WE Run Bartertown?

What if YOU had to create a version of 'Bartertown' where you live?

Normalcy bias:

“a psychological phenomenon in which people have a tendency to underestimate the likelihood or impact of a disaster or other crisis.”

On a day to day basis, the practical manifestation of normalcy bias is to believe that tomorrow will be like today—that things will stay “normal.” The opposite is called worse-case-scenario bias, whose meaning is made plain by its name.

On the continuum between the two, most people (80%, according to Wikipedia) will fall well to the normalcy side of the equation. They will underestimate the severity of a disaster while it is happening, even as they underestimated its likelihood before it occurred.

I have never had a high normalcy bias. Even before the world started to go nuts over the last few years, some part of me has always assumed that things would melt down at some point. I would not be happy to see zombies shambling up my street, but I also would not be paralyzed by disbelief.

When things started to get weird in 2020, for example, I was bothered, but I didn’t have quite the same reaction as others. I was less surprised that it had started, but also more aware that it could get a lot worse—a lot more dystopian. And so it did.

I have long been thrilled by post-apocalyptic fiction, and deeply disturbed—but also fascinated—by its dystopian variant. I am not saying that I would be as successful as Mad Max in navigating an apocalyptic wasteland…but I would not be all that shocked if I ended up in a position of having to try. I am sure there are a few of you out there who can relate.

Because of this personal tendency, I tend to give more serious consideration to what I might actually do in a meltdown of some sort.

What would you do? Would you try to go it alone, like Mad Max? Or would you try to build something, like Auntie Entity (Tina Turner’s character) in the third film of Mad Max franchise?

You can scoff at the question (and if you have a high normalcy bias, you just might). You can scoff at the campy nature of that particular film (and it certainly was campy). But the fact remains that in an actual meltdown, you would have to do something.

I have been contemplating this question a bit more actively in the last couple of years—trying to imagine actual scenarios that might take place in my small town…

I have a family. Our son is a young man in his prime, but my wife and I are not. Disappearing into the woods is not the option that it once would have been for us. (Plus, that would be a terrible option in the winter around here!)

However, I am not one to just sit around. Thus, I would get together with my fellows and try to build something.

People need two things—security and the material items required for survival. If they don’t have the latter, chaos is bound to ensue. In my view, then, the shortest route to protect my family is to keep the security situation from getting worse, and to find a way to secure material things.

Enter Bartertown.

It would not have to be like the Bartertown in the movie—indeed, hopefully it would not be! But building a place for people to trade and acquire the things they need does make a lot of sense.

There are some aspects of building such a place that are obvious. One would need to secure a large space and ensure order and security, for example. The question that puzzles me, however, is how trading would actually work.

There is a reason why we developed currency as both a medium of exchange and a store of value. When the guy who builds houses for a living needs a dozen eggs, he pays the five bucks. In a barter economy, such an exchange becomes a lot more challenging.

How many houses does he trade for a dozen eggs? “I will come build .001 percent of a house for you for that dozen eggs.” That simply won’t work.

So how would it work?

This is not a rhetorical question—I am looking for actual ideas from you!

Let us say you and I live in the same town, know each other, and agree that we are going to do this together. We have to make it work, or we will have a riot on our hands.

Gold and silver are not options. Most people have none. Eventually we might be able to get enough into the system, and facilitate its more general distribution through initial trades—but that would not work right away.

The national currency—dollars, pounds, etc.—is not an option either. Some people may have stashed a few hundred or even a few thousand in their house somewhere, but most have not. Most today are using credit cards or taking out small increments from the ATM.

Some sort of barter will have to work.

It’s easy for two people to figure out how many cans of fruit cocktail they are willing to trade for an animal pelt. It’s much harder for the guy who has a gas generator to trade if all he wants is an egg.

What do we do?

One option: we create some sort of temporary currency.

Instead of creating a giant trading floor where people barter, we could create a store where people shop. Something like this:

People arrive with an item to trade. We assess the value and offer them an amount of credits for the item. We then put the item in the “store” and people can come in and shop for what they need. This process would be a bit cumbersome on item intake (I could envision a long line of people looking to trade items), but it would solve a lot of problems.

But what would the credits/currency look like?

• Just an entry in our ledger? That would require high degrees of trust.

• Something physical that we create and distribute? It would have to be resistant to counterfeiting. Perhaps we could acquire metals or currency and develop a reserve of that to distribute?

I would love to hear your ideas on this.

Another option: we provide a third party service that helps facilitate more complex barter. We help find the guy who needs the generator and has a whole bunch of things that the guy with the generator needs, a small amount of which he can then trade for the egg.

But that seems complicated and clunky. There has got to be a better way.

So what do you think? Help me out here, guys. Damnit Jim, I’m a philosopher, not a businessman.¹

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1. If you do not recognize that reference, then you are either too young or your cultural education has a hole in it!

Similarly, if you are Gen X and you have not seen any of the Mad Max movies, I am not sure what to say. They may be campy, but they are required viewing. (At least numbers 2 and 3 of the series are.) And if you are Gen Y and have not seen them, then your parents were remiss!