I’m fascinated by animal economies. You can make clever geewhiz arguments that certain animal behaviors exhibit money-like features but the more startling fact is that many social species achieve lots of effective coordination without money.
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Stigmergy seems the dominant coordination mechanism for the social insects. Bees do their own interesting thing with the waggle-dances to decide where the nectar’s at.
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Among social animals, it wouldn't be about money per se, but more about status hierarchies and some accounting of debt.
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It turns out that you can teach monkey's to use money. I'm really not sure how this changes my worldview yet.
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It also turns out that monkeys will insightfully steal valuable goods from tourists, hold them for ransom and barter with them to get sugary food. It puts our socio-economic system in an interesting light as typical monkey economic stuff.
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