Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.
The Inca Had No Money. They Also Had No Famine.
How 12 million people coordinated civilization’s largest pre-modern infrastructure project—without markets, merchants, or a single coin
The Punchline Before the Setup
Here’s a fact that should short-circuit your economic assumptions:
The Inca Empire—spanning 4,000 kilometers of some of the most brutal terrain on Earth, coordinating 12 million people across deserts, jungles, and mountains so high they make Denver look like a beach town—operated for nearly a century without money. Without markets. Without a merchant class. Without prices.
And they didn’t starve.
In fact, Spanish chroniclers arriving in 1533 noted something that baffled them: the storehouses were full. Warehouses containing 3-7 years of food reserves. Clothing, tools, weapons—all meticulously inventoried. No one had to buy anything because everything essential was simply… provided.
“Each citizen of the empire was issued the necessities of life out of the state storehouses, including food, tools, raw materials, and clothing, and needed to purchase nothing,” reported the Spanish, their conquistador brains struggling to parse an economy that had no buying or selling.
The Inca may have been “the only advanced civilization in history to have no class of traders, and no commerce of any kind within its boundaries.”
For those of us designing The Foundation—the abundance infrastructure where essential needs become guaranteed access rather than market transactions—this isn’t ancient trivia. It’s proof of concept. With Stone Age technology and knotted strings for record-keeping, the Inca built what we’re only now imagining with AI and fusion reactors.
Let’s see how they pulled it off.
The Qollqas: Amazon Warehouses Before Amazon
Engineering Abundance Into Stone
Forget Jeff Bezos. The Inca invented the fulfillment center.
The qollqas (pronounced roughly “KOHL-kahs”) were a network of thousands of precisely engineered storage facilities that turned food security from a prayer into a structural condition. This wasn’t warehousing—it was infrastructure design philosophy made physical.
The numbers are obscene:
- 2,573 qollqas at Cochabamba (Bolivia)—the empire’s largest complex
- 1,717 qollqas at Campo de Pucara (Argentina)
- 1,000 qollqas at Paria
- 497 qollqas at Huánuco Pampa
- Storage facilities positioned every 22 kilometers along 40,000+ kilometers of royal highways—one day’s march between rest stations
And here’s the engineering flex: these weren’t crude granaries. They were passive climate-control systems that would make a modern architect weep with envy.
The Design:
- Circular buildings for maize (approximately 10 feet in height and diameter)
- Rectangular ones for potatoes and root vegetables
- Built on hillsides to capture drainage and cooling winds
- Staggered arrangements maximizing air circulation
- Gravel substrates beneath floors for moisture control
- Ventilation channels integrated into masonry walls
- Thatched roofs of ichu grass providing insulation
The Results:
- Standard crops (maize, quinoa): 1-2 years storage life
- Freeze-dried potatoes (chuño) and jerky (ch’arki): 2-4 years
- Some products reportedly stored up to 10 years
No refrigeration. No preservatives. No electricity. Just stone, grass, gravity, and a civilization-level understanding of thermodynamics.
The qollqas stored everything: food, textiles, wool, tools, weapons, gold vessels, seeds for future planting. They weren’t emergency rations—they were the infrastructure layer that made markets unnecessary.
When you can simply access what you need from a warehouse designed to never run out, why would you invent prices?
Mit’a: The Original “Labor Tax” (Except It Actually Worked)
How to Build a Continent Without Wages
Here’s the obvious question: who built all this?
The answer was mit’a (Quechua for “a turn” or “seasonal labor”)—a rotating labor obligation where every able-bodied male between 15 and 50 contributed work to collective projects.
Before you cry “slavery,” understand the math: The Inca Empire’s agricultural productivity meant a typical family needed only 65 days per year to farm their own land. The rest of their time was… free. Mit’a claimed a portion of that free time for empire-building.
