A thing I really appreciate about my social circle: people are unusually happy to exchange money for things and vice versa, and comfortable with making deals that involve a monetary component. E.g. someone might ask “would anyone do X for me?” And of course if you do X without any negotiation that’s nice of you and you’ll get social credit and stuff just like normal, but you can also just say “I’d be excited about doing it in trade for $Y”. And people basically won’t judge you negatively for this. It’s great because (a) sometimes you do X and get $Y and are excited about it, (b) sometimes someone does X for you and you pay them $Y and you’re happy about it, (c) sometimes you don’t do X because actually it wouldn’t have been overall good for you to do it.

And even when no money changes hands, people are comfortable expressing how much they want things in terms of dollars, and you can decide whether to do something based on whether it would be worth it to you in principle (this concept is basically the economic idea of Kaldor-Hicks efficiency).

Over the last decade I’ve become a lot more sympathetic to libertarian ideologies, and part of that has come from understanding the arguments, but a big part of it has come from just being embedded in this world where it’s really obvious how price signals are useful. I’m really grateful to the people who introduced these norms to the community, because they’ve really improved my life.