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"Anything can serve as a currency and ultimately the winners will possess the characteristics that people demand: portable, fungible, easily divisible, and reasonably scarce" - John Matonis

The long and short of it is that I am drafting notes for a dark comedic setting where coconuts are the primary currency for a industrialised expansionary city-state that is surrounded by tropical humid rainforests with plenty of rainfall. In this setting, sprouted coconut are considered to have more value than 'non-sprouted' coconuts, whilst macapuno coconuts are the most valuable of all. (yes, i am aware that there are many varients of coconuts, but that's not the most important problem i want dealt with). And yes, people also eat these coconuts as well as commercialising them (ie, using the husks for clothing, weaves, nets or using the oil for various applications or just outright exporting coconuts to foreign markets).

Problem: I want this economy to not collapse because i foresee people either planting coconut trees whereever and whenever they can and flooding the market or people cutting down so many coconut trees to get rich that the plant just goes extinct. Or in short, how can i prevent overharvesting or hoarding.

Value table

  1. Macapuno coconuts
  2. Sprouted coconuts
  3. 'regular coconuts'
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    $\begingroup$ If you're creating a comedy setting you should be worldbuilding for the joke not verisimilitude. Given a set of options pick the one that will generate a laugh. And we all know nothing is funnier than accurately modeling economic forces. I'm literally rolling on the floor laughing at how correct your economy is. $\endgroup$ Commented 2 days ago
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    $\begingroup$ Crazy idea, and I'll throw it out there as a comment, because it is a bit out there. If you'd like me to expand, I'll write an answer. What if society never developed agriculture? So they simply don't know how to create new coconut trees, basically. $\endgroup$ Commented 2 days ago
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    $\begingroup$ I'd just like to note that you don't actually cut down a coconut tree in order to harvest the coconuts. You climb the tree and cut the coconuts off! Keep in mind also the time factors: coconuts only bear fruit after about 10 years, and they live about 80 years. So your Bureau of Cocurrency force will be regularly rotating between chopping unproductive & dead trees whilst nurturing the immature trees. $\endgroup$ Commented yesterday
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    $\begingroup$ How would you account for coconuts that drift onto your islands? Coconuts are notoriously good at swimming. $\endgroup$ Commented yesterday
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    $\begingroup$ @Eomer finders keepers, most likely. There are unlikely to be enough random coconuts drifting about to have a significant impact on the economy. $\endgroup$ Commented yesterday

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What you're describing is a form of commodity money. This isn't something particularly unique; historically, rice, corn, tobacco, and yes, coconuts have all been used as currency.

So how to avoid the problems you're worried about?

  • People cutting down so many coconut trees to get rich that the plant just goes extinct - I don't see why this would happen. You don't need to cut down the tree to harvest the fruit (yes, coconuts are fruit).
  • Planting coconut trees wherever and whenever they can - realistically, people will do this. You can't prevent it; all you can do, depending on how strong your central government is, is restrict the "wherever" and/or the "whenever". However, you may not need to. Historically, commodity-based economies have been able to function. Inflation and deflation do happen, but the fact that currency has intrinsic value places a limit on inflation. Your society presumably needs other goods besides coconuts; they may want to grow rice, for example. If too much farmland is taken over by coconut plantations, then there will be a shortage of rice and its price will go up at the same time as inflation reduces the value of coconuts, to the point that soon you make more money continuing to grow rice than switching to coconuts. Market forces solve your problem for you.

I'm assuming here that your economy is more or less self-contained. If you are able to trade coconuts to neighboring states for other commodities, then you can just grow as many coconuts as possible without it being a problem. In fact, multiple countries in the South Pacific do exactly this.

The bigger problem with this system is that there's no reason for anyone to grow the less valuable coconuts. Everyone will want to plant only the most valuable Macapuno coconuts and may cut down the other types to make room for them (assuming they are similar in production and space requirements - I'm not a biologist).

