View Single Post
Old 04-23-2017, 01:26 PM   #23
Curmudgeon
 
Join Date: Sep 2011
Default Re: Post Apocalyptic Economics

Honey is one of the more reasonable suggestions. It keeps well, is intrinsically useful and a little goes a long way (provided you’re not using it as a preservative). The downsides are that it’s bulky, likely to be used and, like alcohol, it’s only as good as its container. Maple syrup would probably work as well, though it costs more to make it. Honeybee hives might be used for bigger transactions, and someone stealing your hives or the bees dying off would be problems and hives do need to be looked after, so it’s not just harvest the honey and I’m in the money.

Sugar has some of the good points of honey but sugar cane is not something you can grow anywhere and it requires about as much work to produce as maple sugar. I suspect, sugar beets aren’t much better. You might need less processing to get usable sugar, but you probably get less sugar per plant. First, you have to get the sap out and boil it down to molasses (basically the same as boiling sap down to maple syrup), then you have to boil the molasses down to brown sugar (again basically the same thing as maple syrup to maple sugar). At that point, you have brown sugar. To get white sugar, you need to bleach it. Then you need to granulate it, though you could sell it in bulk. The downside of sugar is that it’s water soluble, so you have to keep it dry. To give some idea of the scale involved, forty gallons of maple sap makes one gallon of maple syrup.

Salt is another reasonable suggestion. It is going to take quite a bit of it to have value for preserving but it is a commonly enough available substance. On the other hand, its source can be highly localized. For example, aside from sea salt, which can be “harvested” almost anywhere along the coast, most table salt in Canada comes from just one location, Windsor, Ontario. The little packets of salt that you get from restaurants contain 1/8 of a teaspoon of salt on average, so you can probably get away with paying quite small amounts of salt. The two biggest downsides to salt are its availability and its water solubility. Of course, if you have enough of it stored away and it gets wet and soaks into the ground, well; remember why the ancients salted their enemies’ fields.

As RyanW was saying most of these so-called currencies are really, what do I have the best shot at bartering to get what I really want. Outside of salt, honey and maybe sugar, there’s no real potential as a currency, where you get, “No, I haven’t got any immediate use for it, but I’ll trade you for it anyway.”

Some other possibilities for small/cheap commodities currencies that have been suggested are cigarettes/cigars (nobody’s likely to kill you to get them) and .22 Long Rifle [suggested in Bob Charette’s Aftermath], which is ubiquitous enough to use for “small change.”

Something which is economically important, was only briefly touched on, and they still got it wrong, was marrying off your daughters. In places where grooms pay a brideprice, the bride’s relatives also provide a dowry. The brideprice and dowry are roughly equal in value. The important thing is that both the dowry and brideprice get shared out more widely among the relatives giving acknowledgement of the new kinship. If long term disaster hits your place, it’s nice to be able to travel to your daughter’s new village and have her husband’s kinsmen say, “Sure, you can farm here, and there’s the little patch of land to do it on.” For short term disasters, it’s really nice to have spread your daughters’ marriages out over a wider area. It’s very nice to know that help will come from all four corners if you can just get the word out. Of course, you need to reinforce those bonds of kinship through remarriage in later generations, but kinship is probably your most valuable long-term economic asset.

Last edited by Curmudgeon; 04-23-2017 at 08:43 PM. Reason: straightened out conjunctions
Curmudgeon is offline   Reply With Quote