For me the best account of what money is, is David Graeber's Debt:_The_First_5000_Years. He argues that currency does not arise out of barter, but instead from fairness about reciprocal obligations, and records of debt in regard to them. The perspective he builds from the archeological and anthropological record, highlights that the real basis of wealth is in the accruing of trust and cooperation, that facilitating these is the true purpose of currency.
Graeber gave a talk on Indigenous Culture, which fits in to the dispute about human nature, which finds extremes in Rousseau's 'noble savage', and Hobbes' 'war of all against all'. In Graeber's account, based on studying the second-to-last large land mass to become populated by humans Madagascar, a behaviour like taking slaves, can only exist where technological inequality exists, and where that is not the case, ie no cities, not only do people tend to return to greater equality, but those who were most oppressed contribute to the new culture most, instilling an ethic that strongly acts against emerging inequality. So he sees the 'noble savage' not as a default loaded on to an otherwise blank slate, but as a more stable state, with a tendancy to both reccur & persist.
Alexander MacKenzie, the first person to cross the Americas North of Mexico, was only able to do so after being forcibly re-educated by native Canadian tribes (similarly to The Mayflower colonists requiring similar support/education). It is notable that he is advised how to plan his route around violently hostile tribes. Those would not benefit from trade networks, or the kind of support for the unlucky MacKenzie benefited from. Though we can't know how much the plains tribes were changed by European contact, especially disease, it seems broadly in practice, tribes had a mix of strategies. This for me points to game theory.
I discuss the emergence of moral cultures from game theory here, note in particular ethics as about maintaining unstable equilibria with mutual benefits, over lose-lose outcomes
Is it possible for morality to exist?
And I discussed tyrannicide and the social contract from game theory here, nb free-rider problems and the emergence of groups insulated from selection causing instability Is the tyrannicide perpetrated by William Tell morally legitimate?
Economists Pickett & Wilkinson wrote The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, and The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone's Well-Being. Their tightly reasoned and strongly evidenced case, goes against trickle-down economics and Randian ethic of mutually-beneficial selfishness, which have proved completely unevidencable, & inneffective, in practice - to the extent we can declare them completely untethered from reality, more like harmful meme-viruses. While these untethered views can be seen as 'pure ideology', we can also understand game-theoretical stasis of an all-powerful state as intrinsically problematic too, building a free-rider problem, and becoming vulnerable to the expanding power of social systems that build trust & cooperation more efficiently.
Probably one of the most significant philosophical contributions to this emerging picture of the need for maintenance of a dynamic balance between individualistic selfishness & total reliance on state-provision, is effective altruism, popularised by Peter Singer who's 'expanding circle of moral concern' helps us see that welfare of non-humans should concern us too, in the wider picture of economic & power inequalities.
I would relate the requirement for a welfare system, to habeus corpus. Once trial by a jury of peers was an established right, the death penalty for stealing to feed a starving family could not result in a prosecution. So state provision had to be made, so that circumstance wasn't inevitable. Situations of rapid impoverishment, pandemics, economic collapses, or war, have tended to challenge, basically lies, about the poor. WW1 forced the British state to recognise that rickets & other consequences of poverty permanently damaged large numbers of people, in ways that could be cheaply fixed. New York & the scale of food insecurity among children during the covid pandemic, may shine a similar spotlight.
In conclusion. Stasis is bad, & can fossilise inequality & force a social systems destruction internally or externally. Having smaller-group or individualist ethics can help prevent stasis, but impose substantial social costs. Small universal costs, can create an unstable equilbria, that is mutually beneficial, and rational agents should seek this. Allowing talented and motivated people to succeed rather than be crippled by childhood circumstances, is always better for the community as a whole, and having an elite insulated from any need to have competance creates a free-rider problem that destroys societies more than any other circumstance, as they fail to adapt.
