Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Value, Values and the New Economy




Money does not do that.











Unknown said...

Nice one. Your opening paragraph is exactly what got me into thinking about this whole money/currency thing.

No Lawn Sean said...

ahh wellness, the true goal of a regenerative way of tracking flows(currency). I am interested in the ability of these currencies to fund positive spirals of change based on building soil. Does this still necessitate the use of money based currency? If we are building lifeboats, are these the places to begin the upward spiral?

ChrisJCook said...

We've got to get to the gift economy from here, and I believe that this is possible within a market economy - provided it is a market operating on a "Not for Loss" basis - as Dr Yunus describes "Social businessws".

This presentation of mine

aimed to set out how that might be done...

Arthur Brock said...

Wow! I received a huge flurry of responses to this post on my Facebook page. Many of them raised the concern about the conflict between currencies and gift economies. I am posting my response here:

You should know that previous posts in the blog make one thing clear: although in day-to-day English we use the words currency and money interchangeably, we are reclaiming the word currency to be something much more powerful.

Currencies are the tools which allow communities to interact with currents or flows. And flows are what make living systems healthy and alive: flows of trust, sharing, caring, giving, knowledge, wisdom, etc.

Gift Economies revolve around social contract. Even in a family, someone may be "disowned" by breaking this contract.

In our global family, we don't have indicators of who is honoring what social contracts. Currencies (not money, but feedback, metrics and ratings) are the means by which we can see these things.

Reputation currencies do not commoditize gifts because they are not measuring the VALUE of the gifts, rather are being an indicator of who are givers.

Deep in our nature, we are generous. People are hungry to participate in gift economies which nourish their communities. But because of our recent 500 years of artificially scarce, dehumanizing money, there is also mistrust.

If you can address 3 concerns, almost everybody is willing to play in a gift economy:
1. Honesty: I am not getting duped, conned or fleeced.
2. Equity: The gift economy is not imbalanced / I don't have to carry freeloaders.
3. Shared Value: The gift economy creates value for all of us.

You'll find that for communities larger than 150 people or so (like 6 billion+) the first two require reputation currencies. And the third requires NO currency, just the experience of sometimes receiving value from the community that you give to.

This means that MONEY puts the emphasis on exactly the wrong part of the picture as far as gift economies are concerned.

So for all of you who read this article with the idea that currency = money, you were RIGHT to be concerned.

Unknown said...

So Arthur is your argument then that our societies have no way of valuing these other flows? That we don't have "currency" to lubricate our giving?

I would tend to disagree. But, if I were to accept the need for these additional currencies - would this be in the hope of taking a certain amount of "influence" away from money and its destructive nature?

Another question. Are these currencies you talk about just physical manifestations of cultural norms?

Eric Harris-Braun said...


I think the point is that not about "valuing" the other flows, it's just about seeing them in the first place. At the large scale, the social body as a whole, and individuals that make it up, can hardly see items 1 & 2, much less changes in them. Reputation currencies, perfomance metric currencies, etc make those things visible first, and as a consequence activate changes in them.

Your last question reminds me of the fact that language doesn't just describe reality, it also creates it. Or perhaps more acurately, we use language to describe reality, but the structure of our language creates our reality. The same is true about these currencies. We use them to reflect cultural norms, but their structure creates cultural norms. For example, there is a huge cultural norm around competition. About how good and necessary it is, and how important it is to teach boys (especially) how to compete. I'm quite certain that that cultural norm is in large part created by the structure of our monetary system that because of its inherent scarcity requires competition.

Thus, as we create new currencies of all sorts, we can start to rewire such cultural norms, and we can also create currencies that do actually reinforce or match cultural norms that we have that we like.

Citizen Cane said...

you make my head hurt. You completely misunderstand economics at its most fundamental level. Not only do you have no understanding of capitalism but you don't understand what money fundamentally is. This is the biggest problem I have with local currencies. I think the Idea of a currency which is not owned or operated by the Government is a great Idea but only if it has basis in reality. Sharing resources can be a great thing especially if it saves money. Money is more than just paper bills electronic numbers or such, money is fundamentally the evaluation of one mans contribution to another happiness. Wealth as properly defined is not an accumulation of stuff you are right. Wealth is the accumulation of money ie Consumption < Production. A farmer who does not consume his entire field of wheat but instead trades a portion of it for silver coins has changed the produced goods for a marker which says "I produced X number of bushels of wheat of which I only consumed Y"