Learning to buy

Over the last couple of weeks, Helena has become... well, "obsessed" is too strong a word, but certainly very concerned, about economics.  Specifically, she wants to understand what allows us to go into a store and take certain things home, while we don't or can't take others.  She seems to have resolved this conundrum with a single word, "pagou." (Paid).

Helena's concern with payment serves as a way to de-normalize something that we do every day.  It seems so normal to buy stuff, but in fact it's a relatively new and strange way to exchange good and services.  For most of human history, barter and other informal forms of exchange were much more common, as were sharing, potlatch, and completely non-commencial forms of distributing goods.  It takes a lot of work for a baby to understand how capitalism works.

It's not just babies, of course: people from traditionally non-capitalist cultures famously have a hard time adapting to the money economy.  I remember very clearly, for instance, the way that the cooking oil market worked in Cazucá, a shantytown above Bogotá where I worked for many years.  Most of the people who lived there were refugees from the war, peasants, indigenous people, and traditional blacks who were used to subsistence agriculture as the basic way to sustain themselves.  They had always grown their own crops, shared a successful hunt or catch of fish with everyone (knowing that others would do the same later), and bartered their produce for things they didn't grow themselves.  Then suddenly, in Bogotá, none of those resources were available.

Cooking oil, then: these refugees bought oil each day, just enough to fry what they wanted to cook that day.  Unfortunately, however, buying in small amounts made bad economic sense: in 10 days, they might spend five dollars on oil, while if they had bought the same amount all at once, they would have spent less than a dollar.  If we think about why these people spent so much of their salary on food, and had so little to save or invest, knowledge of how capitalism works was part of it.  (Another serious problem was that the paramilitary gangs controlled the oil market, and they had a vested interest in people not learning.)

Helena Iara is just learning this stuff as we shop.  Not an easy lesson, but an important one.