
You'd be surprised. My dad grew up in the Great Depression and during the war, though he implied that this kind of thing was the way of life before that in small towns: even if people had jobs, they still made their own clothing, had gardens, and hunted. People were remarkably self-sufficient. They had cars (one of the few manufactured goods they bought) but they maintained the cars themselves as well as their equipment. They even owned a little livestock.
So yeah, a lot of people are going to be lost if we ever get into an economic state where consumer culture breaks down.
It's distressing how quickly we loose skills. Throw most Gen X/Y-ers back a generation or two and they'd be utterly lost - at least at first. We're also pretty adaptable.
As Buddha said, suffering ends when our craving for material things ends. We don't have to be as extremely hardcore as the dude above, but following this philosophy in a limited pragmatic manner I think can be very liberating.
So, um, he's a homeless guy who lives in a cave. Congratulations, homeless guy, you have somehow managed to convince everybody that instead of a homeless guy, you're a cultural revolutionary. NB: you live in a fucking cave. Forgive me if this doesn't sound like the future of mankind.
"NB: you live in a fucking cave. Forgive me if this doesn't sound like the future of mankind"
Forgive me if I say this sounds like a Reddit comment :) Why so negative? He doesn't harm or tries to convert. There is a difference between him and most homeless in that he actually chose this lifestyle, is able to quit it if he wants, and seems to be generally pretty happy with it.
It did occur to me as I typed it that it would get downmodded for the belligerent phrasing, but I was post-gym and blood sugar was low, which makes me grumpy.
I think the reason it irritates me is, as others have mentioned, that he doesn't really live without money. He just lives without his own money, and relies on the kindness of strangers to provide him with things he needs. He's not self-sufficient and he's not bartering for everything he needs. He's just an eloquent beggar.
From the article it seems he largely lives on stuff that he finds in nature or dumpsters. Occasionally he may be invited to a meal. Obviously he wouldn't have canned spam without a modern economy, but he would probably have a lot more wildlife to hunt & fish so it balances out.
The media is full of stories of the hyper-consuming celebs and millionaires, so it's nice to see a story on someone from the other extreme once in a while.
"Forgive me if I say this sounds like a Reddit comment"
Forgive me if i say this makes you sound like an asshole - why do people on HN feel the need to belittle reddit in much the same way reddit users belittle digg users?
I wonder where on the net an even more "intelligent" site's users are using "hacker news comment" as a derogatory term?
There are lots of places where people refer to the kinds of comments that show up on web message boards as, well, far from the epitome of rational, polite, interesting discussion. Maybe discussions on email mailing lists are the most common place where this happens.
I think a lot of us here are users both of Reddit and Hacker News, and that experience is why we don't want Hacker News to turn into Reddit. It's not that we're belittling Reddit's users, but that we don't like the kinds of discussions that occur on Reddit.
The comment at the top of this thread is a perfect example: instead of contributing to the discussion, its author thought it would be more worthwhile to express his disagreement with the subject of the article by using the word "fucking", without ever actually explaining why he disagreed. He succeeded in writing a funny comment (it got ten upvotes!) but not in writing anything worth reading.
Another example that with this government (and most) it's their way or the highway. I'm with you -- there's nothing ideal about it. But it's certainly noble.
Yes, I went through a similar thought pattern when I left high school - "I don't want to worry about money. Either I decide to never have money, or I'll put in the effort require to always have enough / too much."
Still working on the second choice. It's not easy, but I think the first option is much harder and never ends.
Interesting article but it would have been even more interesting if the author had chosen to go more in depth about his daily activities and how Suelo copes with loneliness and boredom. IMO, these problems would be much more difficult than the physical hardships he faces.
Loneliness and boredom are not real issues. They're issues fabricated by the mind. With presence, they disappear. That's the whole point of his lifestyle: presence. The reason he dislikes money is because money indicates a distaste of the present and an obsession with the future.
I recommend reading Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now for more information.
This story reminded me of a grown-up version of the children's book "My Side Of The Mountain" for some reason. I love this kind of story because it reminds me that we could all do well to learn to live with less, and that there are some that do.
However, could he still do it if he had kids? The article seems to suggest this is a good way to live, but if you can't live this way, and have kids too, then meh.
He's not just an ordinary homeless guy - he wants a life without property (not money, any property), i.e. he's homeless guy with a principle.
So I evaluate the principle: is it a good one? So far, it seems no, it's not.
