ele munjeli
Jul 27, 2017 · 2 min read

In the 80s I witnessed a cash economy moving into parts of Costa Rica where my family had a farm since the early 70s. The farm is in Osa, a peninsula isolated from the mainland by several rivers — when my grandparents moved to the farm there was no road and it was boat access only. There was always some currency here, even in precolumbian times, as the Olmec were traders, and in the 80s there was a gold rush, leading to gold as a de facto currency for most of the peninsula. But outside of the villages, many people still had very self-reliant lives, and many were functionally illiterate, which didn’t matter much since there were no books or magazines.

The area started developing rapidly after a road came in, was paved, and the US Army came in and built bridges. Likewise the logging and gold mining industries moved in, and many people from the capital.

One thing that struck me was that we have an understanding of money beyond exchange — most of us also know what saving is, and have some concept of investment. In CR, people were bilked out of their land by speculators paying lump sums that made people feel like millionaires set for life, but because of high inflation would only last a few years. For most people, the math didn’t go beyond the first sum.

While life in the villages looked luxurious with electricity and phones, the reality was many had a better food supply on the farms, sometimes a better quality of life all around. I was struck by the depth of knowledge about money we take for granted in the US: our children run lemonade stands. We teach the value of money early, we have as many terms for money (bank, scratch, cash, etc.) as Inuit have for snow. Money isn’t superficial; it changes and flows and loses value… especially if a country has a volatile currency one has to look ahead to stay ahead. The result of education and currency is a complicated perception of cause and effect, the ability to shepherd your resources by reading the news and talking to people with experience. My final impression is that simply introducing currency without explicit provision for education and saving will result in exploitation. It’s not just like trading for other goods; currency is a peculiar abstraction that goes deeper than material trade.

It seems paternalistic to be offering a savings plan to your employees but that’s what my sister did when she hired locals to do construction in the 90s. It was very intimidating for a carpenter from the country who couldn’t write much more than his own name to open a bank account, but if we just paid him cash it would be at risk for bandits. There were tabs at the lumber yard, the hardware shop, the general store etc. for handling exchange since we couldn’t just pass around a lot of cash there either. Money came before law — there was definitely a lot of banditry and abuse.

ele munjeli

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DevOps, Democracy, and my cat. I’m an enterprise engineer who speaks, publishes, and codes infrastructure for virtual democracies and online deliberation.