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 Maya Dual Economy: 2,000 Years of the 90/10 Split
How Cacao Beans and Jade Created History’s Most Stable Two-Tier Economic System
Here’s a thought experiment: You’re designing an economy from scratch. You need to solve two contradictory problems. First, everyone has to eat, trade, and live—so you need a currency that’s liquid, divisible, and accessible to the farmer and the widow and the artisan. Second, you need to prevent rich people from simply buying power—because every civilization that lets wealth convert directly to political authority eventually collapses into oligarchy.
Most societies fail this test. Rome tried gold and silver. The wealthy accumulated it, bought legions, and the Republic died. Modern capitalism uses dollars. Jeff Bezos can’t literally purchase a Senate seat, but… well, you see the problem.
The ancient Maya? They cracked it. For roughly two thousand years—longer than Rome, longer than the British Empire, longer than most civilizations even exist—they ran a dual-tier economy that solved both problems simultaneously.
Their secret? Chocolate and jade.
Chocolate: The People’s Money
The Maya never minted coins. They never developed metal currency. Instead, they stumbled onto something elegant: dried cacao beans as universal medium of exchange.
This wasn’t primitive barter. Archaeologist Joanne Baron analyzed roughly 180 different scenes on ceramics and murals from 691 CE through 900 CE, revealing something extraordinary: a fully standardized monetary system. The images consistently depict commodities delivered to Maya leaders as tribute—and the items appearing most frequently are pieces of woven cloth and bags labeled with the quantity of dried cacao beans they contain.
The Maya standardized this through a unit called the pik: 8,000 cacao beans, stored in cloth bags. This wasn’t arbitrary—it was deliberate monetary engineering that allowed a farmer in Tikal to transact with a merchant from Copán using identical units of account.
And here’s where it gets interesting: Maya kings were collecting way more cacao than any palace could consume. Baron’s research found that of approximately 11 million beans collected annually as taxes, only about 2 million went to dietary consumption. The remaining 9 million? That was the treasury. That was money.
The Price of Everything
Spanish colonial records from the 16th century captured this pricing system in remarkable detail:
| Item | Price (Cacao Beans) |
|---|---|
| 1 tamale | 1 bean |
| 1 turkey egg | 3 beans |
| 1 rabbit | 10 beans |
| 1 turkey | 20-100 beans |
| Porter services (1 trip) | 20 beans |
| Cotton cloak | 65-300 beans |
| 1 slave | 100 beans |
By 1545, Spanish administrators established a fixed exchange rate: 200 cacao beans = 1 Spanish real (about 26 grams of silver). In modern terms? A tamale cost roughly 8 cents.
This was the Maya Foundation: an economy where everyone could participate. A farmer could buy food. An artisan could purchase materials. A widow could feed her children. No credit scores. No bank accounts. No exclusion.
Why Chocolate Worked (The Secret Sauce)
Cacao possessed several properties that made it perfect as baseline currency—and here’s where economics students should take notes:
Divisibility: Unlike jade or gold, you could break cacao into any quantity. One bean for a tamale. Eight thousand for a major purchase. Try doing that with a gold bar.
Universal Demand: Everyone wanted cacao. The Maya considered it a gift from the gods—literally sacred. It was nutritious, delicious when prepared as a beverage, and held deep ritual significance. There’s no “fiat currency” problem when your money is also dessert.
Natural Scarcity (But Not Too Scarce): Cacao trees are notoriously finicky. They require specific humidity, rainfall, and soil conditions. The largest growing regions—along the Grijalva River in Tabasco—were far from major population centers. This natural scarcity prevented inflation while ensuring steady supply.
And here’s the genius part: Built-in Decay.
Cacao beans had a shelf life of approximately one year. Then they rotted.
Modern economists might call this a bug. The Maya knew it was a feature.
Decay prevents hoarding. It encourages spending. It keeps velocity of money high. And critically, it prevents the accumulation dynamics that concentrate wealth in every monetary system based on non-perishable metals.
You cannot store your way to power when your money has an expiration date.