What mit’a built:
- The Qhapaq Ñan: 30,000+ kilometers of paved roads (longer than the Roman road network)
- Agricultural terraces (andenes) that still function today, 500 years later
- Irrigation systems, canals, and aqueducts
- Suspension bridges spanning Andean gorges
- Thousands of qollqas across the empire
- Temples, fortifications, and administrative centers
The reciprocal deal:
In exchange for labor, the state guaranteed:
- Food, tools, and clothing during work periods
- Protection for the worker’s family back home
- Access to stored goods during hardship
- Healthcare and support for widows, orphans, the disabled, and the elderly
This was contribution with visible return. You built roads you traveled on. Storehouses that fed your family during bad harvests. Terraces that expanded productive land in your region. The connection between input and output was direct, tangible, and undeniable.
Contrast this with, say, paying taxes that disappear into a federal budget and maybe contribute to a highway you’ll never drive on three states away. The Inca weren’t naive idealists—they were systems designers who understood that cooperation requires demonstrated reciprocity.
Quipu: Blockchain Before Computers
How to Run an Empire Without Writing
Here’s the part that breaks economists’ brains:
The Inca had no written language. No paper. No alphabet.
They tracked 12 million people’s census data, labor contributions, inventory levels, and tribute flows across a 4,000-kilometer empire using knotted strings.
The quipu (or khipu, meaning “knot” in Quechua) was an information encoding system of genuinely staggering sophistication:
Structure:
- A primary cord with hanging pendant strings
- Knots in strings representing numbers in base-10 positional notation (yes, they independently invented the zero)
- Color-coded strings for different categories
- Subsidiary strings for detailed subcategories
What quipus recorded:
- Census data: population by age, sex, marital status
- Labor records: who served, who was due
- Inventory: exact counts in each qollqa
- Tribute: textiles, llama herds, chicha (corn beer), preserved food
- Military organization
- Possibly historical and narrative information (still being decoded)
The quipucamayocs:
Specialized administrators trained for years in yachaywasi (“houses of learning”) maintained the system. Larger towns might have 30 quipucamayocs functioning as government statisticians, census takers, accountants, and historians.
About 1,400 pre-Columbian quipus survive today. Researchers are still discovering new encoding schemes—the system was far more complex than simple counting.
Think about this: the Inca achieved administrative coordination that rivaled any contemporary bureaucracy—tracking resources, allocating labor, maintaining 3-7 years of food reserves across thousands of warehouses—using knots in string. No computers. No paper. No writing.
And we claim we can’t coordinate abundance because “the logistics are too complex.”
The quipu is history’s biggest flex against that excuse.
Distribution Without Markets: The Impossible Economy
No Money, No Problem
The Inca flow of goods looked like this:
Production:
- Each ayllu (community) worked collective land
- Harvests divided: community needs first, surplus to state
- Artisans produced goods through mit’a labor
- Everything tracked via quipu
Storage:
- Surplus flowed to qollqas at local, regional, and imperial levels
- Inventories maintained by quipucamayocs
- Multiple years of reserves accumulated
Distribution:
- Citizens received necessities from state storehouses
- No purchase necessary—access was a right
- Distribution tracked and balanced across regions
When drought hit one region, stored food moved from surplus areas. When crops failed, reserves released. No price spikes. No hoarding for profit. No market speculation turning scarcity into opportunity.
The result: “There was no starvation in the Inca period.”
This wasn’t propaganda or idealization—it was the structural outcome of designing distribution around need rather than purchasing power. When you eliminate the mechanism for profiting from scarcity, scarcity stops being a business model.
The Operating System: Ayni and Minka
The Inca imperial system didn’t invent cooperation from scratch. It scaled principles that Andean communities had developed over millennia of mountain survival.
Ayni (reciprocity/mutual aid):
When you help your neighbor, you create an obligation for future return. Not strict accounting—a web of mutual support. The word extends beyond humans to include relationship with Pachamama (Earth Mother). Still practiced in Andean villages today.
Minka (collective labor):
Community work days for projects beyond individual capacity—construction, irrigation, planting. Participants fed and supplied by the hosting family or village. Social bonds strengthened through shared effort.
