What is the price of a sunrise?
With the rapid development of AI, robotics and automation, we may be approaching a transition to a moneyless, resource-based world much faster than we think.
That makes it increasingly important to understand how we would relate to value without money and prices. Because if we are to embrace such a future, we must first question some of the assumptions we have grown up with.
So.
How do we teach children the real value of things without money?
An old friend asked me this recently.
He is genuinely interested in the kind of moneyless, resource-based world I describe in Waking Up, but this question bothered him.
Without money, how will children understand what things are really worth?
It sounds like an obvious problem.
Until we go back to the starting point.
Before Price
Long before there were humans, there was Earth.
There were forests, rivers, oceans, fertile soil, minerals, animals, plants, sunlight and rain.
Were they valuable?
Of course.
But none of them had a price.
There was no price attached to a river. No monetary value printed on an apple. No deed declaring who owned a mountain. No border drawn across the landscape. No currency with which one animal could purchase access to water from another.
The world had value before it had prices.
Value Precedes Price
Then humans arrived.
Over thousands of years, we developed increasingly sophisticated systems of territory, ownership, trade, accounting and money. We measured the land, divided it into pieces, established ownership claims and eventually attached monetary values to almost everything that could be bought and sold.
And because every one of us is now born into that world, it feels like the natural starting point.
But it isn’t.
It is the starting point we inherited.
The Child
Now consider another starting point.
A child is born.
What does that child know about money?
Nothing.
What does it know about price?
Nothing.
What does it know about ownership, wages, markets, profit, debt or trade?
Nothing.
And yet almost immediately the child experiences value.
The child becomes hungry.
Mother’s milk has value.
The child becomes cold.
Warmth has value.
The child becomes frightened.
The embrace of a parent has value.
Attention has value. Sleep has value. Safety has value.
Later, play has value. Friendship has value. Exploration has value. Particular foods have value. Particular people have value.
None of this has to be measured.
The child experiences it.
Perhaps this is what value fundamentally is at the human level:
appreciation.
The Kitten
We can see something similar throughout nature.
A kitten doesn’t know the price of its mother’s milk.
It doesn’t need to.
It becomes hungry, suckles, and its hunger is satisfied.
Later its mother may take it into the world where it gradually learns how to hunt, where to find safety, what represents danger and what satisfies its needs.
A mouse has value to the cat.
Water has value.
Shelter has value.
The mother’s presence has value.
But the cat doesn’t need to decide that one mouse is worth ten dollars while a rat is worth twenty.
Its world contains value without monetary valuation. Just like with a human child.
Humans have an extraordinary capacity that the cat does not possess to anything like the same degree. We can abstract, count, categorize and measure the world around us.
That ability is enormously useful.
But somewhere along the way, measurement became intertwined with ownership, exchange and money.
We began confusing the measurement with the value itself.
Appreciation
Imagine that you love strawberries but haven’t tasted one for six months.
Someone offers you one.
You smell it. You bite into it. It is perfectly ripe and tastes absolutely wonderful.
You appreciate that strawberry enormously.
How much?
Five euros?
Fifty?
Five hundred?
The question quickly becomes absurd.
The strawberry might have a market price, but the price cannot measure your appreciation of eating it. Value is not price.
And if somebody gave you the strawberry for free, its price to you was zero.
Was its value therefore zero?
Obviously not.
Now imagine that you are completely stuffed after a huge meal and someone offers you another strawberry.
You might not want it at all.
Same strawberry.
Same market price.
Completely different value to you.
Or imagine that strawberries and pears are both freely available.
You love strawberries and hate pears.
Both have a price of zero.
Are they therefore equally valuable to you?
Of course not.
You walk past the pears and take the strawberries.
Value is still there.
No price is required.
Our appreciation depends upon our needs, preferences, circumstances and experiences. It cannot be adequately expressed by attaching a monetary number to the object.
The Rag Doll
Perhaps children demonstrate this better than anyone.
Imagine a child has an old rag doll.
It is faded and worn. One eye is missing. It has been repaired several times. Nobody would pay much for it. If anything.
But the child has slept with that doll every night for five years.
It has been there when the child was frightened. It came along on holidays. It has a name. Memories are attached to it.
To the market, the doll may be almost worthless.
To the child, it may be irreplaceable. If lost it may be a crisis for the child.
Then an adult says:
“Why are you so upset? It’s only a cheap old doll. We’ll buy you a new one.”
Only a Cheap Toy
Think about what we have just done.
We have taken the child’s immense experienced appreciation and placed our monetary measurement above it.
The new doll might cost €20.
The old one might be worth €1 on a market.
But which one has greater value to the child?
The child already knows.
We are the ones confusing the issue. Not the child.
Learning Price
Children don’t have to be taught value.
They have to be taught price.
And why do we teach them price?
Because we have created a monetary society in which they need to understand it.
They have to learn that €100 provides more purchasing power than €10. They have to learn that their parents cannot necessarily afford something. Eventually they have to understand wages, bills, rent, bank accounts, debt and all the other rules required to function within the system they were born into.
Price is therefore useful information inside a monetary system.
But that doesn’t make price the same thing as value.
When we tell a child:
“Be careful with that. It was expensive.”
we are teaching something subtly different from:
“Be careful with that. Appreciate it and take care of it.”
And when we say:
“It’s only a cheap toy.”
we may be teaching something worse:
that low price means low value.
But the child with the rag doll knows that isn’t true.
Real Value
Many of the greatest values in a child’s life are already priceless.
The attention of a parent.
Friendship.
Feeling safe.
Being loved.
Playing.
Learning.
Belonging.
Nature.
A favorite toy.
A bedtime story.
We don’t need to tell a child the monetary price of a parent’s attention for the child to appreciate it.