As the Spanish colonial observer José de Acosta noted: “With five cacao beans one thing can be bought, and with thirty another, and with a hundred another, without haggling.”
This wasn’t primitive. This was sophisticated monetary engineering—a functioning market economy accessible to everyone, with built-in structural safeguards against wealth concentration.
Jade and Feathers: The Ascent They Couldn’t Buy
But wait—didn’t the Maya have rich people? Didn’t they have kings, nobles, elites?
Of course they did. And here’s where the second tier kicks in.
While cacao circulated freely among all social classes, a parallel economy existed for the elite—one based on materials that could never function as everyday currency because they served a completely different purpose.
Jade. Quetzal feathers. Spondylus shells. Pyrite mirrors.
These weren’t just expensive items. They were categorically different: prestige goods that could not be purchased with any quantity of cacao beans.
Read that again. No matter how many chocolate beans you accumulated, you could not buy jade. You could not purchase quetzal feathers. The conversion rate wasn’t “very high”—it was undefined.
The Jade Monopoly
All Maya jade came from a single source: the Motagua River Valley in what is now Guatemala. The geological conditions that create jadeite—high pressure and low temperature along the earthquake fault between the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates—exist nowhere else in Mesoamerica.
The Maya understood this. And they controlled it ruthlessly.
The site of Kaminaljuyú became a dominant Preclassic capital specifically because it controlled access to the Motagua Valley jade sources. Later, Copán established the city of Quiriguá in 426 CE explicitly to control Motagua River trade. Wars were fought over these routes.
But here’s the structural point: jade could not be grown, harvested, or produced by ordinary people. You could not accumulate enough beans to buy your way into jade ownership. You had to be connected—part of the network of elite exchange that distributed these materials through diplomatic gifts, royal marriages, and tribute relationships.
The dual economy wasn’t about price. It was about access.
The Bird That Was Worth Your Life
Nothing illustrates the categorical barrier between economies better than quetzal feathers.
The resplendent quetzal, native to the cloud forests of Central America, produces iridescent green tail feathers that the Maya considered sacred—associated with the god Kukulkan. These feathers appeared in royal headdresses, ceremonial regalia, and religious artifacts.
Under Maya law, only the elite could possess quetzal feathers.
The restriction went further: killing a quetzal was punishable by death. Since quetzals died in captivity and couldn’t be domesticated, the feathers had to be obtained by capturing wild birds, carefully plucking their tail feathers, and releasing them. This required access to remote cloud forest territories—access that was itself controlled by elite networks.
This wasn’t arbitrary cruelty. It was system architecture. The Maya created legal and practical barriers that made it structurally impossible for baseline wealth to convert into prestige goods. No matter how successful a merchant became, they could not transform themselves into nobility by purchasing jade and quetzal feathers.
Contrast this with Rome, where a successful businessman could buy his way into the Equestrian class. Or with modern America, where sufficient wealth purchases influence, access, and eventually policy. The Maya built a firewall. And it held for two millennia.
Why the Separation Mattered
Modern economists might see this as mere inequality—the rich hoarding luxury goods while the poor made do with “chocolate money.” That misses the structural genius entirely.
The two economies served different functions:
The cacao economy enabled coordination: buying, selling, paying taxes, hiring labor, exchanging goods across the Maya world. It was optimized for liquidity, accessibility, and velocity.
The prestige economy enabled signaling: demonstrating fitness for leadership, cementing alliances between city-states, marking ritual authority, maintaining social cohesion across generations. It was optimized for exclusivity, permanence, and symbolic power.
The Maya didn’t try to make one system do both jobs. They recognized what modern societies keep forgetting: coordination and signaling require different economic architectures.
Gold can’t be both common enough for daily transactions and rare enough to signal elite status. The dollar can’t be both a universal medium of exchange and a marker of political legitimacy. But cacao and jade? Each does its job perfectly.
The Archaeological Evidence (Yes, This Actually Happened)
The Maya dual economy isn’t a theoretical reconstruction. It’s demonstrated through extensive archaeological evidence across major sites.
