thanks for your comments. would you like to talk more about this sometime soon on skype perhaps? my username: venessamiemis

Second and on the matter. The convo is amazingly huge so I’m not sure that I got all the points but I’ll touch on the ones I think you guys did mention. ‘Money has become the aim’ I agree and also agree that such situation needs to change. However, that any and every type of currency is an indication of failure in society, I don’t agree. Neither I think that an economy should work only on the basis of the intangible. Both the intangible and the physical have real value, and focusing just in making an economy be efficient on one of the two, by completely neglecting the other, I don’t believe is the wisest thing to do.

Not sure but I didn’t see any comments on Mutual Credit Systems or LETS, which are, as far as I know, the most common of the complementary currencies. All currencies, including time banks and mutual credit systems are created out of debt. The difference is on who issues the money. In the current mainstream economy, there is a monopoly on the issue of money. In the complementary systems design to build economy, there is still an authority but the aim is to ensure local circulation of the currency. In complementary systems like time banks and mutual credit systems, each person issues the money at the time of trading. You gave me ‘X’, therefore you debit my account and credit yours and there you have money.

Mutual credit systems are of my preference because they imply a change in the mind set regarding money. Trust is encouraged because you can have negative balances…that is, you don’t need to have money in order to obtain what you need. Please read Thomas Greco on this topic.

Bernard Lietaer has a series of articles that argue that both physical and non physical need to exist in order to ensure sustainability. If you go to my blog, the only discussion topic that I’ve written so far, has my thoughts on this. The idea that all should be worked out in terms of knowledge or the intangible is I think, very valid one. However, I’m not sure whether we can reach that state by skipping the one when we reassess the use of money and explore other options of currency.

Money is not bad per se. I think it is rather our relationship with it what is in conflict. In the end, if we see money as just an information system, then the problem is reduced in great deal.

Many thanks indeed (and likewise Venessa and others of the few above who did get this point).

The actual requirement is for a means of guiding and monitoring inter-person, intra-community and inter-group exchange, such that resources are managed equitably and, as far as practicable, sustainably into the indefinite future across an entire global scale.

A really quick summary is this:
- point-to-point barter works very well in small communities for relatively small and simple needs
- community-barter (e.g. barn-raising) works very well in small communities for larger needs
- barter does provide limited mechanisms to deal with social-obligations in time (e.g. pay back a bequest), via social policing of commitments and ‘promises made’
- however:
— barter can only be used for ‘exchangeable items’ (products and/or services)
— requires that each party be able to provide exchangeable-items (e.g. often excludes children, active-parents [esp. mothers], elderly, disabled etc), requires that exchange is desirable
— is dependent on/policed by direct personal social-obligation, hence does not scale well beyond a small group
— etc
- token-based currencies (e.g. money) attempt to tackle the scale problem and the point-to-point problem
- token-based currencies permit ‘universal’ exchange (i.e. act as an intermediary to enable complex multi-way exchanges)
- however:
— the currency may become an aim in itself [as John describes above]
— token based currencies may be easily ‘gamed’ in many different ways
— possession of token-based currencies (especially when gamed) may lead to situations where the currency is deemed to confer ‘rights’ to resources that do not actually exist
— token-based currencies tend to become dissociated from the social-obligations that are the actual basis of the currency
— etc
- time-based currencies attempt to tackle the unintended-consequences of token-based currencies, and/or as a subsidiary mechanism to extend and/or police social-barter
- time-based currencies appear at first glance to be ‘fair’ in that, in principle, every person has the same amount of time
- however:
— the assumption that everyone has the same available/exchangeable time breaks down in many ways in practice (e.g. children, parents, elderly, disabled etc)
— the assumption that time has the same meaning for each person breaks down in practice (e.g. actually rewards inefficiency; also the truism that “if you want something done, give it to the busiest person you know”)
— assumes that everything can be broken into discrete time-units (which makes no sense in practice for most forms of non-physical work)
— assumes that time can be linked directly to exchangeable-items, and vice-versa
— in effect assumes that each person has the same amount of life-time, expended in the same way, with the same choices
— etc

In short:
- barter is limited in scope, and does not scale
- token-based currencies can scale, but are limited in scope and have huge and ultimately-fatal unintended-consequences
- time-based currencies can sort-of scale, resolve some of the unintended-consequences of time-based currencies but introduce others, and are limited in scope

In even shorter:
- barter cannot satisfy all of the requirements
- token-based currencies cannot satisfy all of the requirements
- time-based currencies cannot satisfy all of the requirements

My suggestion is therefore to stop focusing on barter or currencies, because we know they cannot work. At the scope and scale we need, all of them create more problems than they solve; all of them are premature quick-fix ‘solutions’ to a set of problems that have still not yet been adequately described.