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    $\begingroup$ +1 I think it is an important detail that it requires time and effort to plant and harvest coconuts, which limits the abuse. This should be pretty much the same as for a non-currency based trading system (except that everybody collects coconuts even if they don't use them). In the end the market forces will bring the price of a coconut to a value that resembles the effort of planting growing and harvesting a coconut. $\endgroup$ Commented 2 days ago
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    $\begingroup$ @Thibe further, they'll bring the price of everything else to where the effort of producing it is roughly equivalent to the effort of producing an equivalent number of coconuts. $\endgroup$ Commented yesterday
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    $\begingroup$ Other factors limiting inflation: it's perishable, and has a fairly strict ceiling in terms of maximum yield per land unit. Both of those things mean that "wealth" will largely be a function of the amount of productive land owned/controlled. That land is the only form of generational wealth transfer unless these are nonbiodegradable coconuts, which itself would pose a number of daunting logistical challenges to accommodate. $\endgroup$ Commented yesterday
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    $\begingroup$ @JayMcEh That's a very good and interesting point. Perishability puts a hard upper limit on the money supply; on the other hand, people want to spend or use their coconuts before they go bad, meaning a low savings rate, which tends to increase inflation. In practice, people with a coconut surplus are likely to invest in something with more permanent value (land, family jewels, these days cars and real estate), so your last sentence doesn't really hold. Over time, this is likely to develop into some kind of non-perishable de facto currency. $\endgroup$ Commented yesterday
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    $\begingroup$ @user111403 "meaning a low savings rate, which tends to increase inflation." in an economy with worthless money, yes. You are applying Fiat-money theory to money with real (aka intrinsic) value, which is not how this works. More coconuts means people get a bit fatter, that's it. Similarly I doubt your analysis of modern-stock-market-equivalents being inevietable (they'd arise more for OPs comedic purposes than for in-universe economics) $\endgroup$ Commented yesterday
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Many islands have a fresh water lense that they hold beneath the sand. It replenishes with rain- it shrinks in droughts and it slowly migrates into the sea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltwater_intrusion Is dangerous, as it reduces the number of trees your island can support. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut#Natural_habitat They can tolerate salt water for quite a while, but not forever. The roots need to tap into sweet water eventually or the laws of osmosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osmosis#Description take over. So many trees pump water out of the ground into the sky. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinus_contorta for example is widespread used to terraformed swampy areas - the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landes_forest was terraformed this way. But i digress.

So if your land has fresh water- and drought, and a "opposite force" economy that pumps water into the sky, your coconuts are going to die, from the beach land inwards. And it takes some time, before the intruding saltwater is flushed out again. These cycles of greed sabotaging one another, may actually be a mystery to the locals. Im thinking of overusage of wood for imperial ship building (resulting in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maquis_shrubland) - and then recovery of forrests by declaring them state/local strong man land, forcing the normal peasants todo strange things to get wood https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2020/10/daisugi-trees-japan/. But i digress.

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Oh, that's so simple! Just tax the coconut trees!

Set a fixed rate of a certain number of coconuts from each tree each year... and if it's a macapuno tree, that's what its tax is payable in. You could also make the coconut tax per tree payable in more coconuts per year from the more valuable varieties.

Of course, since coconuts are currency, anything that a tree produces over its taxed coconuts is profit.

However, the tax is also applicable to young trees that haven't yet begun producing coconuts. It takes 6 to 10 years for a tree to begin producing coconuts. That means that making a coconut tree plantation is going to cost you money in the short term. You're going to need to be rich to be able to afford to establish a plantation.

What happens then? People research more productive cultivars, to maximise the coconuts - and therefore the profit - per tree.

Of course, some people will try to have unregistered plantations... but if or rather when they're detected (it's hard to hide one coconut tree, let alone a whole plantation of them), the whole plantation is confiscated and the owners both fined a multiple (3x or more) of the plantation's deemed (including taxable coconuts for trees that have not yet begun to produce coconuts) total lifetime output to date and jailed for a time equal to the age of the oldest tree in the plantation.

Coconuts are a fruit, so cutting down the trees is cutting into their owners' profit. It won't happen, except if they plant a more valuable tree, and even then, it takes time for trees to grow to maturity when they start producing coconuts.

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Coconut police

The planting of coconut trees is strictly regulated by law or custom. If they find unauthorized coconut trees on your land, they come and cut them down, and then they make you dress up in a funny costume and get paraded all around the village, and THEN they make you pay for the work of cutting it down.

Go over the top.

If it adds to the joke, you could have people sneaking about planting trees on the land of those they dislike, and digging up saplings and putting them on the original planter's land in retaliation.

