VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 1, SECTION 2
Economy Is Not Money, It Is How People Settle One Another
The last section stood you through a class in the house of a master who could not cook. In that house the rice went into the pot, the fire came up, the horse was shod, the children took their lessons, a whole day turned over and ran well. And one thing never showed up in it from start to finish. Money. Not one coin ever moved. Was there, or was there not, an economy in that house. That is the question this section answers.
Put the commonest answer out first
Ask a hundred people what the economy is, and ninety will answer, money. Prices, wages, the cost of a house, the market, that row of numbers in the ledger. Good economy is money coming in. Bad economy is money running short.
That answer is not wrong. It has only taken a tool and mistaken it for the thing itself.
It is like asking a man what eating is and having him answer, chopsticks. Chopsticks do have to do with eating. You reach for them every day, you cannot get through a meal without them. But chopsticks are not eating. Where there are no chopsticks, people still eat their fill.
Money is to the economy what chopsticks are to eating. It is a tool that sits well in the hand, and used long, used so smoothly, a person comes to take it for the thing itself.
Back to that house from the last section
In the master’s house, several hundred people, busy from dawn to dark. The wheat comes in from the field and goes into the granary. The rice comes out of the granary and goes to the stove. The meal is cooked on the stove and set on the table. The cloth is woven in the weaving room and cut into clothes. Someone falls ill, and the house doctor comes. A child reaches the age, and the house teacher teaches.
This whole thing, link caught in link, cannot stop for a day. There is producing in it, there is distributing, there is exchanging, there is consuming, every one of them present and whole.
And in this whole thing there is not one coin. The rice is not bought, the meal is not paid for, the doctor takes no fee, the teacher draws no tuition.
So ask again. Is there, or is there not, an economy in this house.
There is. And a tightly run economy at that. It simply does not use the tool called money.
This is the first position to set. Money can be absent, and the economy is there all the same. Money is a coat the economy wears. It is not the economy’s bones.
What the word economy first meant
The word economy did not come out of a ledger. It came out of the old writings on governing a realm, and its root there is a phrase, order the age and carry the people through.
To order the age is to take this age of the world and manage it, set it in order, keep it turning. To carry the people through is to catch people and hold them up so they can go on living.
So from the day the word was made, it was never about money. It was about this. How does a crowd of people get one another settled.
Hold on to that word, settled. Who plants, who cooks, who beats the iron, who teaches. How the grain that is grown gets shared, who eats first, who eats after, who tends the one who is sick, who keeps the one who is old. Put all those questions together, and that is the economy.
Money came in later, and it took away not one of these questions. It only added a tool that reckons faster. The questions are still the same questions.
The ancestors put it in first place
In the Book of Documents there is a piece called the Great Plan, and it lays out nine great methods for governing all under heaven. One of them is called the eight offices, and it takes the things a state must see to and sets them in order of weight. What stands in first place.
The Great Plan runs, first food, second goods, third the rites. First is food, eating. Second is goods, the flow and exchange of things. Third, and only third, is the rites, the sacrifice, that whole apparatus of ritual and belief and the things of the spirit.
Look hard at that order. The ancestors set eating ahead of the sacrifice to heaven. Not because the sacrifice does not matter. Because a crowd of people with empty bellies cannot make the sacrifice at all.
That order is the order of this whole volume from end to end. Matter first, mind after. Guanzi later put it sharper still, and that line is held back for the third chapter of this first semester. Here, only hold on to this. What the ancestors put in first place was food and goods, was getting people settled.
Xunzi said it plainest
Then this settling, what is it settling. Xunzi, in the Discourse on Ritual, gave an answer in a handful of words. Nourish what people want. Supply what people seek.
Xunzi is blunt about it. A man is born with wants. Hungry, he must eat, cold, he must be clothed. This is not a bad thing and not a good thing. This is what a man is. The wants cannot be dammed. Dam them and the man cannot live.
But wants let loose and left alone, a crowd all grabbing at one thing, will fight, and fighting brings disorder, and in the disorder no one gets fed. So there must be a set of things that gets the wants settled, that gives every person’s seeking somewhere to land.
That set of things Xunzi calls ritual. And inside that set of things, the long stretch that handles food and clothing and use, that handles who plants and who shares, that stretch is the economy.
So the economy is not cold arithmetic. The economy is a crowd of people, sat down, getting one another’s wants and seekings settled and squared away.
Then what is money
Money is made by man. It does not grow in the ground, it does not fall from the sky. It is what is done by human effort. It is wei.
It is a stunning invention. With it, one ox can turn into thirty measures of rice, and the rice into a bolt of cloth, and the cloth into a year of a child’s schooling. It folds ten thousand things that will not line up against one another onto one single ruler. Without it a large society will not turn.
But it is a tool in the end. A tool is neutral. Good or bad is in the hands that take it up.
Where does the trouble come from. The trouble comes the moment a person mistakes the tool for the end. Rice is there to be eaten, and someone begins to hoard rice for the sake of money itself. Cloth is there to be worn, and someone begins to hoard cloth for the sake of money itself. By that step, the man no longer puts money to work. The money begins to put the man to work.
A man sits over a houseful of money, falls ill, and will not spend one coin to be seen, and aches his way out of the world just so. Such a man this volume will walk in close to, later. He is not a fool. There is a hidden grief underneath him. Here, set only this one line. He has sat down into the slave’s position, and the master that locks him is the pile he saved with his own hands.
What this section set up, and the turn to the next
This section set up three things.
The first. The economy is not money. Money can be absent and the economy is there all the same. In that master’s house not one coin moved, and a whole economy turned without a seam.
The second. The economy is ordering the age and carrying the people through. It is how a crowd of people get one another settled. Who plants, who shares, who eats first, who eats after, who keeps the old, who tends the sick. The ancestors set this ahead of the sacrifice to heaven, and Xunzi brought it down to a handful of words, nourish what people want, supply what people seek.
The third. Money is wei, a tool made by man, and neutral. Let a man put it to work and it is a good tool. Let it turn and put the man to work, and the man has sat down into the slave’s position.
Then how many ways are there for people to get one another settled. Is it first a slave society, then a feudal one, then a capital one, one stretch climbing up after another. The next section sets out a whole map. And that map looks nothing like the single line so many people learned by heart from the time they were small.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.