Instead, we would be far wiser to expend our effort on _understanding the problem_. Once we find what the right questions are, the answers that we need will arise automatically. All we know at present is that none of the current ‘solutions’ are it.

But when you scale this to the world, and it’s million agendas, it just doesn’t work. Tom is right we need to abolish currency altogether, as money is not longer just the exchange, but has become the aim. eg. My aim in life is to make money so I can afford to live and consume…what kind of illusion are we living?

Here’s a podcast with Verna Allee on informal network of barter in the workplace, and how intangibles/social capital are the real value
http://johntropea.posterous.com/uc-berkeley-webcasts-video-and-podcasts-ids-1

Here’s another
http://johntropea.posterous.com/it-conversations-meshforum-verna-allee

This comment kind of crosses over into your other post
http://emergentbydesign.com/2010/03/06/social-capital-is-not-the-same-as-whuffie/

What do vampire bats and birds have that we don’t – they almost practice reciprocal altruism

What are the conditions (and survival) of the life of vampire bats, and birds compared to humans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocal_altruism

“The concept of “Reciprocal Altruism”, as introduced by Trivers, suggests that altruism, defined as an act of helping someone else although incurring some cost for this act, could have evolved since it might be beneficial to incur this cost if there is a chance of being in a reverse situation where the person whom I helped before may perform an altruistic act towards me”

“Stephens shows a set of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions “… for an instance of reciprocal altruism:[2]

- the behaviour must reduce a donor’s fitness relative to a selfish alternative;
- the fitness of the recipient must be elevated relative to non-recipients;
- the performance of the behaviour must not depend on the receipt of an immediate benefit;
- conditions 1, 2, and 3 must apply to both individuals engaging in reciprocal helping.”

“There are two additional conditions necessary “…for reciprocal altruism to evolve:

- A mechanism for detecting ‘cheaters’ must exist.
- A large (indefinite) number of opportunities to exchange aid must exist.”

BIRDS
“It has been shown that predators learn specific localities and specialize individually on prey types and hunting techniques. [9][10][11][12] It is therefore disadvantageous for a bird to have a predator eat a conspecific, because the experienced predator may then be more likely to eat him. Alarming another bird by giving a warning call tends to prevent predators from specializing on the caller’s species and locality. In this way, birds in areas in which warning calls are given will be at a selective advantage relative to birds in areas free from warning calls”

VAMPIRE BATS
“The bats feed each other by regurgitating blood. To qualify for reciprocal altruism, the benefit to the receiver would have to be larger than the cost to the donor. This seems to hold as these bats usually die if they do not find a blood meal two nights in a row. Also, the requirement that individuals who have behaved altruistically in the past are helped by others in the future is confirmed by the data. [13] However, the consistency of the reciprocal behaviour, namely that a previously non-altruistic bat is refused help when it requires it, has not been demonstrated. Therefore, the bats do not seem to qualify yet as an example for reciprocal altruism. However, a closer look at the data shows that – except for a single interaction – all instances of feeding happened between individuals of the same group, who are on average cousins.[13] Thus, it seems much more probable that this example is a case of kin selection than reciprocal altruism.”

What I’m getting here is that the life of birds and vampire bats have certain conditions that make cooperation necessary to survival.

Is it that humans don’t have these conditions so we don’t feel we have to cooperate? I don’t think so, we are raping the planet. I think we innately look out for each other..it’s just that when our conditions change and our outlook changes we may lose this behaviour.

If a species of birds multiplied for some reason and became massively populated, would they still practice reciprocal altruism.

Most people don’t care deeply enough as we are sidetracked by the illusion of life (what we have made life to be). We increasingly live in cities (pigeon holes) rather than villages…we all have our own agendas…all this doesn’t lend to cooperation being on the top of the list.

Why has this happened? Not sure, but we are enslaved by economics, which is a game, not a natural science.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/rushkoff09/rushkoff09_index.html

Maybe money, materialism, greed, over population is depleting the humanness out of us…are “we” the antichrist?

We already do so, when we share our thoughts freely. When we altruistically give of ourselves, without any requirement of recompense. Thanks Tom, I had some notion of this before I began the long journey of my first startup last summer, Monetization for Web 2010.