Das Coopital: A Chicken and Egg Story of the Economy

In the beginning, roving bands of people gathered fruit and plants and hunted proto-chickens, until one day they discovered that they could eat more regularly if they cultivated the plants that they ate and domesticated the chickens. Thus was born agriculture, more or less, and everyone contributed their labor in equal measure to the number of chickens they wanted to eat. It was hard work, but there was a chicken in every pot, and, perhaps, a little pot in every farmer. Life was good (except for the chickens).

…Still, the wealthy people wanted to amass more chickens, or at least more “money” which represented chickens. By this time, of course, the labor of the chicken-farming class had been augmented by cheap hydrocarbon fuels (energy that is) which, as a form of labor equivalent, further increased the production of chickens. A couple of centuries later, of course, the cheap hydrocarbon fuels began to become significantly more rare and more expensive to extract and refine (a concept embodied in the phenomenon of “peak chicken fat”, or the diminishing chicken return on chickens invested). As wealthy people continued to want to be ever wealthier, as the production of chickens by chicken farmers hit a practical wall, and as cheap hydrocarbon energy and chicken fat production began to peak, the inevitable result was that the chicken equivalent money began to represent fewer and fewer chickens. Indeed, money became so inflated that it soon represented only tiny bits and pieces of chicken beaks, chicken livers, chicken lips and gristle.

Smirking Chimp