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 Ran Two Economies at Once. So Can We.

Running two separate economies at the same time sounds like science fiction, the kind of thing you sketch on a whiteboard at a startup and quietly abandon by lunch. It is actually archaeology. For the last two centuries of the Classic Maya kingdoms, the record shows an everyday economy that counted its money in cacao beans and cotton cloth, running alongside a prestige sphere of royal jade. The legend says two thousand years and a wall nobody could buy through. The record says something shorter, leakier, and more useful.

Two Boxes, Two Currencies

Start with the money. Cacao beans and cotton textiles took on the functions of currency among the Classic Maya in the late seventh century, according to Joanne Baron’s 2018 study of some 180 painted and carved scenes, the earliest dated 691 CE. Both goods began as status display, chocolate as a prestige drink and fine cloth as a gift, and became money as marketplaces spread among rival kingdoms. The count was standardized before the market was: a pik was 8,000 beans, the third place in the Maya base-twenty numbering. A mural at Bonampak, painted around 790, labels a bundle beside the throne “5 pik kakaw”: a tribute payment of 40,000 beans. The Aztecs later used the same count, the xiquipilli, a sack of 8,000, and Spanish tribute counts in the Izalcos region of what is now El Salvador were still using it in the 1570s.

Here is the elegant part. The currency of that layer was organic. Beans spoil, so a palace could store a tribute payment for a later transaction but could not bank a dynasty in it. The temptation to cheat was real: Spanish officials found bean shells refilled with dirt or avocado rind, and the viceroy sent samples of the counterfeits to the king in 1537. But a fortune in beans was a fortune you had to keep spending. Nature stamped an expiration date on accumulation, which is a trick we are now trying to rebuild in software through Impact and its decay curves.

Running in parallel was a prestige sphere reserved, at its top, for kings, priests and high nobles: finely carved jade, iridescent quetzal feathers, spondylus shell from distant oceans. The finest pieces moved by gift, tribute and burial, not by sale. Translucent, high-quality jadeite was reserved for the royal plaques, figurines and ear ornaments that marked a dynasty, and much of it ended sealed into caches and tombs.

The Conversion Rate That Was Steep, Not Undefined

The tempting version of this story says that no quantity of cacao beans could ever be turned into jade: a conversion rate that was not high but undefined. The archaeology says otherwise, and the correction improves the model.

Jade was not unbuyable. At Cerén in El Salvador, a farming village buried by a volcanic eruption around 600 CE, nearly every household owned a greenstone celt, and excavations across the lowlands find jadeite in commoner contexts as well as royal ones. Archaeologists conclude that jadeite reached local marketplaces, and that jade beads may themselves have served as a medium of exchange for larger purchases. What a bean-rich farmer could not buy was the top of the sphere: the named, inscribed, portrait-bearing pieces that belonged to a lineage and went into the ground with it.

So the wall was real, but it stood at the top of the prestige sphere, not at its base. The right picture is not a currency with no exchange rate. It is a market with a ceiling: you could buy jade, and you could not buy a king’s jade.

The tomb under Temple I at Tikal shows where the ceiling sat. Jasaw Chan K’awiil I, who ruled Tikal from 682 to 734, was laid to rest with jaguar skins, painted ceramics, pearls and a jade mosaic vessel whose lid carries his portrait. Around his neck went a necklace of 114 oversized jade beads weighing 3.9 kilograms, about eight and a half pounds, the same necklace his sculpted portraits show him wearing. Earlier researchers nicknamed him “Ah Cacao” before his name glyphs could be read; the Maya never called him that. The king who taxed the bean economy went into the next world wearing the one asset that economy could not buy.

Why the Wall Mattered, and What It Did Not Do

The survival money and the dynastic treasure answered to different rules, and the separation did useful work. A hoard of beans spoiled or got spent. A hoard of royal jade could be neither eaten nor sold. The separation kept the game of status from becoming a claim on the food supply, which is the design the book borrows.

Be honest about what the arrangement did not do. The throne was inherited: Jasaw was succeeded by his son, Yik’in Chan K’awiil. Royal bloodletting, the thorned rope that Lady Xoc of Yaxchilan pulls through her tongue on a lintel carved in 709, was the price of legitimacy for an inherited position, not a way to earn one. And the system neither lasted two thousand years nor ended with the Spanish. The cities of the southern lowlands, Tikal among them, declined through the eighth and ninth centuries and were abandoned soon after, some six hundred years before any European arrived. The kings and their jade went first.

The bean money outlived them by centuries. A 1525 petition from Mexico City complained that “the money they currently use is blankets, cacao, maize and such.” Before 1544 a silver real bought 200 beans; by 1560 it bought only 40. In Nicaragua in 1528 a rabbit cost ten beans and a slave a hundred. Humboldt found 72 beans exchanging for a half real in Mexico early in the nineteenth century, and Squier saw beans used as small change in El Salvador decades after that. Spain’s silver did not kill the survival currency; it merely gave it a price.

The Original 90/10 Split

If this is starting to sound familiar, it should. The Maya record is the historical ancestor of the book’s central architecture, the 90/10 Framework. The cacao layer is the Foundation: the survival economy, where access is broad, the currency is deliberately un-hoardable, and nobody acts out of desperation. The jade layer is the Frontier: the status economy, genuinely scarce at the top, reachable through contribution rather than purchase.

Two of the Maya’s failures are the design brief. Their prestige sphere was inherited, so the book makes standing something earned and decaying rather than bequeathed. Their wall was cultural, so it leaked at the bottom and vanished when the kings did; the book makes the wall mathematical, so it cannot be eroded by the next clever merchant with a warehouse full of beans, or abolished by the next collapse.

The lesson is not that we should worship the Maya. It is that the hardest design problem in post-scarcity economics, keeping the game of ambition from eating the right to eat, has a documented precedent. A couple of centuries of cacao money ran beside a jade sphere with a ceiling, and the survival currency outlived the state that taxed it. We just have to be smart enough to copy the part that lasted and fix the parts that did not.

Sources

• Joanne Baron, “Making money in Mesoamerica: Currency production and procurement in the Classic Maya financial system,” Economic Anthropology 5(2), 2018: cacao and cotton as Late Classic money (abstract; the study reported)
• Heather McKillop et al., “Demystifying jadeite: an underwater Maya discovery at Ek Way Nal, Belize,” Antiquity 93, 2019: jadeite in commoner households and local marketplaces (PDF)
• Mary Miller on the Bonampak tribute bundle, “5 pik kakaw” (Maya Art and Architecture excerpt); Maya numerals on the 8,000 count
• Tikal Temple I and Jasaw Chan K’awiil I, citing Martin and Grube, Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens, and Sharer and Traxler, The Ancient Maya: Burial 116, the 114-bead necklace, the “Ah Cacao” nickname
• Bloodletting in Mesoamerica and Yaxchilan Lintel 24, citing Schele and Miller, The Blood of Kings
• “Cacao bean use as money traced,” Numismatic News: the 1525 petition, the real exchange rates, the counterfeit beans
• Kathryn Sampeck, “Cacao money,” Mexicolore: Nicaragua in 1528, the 1570s tribute counts, Squier’s El Salvador
• Arturo Giráldez, “Cacao Beans in Colonial México: Small Change in a Global Economy,” in Money in the Preindustrial World (Cambridge University Press): Humboldt’s 72 beans to a half real (chapter)
• Classic Maya collapse: the eighth- and ninth-century decline of Tikal, Copán, Palenque and Calakmul