As a young man, I lived in the Caribbean for a few years. People would clear cut fruit trees and bushes and replace them with lawns. We got here because we are stupid as fuck.
Simple: the earth produces a fuck tonne less food for like half the year, requiring some kind of strategy to handle the fact you have lots of food half the time and like no food the other half.
We took the “stash it in a special spot” approach.
But how do we stop other us’s from stealing our stashes?
Strength in numbers, ape strong together. We form villages.
As we grow, we need leadership, mechanisms to keep track of each other, protect each other, and rules with how to fairly treat bad actors.
Laws, democracy, judicial systems come into play.
Oh shit, other village has cool shit. They want our cool shit. Trade? Trade! Commerce comes into play.
How do we keep track of people that are reliable to trade with and can be trusted across Trade networks?
Credit. Village A vouches on behalf of Trader, they have Credability, you can trust them.
Many villages create a unified system to describe this trust in a metric…
Thus: credit score.
In other words you have a credit score because of the way the earth makes food (that is to say, about half the time)
Actually credit scores came about in the 1700-1800s but were turned into their modern design in the 1980s.
So just a little bit later than when you’re describing.
I’d place a lot less of the cause of credit scores on the Earth’s seasons than you, but this does make me wonder what the economic systems would look like on a habitable planet with no seasons, with year round stable temperatures/humidity/etc.
Man: “God, please help me get a job.”
God: “What the fuck is a job?”
Man: “Work you do to make money.”
God: “What the fuck is money?!”
Man: “Paper and metal we use to buy food.”
God: “Buy food? I left food all over the fucking floor! Eat that!”
I know all of this is sort of a caricature but i hope most people here realize the many famines we have in history aren’t because of sociopolitical issues. I know it’s a joke. Sorry for being that guy 😔
many famines we have in history aren’t because of sociopolitical issues
That’s increasingly untrue, particularly in the last century. To say we’ve got some kind of food shortage, you have to ignore everything from the Irish Potato Famine (in which English storehouses were so full of wheat that it rotted on the docks) to the Bengalese Famine (in which Churchill diverted foodstock away from East Indian ports as retribution for the wave of independence movements breaking out in the wake of WW2) to the US policy of buffalo hunting to near-extinction as a form of Indian removal to the engineered famines in Iraq and Palestine and North Korea and Cuba under international sanctions regimes.
What’s more, where we’ve successfully ended the 19th century streak of famines, what we’ve seen is explicit socio-economic policy to improve foodstock production and distribution. This isn’t an ecological problem (yet). It is entirely a logistics issue. We yield far more foodstock than we consume. And we’ve known we were producing more than we consume straight back to the early 20th century. Famous Russian anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin even wrote a book on the subject, complete with a health amount of data analysis to support his theories, supporting the claim that then-modern wheat production should have already eliminated famine pretty much globally.
