Murderbot describes Preservation as using a “complicated barter system.” The funniest (to me) interpretation of this is just that they use cash and MB has never seen actual for real physical paper/metal cash before (what is currency but complicated barter?). However it’s fun to flex the cultural worldbuilding imagination and say, what if the Preservation economy is structured as a LETS, which is also, conceptually, sort of, a complicated barter system.
LETS stands for Local Exchange Trading System and has been implemented in a few places in recent decades. At its core it’s a different mode of conceptualizing debt.
Basically, the way we treat money now is as a commodity: it is zero-sum Stuff that we hoard and accumulate. You earn it and then you spend it. It’s based on the logic of scarcity. A LETS treats the idea of money as more like debt: you create more by borrowing it from a conceptual pool. You spend it, and then you earn it. It’s based on the logic of abundance.
To my understanding, you “borrow” a certain number of Green Dollars (the LETS monetary system discussed in the specific example I attended a lecture on) from the central tracking system. You can use that to pay for whatever good or service you want. Then, you are obligated to do that many “Green Dollars” worth of goods or services for that person (or someone else, depending) at some point to balance the ledger.
You can’t be denied a “loan” if you’re in the red; that’s not how it works. You declare that you’re using X amount of Green Dollars, there’s no application/denial system. BUT if you have a history of not putting it back into the community, people can stop doing business with you. It’s an economy based on reciprocity and reputation.
Essentially, spending money is not so much spending money, it’s making a promise to put this much value back into the community at some point in the future.
It has only ever been implemented on fairly small and local scales, and usually as a supplement to the “regular” economy; I think to make it work on a planetary scale, there would need to be a central governmental “bank” keeping track (election to the oversight of which is probably a critically important job) as well as designated government-run “sinks” where people can pay to get stuff like food and health care without being expected to return an equivalent amount because what they need is far more than what they can return.
You can get rich by providing a good or service everyone wants, but the currency you’re rich in is basically a promise to pay you back in some form, and then the things that people do for you. People can transfer Green Dollar debt too: if X does a service for Y, then Y does a service for Z, Y can agree to accept the repayment via Z doing a service for X if X has something Z wants more than Y does. The goal is to create networks of inter-reliance where debt is not a bad thing but rather a representation of what we owe to each other and to society.
Local communities may act more like gift economies where “everything comes out in the wash” anyway, and direct trade of items or services can sometimes be expedient, but the LETS and its central bank tracking people’s yet-unpaid debts and repayments is the primary planetary economic system. There are a bunch of committees around this.
Unrelatedly to the LETS thing I imagine Preservation having a “service tax” akin to jury duty where every once in a while you are called up to spend the day washing dishes at the communal free food court or something. Also a looooot of industrial scale food production is done by ag-bots. Also it’s extremely common and kind of culturally expected that most people grow some food themselves, whether it’s a window-box of herbs or a fruit tree they tend or a vegetable garden. Also also surplus food is stored in the government-owned cryo-pods that the Pressy colonists were in—if they can keep a human alive in cryo stasis for 200 years they can keep fruit and vegetables fresh for as long as needed, so if a food crisis ever comes up the government has a stockpile. I think these are important ways that labor and goods get distributed also.
The system is complicated! Centralized government that makes sure everyone gets what they need AND creates a system where people can get what they want from each other AND making sure inability to repay debt doesn’t prevent people from getting what they need AND community-oriented reciprocity economy AND making “accumulation of monetary wealth” not really a possible thing AND making sure no individual or private group can corner the market on an important good AND making sure doctors and farmers and politicians get adequately compensated for the work they do AND making it possible to be an artist or academic who doesn’t do anything “practical” but still can dedicate their life to it and get what they need AND ensuring disabled people who can’t meaningfully “pay back” for what they need to live… it’s a system with lots of places to prod it, but a LETS structure rather than a cash economy feels more in keeping with the philosophy and values of Preservation. And Murderbot from the outside sees it and has no language to articulate what it’s seeing besides “complicated barter system” because it sure is complicated!