The Inca genius was recognizing that village-scale practices could become empire-scale infrastructure:
- Ayni → Mit’a (neighbor reciprocity → state labor service)
- Minka → Monumental construction
- Ayllu self-governance → Decimal administration
The state didn’t replace community—it federated community principles to coordinate at continental scale.
Sound familiar? It should. It’s precisely the architecture of The MOSAIC: local autonomy for local matters, coordination for collective infrastructure.
The Inconvenient Truths
Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging what the Inca system wasn’t:
It wasn’t democratic. The Sapa Inca (emperor) held absolute power. Local leaders (curacas) had autonomy but within imperial parameters. You couldn’t vote the system out.
It wasn’t voluntary. Mit’a labor was mandatory. You served your turn whether you felt like it or not.
It was fragile in a specific way. When the Spanish captured Atahualpa in 1532, the entire coordination mechanism collapsed. Too much depended on the center.
It was designed for agriculture, not innovation. The system optimized for stability and redundancy, not rapid change. No answer to the Industrial Revolution problem.
These aren’t minor caveats—they’re fundamental limitations. A modern baseline infrastructure must address them through:
- Democratic governance (The Diversity Guard)
- Distributed authority (The MOSAIC)
- Contribution that’s meaningful but not coerced (The Civic Service)
- Systems designed for change, not just stability
The Inca proved moneyless coordination is possible. The question is whether we can build a version that’s also good.
The Lessons Worth Keeping
What survives the honest critique:
1. Storage is the foundation of abundance.
The qollqas weren’t an afterthought—they were the central infrastructure that made everything else possible. Modern baseline infrastructure needs equivalent reserves: guaranteed access that’s structural, not dependent on continuous production.
2. Contribution without transaction can work.
Mit’a succeeded because it was clear, bounded, reciprocal, and produced visible results. Automation may provide the labor, but baseline infrastructure still needs transparency showing how collective systems serve individual needs.
3. Decentralized administration, federated coordination.
The decimal system allowed local decision-making within imperial coordination. Curacas weren’t eliminated—they were integrated. This is precisely how The MOSAIC should function.
4. Information infrastructure enables everything.
The quipu system made coordination possible. Modern equivalents (distributed ledgers, real-time inventory, contribution tracking) serve the same function—just without the knots.
5. Redundancy over efficiency.
The Inca kept 3-7 years of food reserves. Modern supply-chain optimization would call this “waste.” The Inca called it “no famines.”
6. No money doesn’t mean no accounting.
They tracked everything meticulously—they just didn’t use prices. The question isn’t whether to measure; it’s what you measure: market value or human need.
The Proof of Possibility
The Inca coordinated 12 million people across impossible terrain for nearly a century without money, without markets, and without a merchant class.
They achieved food security through engineering. They built continental infrastructure through rotational contribution. They distributed goods through tracked allocation rather than purchase.
And they did it with knotted strings and stone warehouses.
When skeptics ask whether The Foundation is possible—whether essential needs can be guaranteed as infrastructure rather than purchased through markets—the Inca answer is: yes.
The qollqas are still standing, 500 years later. The terraces still grow crops. The roads still carry travelers.
The question isn’t whether moneyless abundance infrastructure can work. History already answered that.
The question is whether we’re ready to build the version that’s also free.
Sources
- Qullqa - Wikipedia
- Mit’a - Wikipedia
- Quipu - Wikipedia
- Ayni - Wikipedia
- Economy of the Inca Empire - Wikipedia
- Inca Empire - Wikipedia
- Smithsonian - How Were Food and Supplies Stored for the Inka Empire?
- Harvard Library - The Quipu Accounting Systems
- NIST - How Standards Enabled the Inca Empire to Thrive
- World History Encyclopedia - Quipu
- Gizmodo - The Greatest Mystery of the Inca Empire Was Its Strange Economy
- PBS NOVA - A Marvel of Inca Engineering