Tikal: Lord Chocolate’s Tomb
Temple I at Tikal was constructed in the mid-eighth century as a mortuary structure for one of the greatest Maya kings: Jasaw Chan K’awiil I, also known as Ah Cacao—literally “Lord Chocolate.”
His very name reflects the economic reality: the king who controlled cacao controlled the baseline economy.
His tomb contained extraordinary grave goods: jaguar pelts, pyrite mirrors, shell ornaments, intricately carved bone. But the jade assemblage was staggering—a necklace of over 114 pieces weighing 8.6 pounds. Additional jade artifacts found throughout the tomb demonstrate the concentration of prestige goods at the apex of society.
Lord Chocolate controlled chocolate. But he was buried in jade. Two systems. Two currencies. One civilization.
Copán: The Lady in Red
Copán’s strategic importance derived directly from its position near the jade sources. In 426 CE, a Tikal prince established a dynasty there specifically to control Motagua River trade.
Deep in Copán’s acropolis, archaeologists discovered the tomb of a woman believed to be the wife of the founding king. She was buried wearing a skirt made of thousands of jade sequins, accompanied by ceramics, jade ornaments, and mother-of-pearl necklaces.
This single burial contained more jade than an ordinary family would see in generations. That’s not inequality. That’s a categorical distinction—a physical manifestation of the boundary between economies.
Palenque: War for the Money Supply
The political significance of the dual economy becomes clear in Palenque’s history.
In the early 7th century, war broke out between three polities—Piedras Negras, Palenque, and Calakmul—competing for control over the Tabasco cacao-growing region. When Calakmul eventually gained control, they secured a regular supply of cacao that fueled their rise to dominance.
This wasn’t a war for luxury goods. It was a war for monetary infrastructure—control of the supply that made the baseline economy function. Control the money, control the civilization.
2,000 Years: Why It Lasted
The Maya dual economy operated from approximately 2000 BCE through the Spanish conquest—a span rivaling the Roman Empire and ancient Egypt combined. What made it so stable?
Built-In Anti-Accumulation
The decay of cacao beans prevented dynasty-building through the baseline economy. You couldn’t store your way to power. Whatever you accumulated would rot within a year if not spent. This kept the Foundation economy fluid and accessible to each new generation.
Compare this to medieval Europe, where gold coins accumulated across generations, creating entrenched aristocracies. Or to modern capitalism, where wealth compounds through interest and inheritance. The Maya system had a structural circuit breaker.
Categorical Barriers
The separation between economies wasn’t merely price-based. Jade and quetzal feathers were legally and practically inaccessible regardless of baseline wealth. This prevented the conversion of commercial success into political authority—the problem that has plagued every society using unified precious-metal currencies.
Distributed Control
Unlike palace economies (such as those that collapsed in the Bronze Age Mediterranean), the Maya system distributed economic agency across the population. The cacao economy allowed:
- Farmers to sell surplus production
- Artisans to trade their crafts
- Merchants to profit from regional exchange
- Workers to receive payment for labor
This created resilience. When individual city-states collapsed—as many did during the Terminal Classic period (800-900 CE)—the economic infrastructure survived. Markets continued. Trade continued. People adapted.
Some scholars, including Baron, speculate that climate disruptions affecting cacao production may have contributed to regional instabilities. But anthropologist David Freidel notes that cacao wasn’t the only element of the economy: “My guess is that one commodity crashing would not cause the system to crash.”
What Finally Broke It
The system survived the Classic Maya collapse of 800-900 CE, regional droughts, inter-city warfare, and the reorganization from Classic to Postclassic political structures.
What finally ended it was the Spanish conquest—and specifically, the introduction of unified metal currency that erased the categorical distinction between baseline and prestige economies.
When everything became purchasable with gold and silver, the barriers that had maintained social stability for two millennia dissolved. Spanish colonial records show cacao beans continuing as currency well into the 1700s—a testament to how deeply embedded the system was. But the dual structure was gone, replaced by the European model where sufficient wealth could buy anything.