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The Government or Ruling Class Owns All The Cultivatable Land

Yours is a city state so land is already going to be a limited resource. The rulers will want to ensure that the populace has enough to eat (I'm not sure about the feasibility of surviving on a diet of coconuts alone). They will want space reserved for other crops and livestock too. So give your city state's government or ruling class ownership of all the cultivatable land. Thus they can control what is and isn't planted solving the problem of coconut overproduction/harvesting while ensuring there is a supply of non coconut food products.

Of course this does not give them exclusive control over coconut production as citizens can still grow the trees on private property. But again, this is a city state. How much space is the average citizen realistically going to have? Coconut bearing trees can get quite large which makes them unideal houseplants so domestic production will remain limited.

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    $\begingroup$ Why wouldn't they be able to ban coconut trees at home? They're not easy to hide, after all. $\endgroup$ Commented 2 days ago
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There is actually legit monetary theory about your style of economy: Silvio Gesell 's Freigeld.

(if you can read the German page, it's about 4 times as long and way more in depth). Or rather, Freigeld is an economic philosophy that revolves around your type of money: demurrage currency. It's been tried occasionally (though always in direct competition with other currencies and as a minor part within an otherwise non-demurrage economy) and a lot has been written about it. Ancient Egypt worked with it and a lot of places in higher medieval times (source: surface level Wikipedia reading)

Tl:dr: your money looses value over time so people want to spend it.

But that is likely far too deep for a lighhearted world so at a surface analysis: (more in-theory stuff at the end)

It's a non-issue

Your question reads like the legendary 4chan poster rediscovering agriculture. (reddit link)

What is the difference between growing money and growing stuff you exchange for money? Moneys purpose is to be exchanged for stuff so by growing money directly you're skipping the step of selling it but that's it. A somewhat minor advantage, easily overcome by the fact that people will initially favour coconut over other crops, driving up their prices (likely to the point where your time spent selling is more than worth it).

Farmland is limited, coconut-suited land even more so. If prices become too high someone will go through the effort of trying to farm the less hospitable areas (closer to the beach, further up the mountain), if they farm coconuts or rice etc.there is irrelevant. You can't simply plant trees everywhere, that's not how plants work. And as explained above, all the other plants will easily compete for growing space economically.

What about catastrophes? If let's say a fire burns down a quarter of the islands coconut trees coconuts of course gain in value. But that doesn't matter. Due to their perishability, the main end use of coconuts is being eaten. So if there's less coconut, their price goes up. Which causes the (relative) price of rice to go down so people eat more rice and less coconut, rebalancing the exchange rates. Similarly, what do non-farmers do with their money? Eat & have a roof over their head. So the prices of their labour will be relative to the competition and amount of resources in the economy. Whether there's more coconut or not in the economy doesn't matter, it's just one good of many, a more efficient barter economy. A really rich person? Feed more livestock. Which is likely to also not yield that significant return because they'll want to eat it themselves and selling a lot means meat is worth less.

Your money having real value and being backed by the real economy will by and large prevent bubbles, in- and deflation outside of changes in actual economic activity (for example industrial progress will "deflate" prices by making stuff cheaper), but within reason. Unless some non-coconut-quasi-currency like stocks, bonds, debt letters etc. are introduced.

Back to Freigeld. If you read through it (in German) you soon realise that the money part of the whole is simply assumed a given without much thought while the consequences thereof (and the required adjustments to them) are given far more thought. One of these is land reform. Due to currency loosing it's value, permanent value stores (and especially generating ones like a plantation) will see incredible price increases which should be countered by land reform as elaborated by Gesell.

One big difference to Gesell's writings however that your currency has innate value (though still depreciating), so instead of investing, you can simply eat that surplus coconut.

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Have a government strictly control the supply with laws in place to criminalize private planting. Additionally the government could mark monetary coconuts that are eligible for trade in a way that the people can't.

Realistically people will try to circumvent these regulations though.

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  • $\begingroup$ The tall coconut trees can take up to ten years after planting before they produce any nuts. That gives the tax man enough time to look for illegal growing. (Although many countries have proven that tax men can miss obvious issues for far longer.) $\endgroup$ Commented 2 days ago
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Breed sparrows. They will naturally carry off your excess coconuts. Pairs of them can handle the biggest coconuts. (Citation: “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”)

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