If he could have kids, then, interesting, maybe it's not for me, or for more people, but at least it's interesting. But if you can't live that way, and have kids too, then it's forgettable.
PS. I did not say if he could/couldn't. My initial post was actually a question, worded a little short asking if it was possible. Especially in light of the ending of the article, where it talks about natural selection. If you are really committed to this, then have kids too.
It's a principle which currently has little visibility in society. What makes that less important than spending your effort on the same work literally billions of other people are already doing?
No, homeless people usually don't want a life without property; at least not the sane ones who aren't on the run from the law. Homeless people do have property of some sort; they push around a shopping cart full of their items and they usually have "spots" where they sleep at night. Even under bridges, tunnels, and underground homeless areas; every one of them has a little corridor to himself.
P.S. I am deliberately ignoring the much large population of working, "normal", homeless people. See "Persuit of Happyness".
If everyone did this, he wouldn't have a thing to eat. I'm not knocking it, but it's something to think about.
But that brings us to a more important point: Why does this guy have to forage to survive without money? Shouldn't he be able to save up, buy a few acres and grow his own resources? Nope, because of the absurdity known as the property tax (er, I mean "protection racket").
There are federal levies on owning real estate? I haven't owned real estate in the US in several years, but I don't remember ever hearing about federal property taxes.
I have no problem with people having to pay to maintain ownership of their land. Land ownership is a useful farce. Every land owner is in possession of land that was "stolen", for lack of a more precise word. If we're going to protect people's right to claim land according to the "finders keepers" rule, we should ensure that the owner is making good use of that land. Property taxation helps to do that. (With many side effects, like exacerbating gentrification. That could be fixed, though.)
"A Land Patent is permanent and cannot be changed by the government after its issuance except in case of fraud, clerical error, or failure to pay taxes." (emphasis mine)
If everyone in the world was an investment banker, no one would have anything to eat. Ditto hackers, unless they were hackers with an eye towards agriculture.
I don't think this is valid in the context of what the parent was saying about this guy; hackers and investment bankers are specialized professions which contribute to society in their own specialized way and specialization makes life better for everyone overall by enabling civilization.
The subject of the article is hardly a specialized professional and while it's minimized to some extent, he even admits he sometimes mooches off of friends for meals and is basically a scavenger. He's contributing nothing to society and leeching off of its resources despite being able bodied and intelligent.
Some might argue that his commentary on culture is useful in an artistic sense by pointing out flaws in our society, but there are better ways to do this without being a bum living in a cave. I don't like getting worked up over things in a "Something is wrong on the internet!" sense, but articles about guys like this make me kind of angry. There's nothing noble, nothing ideal here. This guy isn't worth praising.
In the article, it says, "He moved to Moab and worked at a women's shelter for five years. He wanted to help people, but getting paid for it seemed dishonest—how real was help that demanded recompense?"
Looking at his blog, it sounds like he still does that kind of thing, doesn't it? He wouldn't have to work many shifts to compensate for the resources he draws from the rest of society. Also, he writes things that other people enjoy reading, which has traditionally been considered productive work, and he's presumably performing some kind of minimal service just by diminishing the waste stream.
So I don't think it's quite true that he's contributing nothing to society.
You write, "Articles about guys like this make me kind of angry." Well, that's not surprising. His value system is clearly very different from yours, and anger is a normal human reaction when you're confronted with someone behaving according to a different value system. It takes a lot of maturity to get past that point.
Perhaps not the end-all be-all of moral reasoning, but certainly very influential (and there's a mammoth body of analysis and discussion around it), and personally I find that it's always a worthwhile perspective to consider.
I highly respect what this guy is doing, even though I don't yet have the guts to live like this myself. As Tyler Durden said, "the things you own end up owning you." The best I can do is smugly re-read Thoreau while sitting in a Starbucks and twittering from my iPhone in debt up to my eyeballs.
What I appreciate most about guys like this is how they make us face the mirror. Like fish unaware of the water in which they swim, American culture is so hyper-materialist that great numbers of us cannot even conceive of this guy's reasoning. Commercial interests can't have good, little fear-driven, obedient consumers dropping off the grid now can they?
The spiritual dimension to his lifestyle choice also deserves consideration. The article says he lived in a Buddhist monastery in Asia for several years up until 1999. He's obviously not even comparable to the typical crazy, drug-addled de-humanized homeless people we encounter in our day to day lives in our own urban zoo cages.
