There is a chapter in one of the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books that I remember reading as a kid in which a spaceship crashes on a forested planet and the survivors form a new society in which they use leaves as their currency. And so everyone devotes all their time to gathering up bigger piles of leaves to showcase their wealth to the other members of the new society. Since leaves are so commonplace on a forested planet you have to devote an extreme amount of labor to collecting enough to enter the wealthy elite. So much so that they don’t have enough leftover for things like producing food or shelter or other necessities. So the society devolves quickly into a social order of starving people wearing rags haughtily sitting on massive piles of leaves since nobody ever thinks to question the underlying logic of their leaves based economic system.
Now that I find myself living in a society where people spend thousands of dollars on....whatever THAT is....I found that passage coming back to me for some reason.
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