What is good about money?

Morbius has posed these questions:

• What good things does money make possible?
• What becomes exceeding difficult without it?
• Why are there no large, complex, highly-capable nonmonetary societies?

(On that last: you might well argue that LCHC societies are not a Good Thing. But you still have to contend with the absence of any nonmonetary examples.)

Branch: What good things does money make possible?

There are lots of ways to take that question... mainly combinations of the following attributes, I think:

(1) - (a) things that wouldn't work without money, or (b) things that money makes easier but which might be done other ways?

(2) - (a) specific projects, or (b) general areas of social good?

My answers for each possible combination:

1a2a: really can't think of anything, suspect there isn't anything

1b2a: I can only think of classes of project -- basically any project where one person grasps the value of something, would find it very difficult to persuade anyone else of its value, and has the necessary money to pursue it themself.

1a2b: I'll concede that there might be some things in this category, but have not been able to think of anything.

1b2b: initiatives along the general lines of "block grants", where such projects actually do provide benefit; research grants, possibly? I could probably list more, but I'm skeptical that money (at least in its present form) actually makes these things easier than possible alternatives.

Branch: What becomes exceeding difficult without it?

Do you mean without actual money, either cash or in an externally-recognized bank account, or do you mean "what if we didn't have any way of assigning quantitative value to anything we might wish to trade", even as a system of IOUs or a general resource-usage heuristic?

Branch: Why are there no large, complex, highly-capable nonmonetary societies?

Because money aids with the centralization of power, which has enabled money-using societies to dominate non-money-using societies.