Including power.
Blueprint for the Foundation & The Ascent
Now here’s why this matters for Unscarcity.
The Maya dual economy offers a concrete historical precedent for the Foundation & Frontier framework proposed in the Unscarcity vision. This isn’t utopian speculation. It’s reverse-engineering something that actually worked.
The Structural Parallel
| Maya System | Unscarcity Framework |
|---|---|
| Cacao baseline economy (accessible to all) | The Foundation (90% of goods/services as universal access) |
| Jade/quetzal prestige economy (elite only) | The Ascent (10% requiring Impact Points) |
| Decay prevents hoarding | Impact Points decay prevents permanent hierarchies |
| Legal barriers between tiers | Categorical distinction between Foundation and Ascent |
| Natural scarcity of prestige materials | Structural scarcity of Ascent access |
| Status from connection and contribution | Standing from contribution to civilization |
The Lessons
Lesson 1: Two economies can coexist productively. The Maya didn’t try to create a unified system. They recognized that coordination and signaling require different architectures. The Unscarcity model similarly distinguishes between The Foundation (where no economy exists—access is a right) and The Ascent (where Impact Points enable contribution-based priority).
Lesson 2: Decay prevents tyranny. Cacao’s natural expiration prevented generational wealth accumulation in the baseline economy. Impact Points, with built-in decay, serve the same function: influence must be continuously earned, not inherited. (See: Axiom IV: Power Must Decay)
Lesson 3: Categorical barriers matter. The Maya didn’t just make jade expensive—they made it structurally inaccessible. The Foundation & Frontier framework similarly requires that baseline abundance cannot be converted into frontier privilege through any amount of accumulation. The tiers are architecturally separate.
Lesson 4: Distributed systems survive. Unlike Bronze Age palace economies that collapsed catastrophically when central authority failed, the Maya system continued functioning even as individual city-states fell. The MOSAIC governance model takes this lesson seriously.
Lesson 5: Embodiment helps. Cacao and jade were physical objects with inherent properties—divisibility, decay, scarcity—that reinforced their economic functions. Digital systems designing similar architectures should consider how to make abstract tokens feel as real and constrained as chocolate beans and green stone.
The 2,000-Year Test
When skeptics ask whether a dual-tier economy can actually work—whether humans will accept categorical limitations on what wealth can buy—the Maya provide empirical evidence.
It worked for longer than Rome lasted.
The Maya didn’t require utopian transformation of human nature. They designed systems that channeled ordinary human motivations—desire for status, fear of deprivation, drive for achievement—into stable social structures.
That’s the lesson. Not that humans must become angels, but that systems can be designed better. The Maya did it with chocolate and jade. We can do it with abundance and contribution.
History has already run the experiment. The results are in.
References
- Baron, Joanne. “Making money in Mesoamerica: Currency production and procurement in the Classic Maya financial system.” Economic Anthropology, 2018. https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sea2.12118
- “The Maya Civilization Used Chocolate as Money.” Science, 2018. https://www.science.org/content/article/maya-civilization-used-chocolate-money
- “The Resplendent Quetzal in Aztec and Mayan Culture.” BirdLife DataZone. https://datazone.birdlife.org/articles/the-resplendent-quetzal-in-aztec-and-mayan-culture
- “Motagua River Valley: Source of All Maya Jade Found in Belize.” Belize with Alvin. https://belizewithalvin.com/source-of-all-maya-jade-found-in-belize/
- “Trade in Maya Civilization.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_in_Maya_civilization
- “Economy of the Maya Civilization.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Maya_civilization
- “Jade Use in Mesoamerica.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jade_use_in_Mesoamerica
- “Beanz Meanz Money!” Mexicolore. https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/maya/chocolate/beanz-meanz-money
- Chase, Diane Z., and Arlen F. Chase. “Ancient Maya Economics: Models, Markets, and Trade Routes.” Frontiers in Human Dynamics, 2025. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-dynamics/articles/10.3389/fhumd.2025.1577960/full
