The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy

linky

I though this was an interesting article and thought I'd share.

In the article they delve into hos the Incas were basically an empire without an economy.
Everyone paid a tax not in money but in physical labor.
Of course the "wealthy class" didn't have to pay in this physical labor.
Go figure.

That article also goes on to talk about how they focused mostly on keeping everyone fed.
So that's why their agriculture was so advanced.

I recommend everyone take a read.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Inca Empire was the largest South America had ever known. Rich in foodstuffs, textiles, gold, and coca, the Inca were masters of city building but nevertheless had no money. In fact, they had no marketplaces at all.

Centered in Peru, Inca territory stretched across the Andes' mountain tops and down to the shoreline, incorporating lands from today's Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and Peru - all connected by a vast highway system whose complexity rivaled any in the Old World. The Inca Empire may be the only advanced civilization in history to have no class of traders, and no commerce of any kind within its boundaries. How did they do it?

Many aspects of Incan life remain mysterious, in part because our accounts of Incan life come from the Spanish invaders who effectively wiped them out. Famously, the conquistador Francisco Pizzaro led just a few men in an incredible defeat of the Incan army in Peru in 1532. But the real blow came roughly a decade before that, when European invaders unwittingly unleashed a smallpox epidemic that some epidemiologists believe may have killed as many as 90 percent of the Incan people. Our knowledge of these events, and our understanding of Incan culture of that era, come from just a few observers - mostly Spanish missionaries, and one mestizo priest and Inca historian named Blas Valera, who was born in Peru two decades after the fall of the Inca Empire.

reply to post by grey580


Very interesting! Thanks for posting!

I never realised that such a large civilisation existed that had no currency (there are examples of smaller communities achieving this), and I feel it is the only way forward for our current society.

We need to remove the erroneous concept of "promissory notes", and replace the system (including the removal of concepts such as interest and inflation) with a value based system that is related back to person power (man-hour or person power can be either physical or mental).

We should have an "Intellectual Property" based economical standard that is related to the current aggregated productivity of any given subset of society. (for instance, and there are many different classifications; the effort it takes to mine, process, market and trade a gram of gold in terms of man-hours).

Just an idea, but the only viable way forward I can see without a major reset... and even though there is a push in that direction (look at cryptocurrencies), the transition will be bumpy unless a seamless system can be put in place that allows TPTB to retain their power through the transition.

ETA:
If only disease and conquest didn't wipe them out, they may have had the answer everyone had been looking for... but only held inherently in their everyday interactions... in other words, once the critical mass of their society was gone, so went with it the very concept of what made their society great.

That is rather odd.