There isn’t one.
We even say that we pay attention, but no money changes hands.
The experience itself has value.
So perhaps the question is not:
“How will we teach children value without money?”
Perhaps it is:
Why did we begin teaching children that price tells them value?
Maybe we should rather ask:
Why did we invent money at all and then tell our children money is value?
What We Measure
A resource-based economy would not mean that humanity suddenly stopped measuring things.
Quite the opposite.
We would still use calculation in kind.
We would measure how much water we have.
How much grain.
How much electricity.
How many homes.
How much steel.
How many strawberries.
We could measure soil health, ecological regeneration, production capacity, consumption and demand with extraordinary precision.
Suppose we have 100 strawberries and 100 people would like strawberries.
That is useful information.
There is temporary scarcity, and we may have to share them fairly.
But why must we conclude that scarcity means the strawberries now have to cost €10 each?
We don’t need a price to understand the physical situation.
We need to know:
How many strawberries do we have?
How many people want them?
Can we sustainably grow more?
If demand is consistently greater than supply, we can increase production where resources and ecological conditions allow.
If there is a temporary shortage, we can share what is available fairly.
Scarcity requires intelligent allocation.
It does not require a price.
Shared Access
This is where the starting point matters again.
Today, the strawberry field probably belongs to somebody.
The land belongs to somebody.
The equipment belongs to somebody.
The harvest belongs to somebody.
Other people gain access through money.
Now imagine starting somewhere else.
Ownership has been transformed into stewardship.
The resources of Earth are regarded as our common inheritance rather than enormous unequal pieces belonging exclusively to different individuals and institutions.
We still measure everything necessary to manage those resources intelligently.
But we begin with a different question.
Not:
Who owns the strawberries and what can they be sold for?
But:
How many strawberries do we have, how many do people want, and how can we sustainably provide enough?
If there is abundance, take what you need and want.
If there is scarcity, share fairly while addressing the physical reason for the shortage.
The objective is not to produce the maximum possible amount of everything regardless of how much we destroy in the process.
It is to produce enough to satisfy human needs and reasonable wants, maintain appropriate reserves, minimize waste and remain within ecological limits.
Enough For All
Imagine again those 100 strawberries and 100 people.
If everyone wants one, everyone can have one.
If twenty people don’t like strawberries, there may be more for those who do.
If demand rises dramatically, the system detects it and, where sustainable, grows more. After all, we don’t absolutely need strawberries to survive.
We should be able to adapt and share what we have until more strawberries are ripe.
Nobody gains a greater right to the strawberries merely because they have more money.
Nobody owns the field and can withhold its harvest simply because it is their property.
Everyone begins with an equal right of access, while actual distribution responds intelligently to need, preference and availability.
That requires measurement.
But it doesn’t require monetary valuation.
Measure the resource, not the appreciation.
We can measure that you ate 300 grams of strawberries.
We cannot meaningfully measure how wonderful they tasted to you.
We can measure how much food a child needs.
We cannot put a price on the satisfaction of hunger.
We can measure the materials in a rag doll.
We cannot measure the child’s love for it.
Two Worlds
And so we arrive at two starting points.
The first is the planet itself.
Earth existed before ownership, money and prices.
Its resources already had value because they supported life.
Then humans created an abstract layer of ownership, trade and monetary valuation and eventually began treating that layer as though it were reality itself.
The second starting point is every child.
A child enters the world without understanding money or price.
But the child already experiences value.
Then we teach the child our abstract layer.
And eventually the child may begin to see the world through the same monetary lens that we do.
Starting Again
What if we didn’t?
What if we taught children appreciation instead of price?
Where does your food come from?
What did nature require to produce it?
How much of it do we have?
Does somebody else need some too?
Can it be repaired rather than thrown away?
Can somebody else use it when you no longer need it?
What happens to the environment when we produce it?
How can we care for it?
These are lessons about value.
A child doesn’t need to hear:
“Don’t waste those strawberries. They were expensive.”
The child can learn:
“Don’t waste those strawberries. They required soil, water, sunlight, nutrients, pollination and care to grow. Other people would like some too. Take what you want, enjoy them, and don’t take more than you’ll use.”
That is not a world without value.
It may be a world with a much deeper understanding of it.
The Starting Point
My friend’s question was:
How do we teach children the real value of things without money?
Perhaps the answer is that we don’t need money to do it at all.
Children experience value before they understand price.
Human beings experienced value before we invented money.
And we still do. There are many things we value because they are priceless. A sunrise. A sunset. The beauty of nature. The love of our children.
Life itself experienced value, in the form of needs, preferences and survival, long before humans existed.
The world was valuable before we priced it.
And a child knows that a beloved rag doll is valuable before an adult tells them it is cheap.
Maybe we have had the question backwards.
Perhaps our task is not to teach children value.
Perhaps our task is to avoid teaching them not to confuse value with price.
We still need measurement.
We still need calculation.
We still need to know what resources exist, where they are, how quickly they regenerate, how much people need and want, and how we can distribute them sustainably and fairly.
But none of that requires us to put a monetary price on the experience of being alive.
Value precedes price.
It always did.
And perhaps if we want to build a world based on stewardship, abundance, sharing and intelligent resource management, that is where we should start again.
At the starting point.
A Unique Opportunity
The bewildered billionaire Benjamin Michaels is given a unique opportunity to experience this value when he wakes up again after 100 years of cryonic sleep trying to escape his cancer in the novel
Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity, whichis a novel that explores a future in which trade and ownership have given way to stewardship, shared abundance and intelligent resource management. And where value is no longer quantified in the form of money. He hoped to wake up again to expand his empire, but instead he have to learn the real value of the world…