this new Report from the Club of Rome exposes the systemic flaws in our money system and the wrong thinking that underpins it. It describes the ongoing currency and banking crises we must expect if we continue with the current monopoly system - and the vicious impact of these crises on our communities, our society as a whole and our environment.
Our money system IS the 'Missing Link'. We tend to assume that we must have a single, monopolistic currency, funded through bank debt, enforced by a central bank. But we don't need any such thing! In fact, the present system is outdated, brittle and unfit for purpose (witness the eurozone crisis). Like any other monoculture, it's profitable at first but ultimately a recipe for economic and environmental disaster.
The alternative is a monetary 'ecosystem', with complementary currencies alongside the conventional one. This is more flexible, resilient, fair and sustainable. Societies worked like this in the past. So can we.
In 1972, the famous first Report for the Club of Rome - The Limits to Growth - showed how an economic system that demands infinite growth in a finite world is fundamentally unsustainable. This new Report explains our present monopolistic money system and the flawed thinking that underpins it. It spells out the catastrophic problems - environmental, socio-economic and financial - that we will continue to experience unless we make radical changes. Finally, it sets out nine practical proposals, which can be implemented now, to run alongside the current money system. This book is essential reading for policy makers, business leaders and economists, anyone concerned about sustainability, those working in the field of monetary systems and anyone with an informed interested in the future of the planet.
"So here we have it. The austerity versus Keynsian spending debate is about as useful as arguing whether the earth is flat or sitting on the back of a pile of turtles. Neither will provide sustainable interventions to our converging crises while the debt-based money system remains the only significant game in town.
Money & Sustainability is as long as it has to be and no longer. Its 200 page analysis details the adverse impact of the current financial system on sustainability as a root cause of boom and bust cycles. It requires short-term thinking and unending growth, concentrates wealth and destroys social capital.
The authors first 'make explicit' the prevailing economic paradigm and contrast this with an ecological economics approach.... The underlying narrative here, of how a fantasy world (or model of economic reality) has come to be taken as read and treated as gospel by a whole generation of economists, academics and politicians, is short and to the point. It deals brutally with two of the main faults in this paradigm: the treatment of non-monetised entities (notably the environment, non-paid activities and cultural and spiritual traditions) as irrelevant externalities; and the erroneous assumption that money is a passive neutral element: an 'innocuous facilitator'. The first of these has received a fair amount of air-time lately though the summary here is concise and helpful. The second is described via consideration of a monetary 'blind spot' comprising three layers.
Although dual or multi-currency societies have existed, appreciation of how they have operated is not widespread and mainstream economics generally ignores them, assuming a single, monopolistic hierarchically-issued currency. The communism versus capitalism ideology war has layered on top of this assumption (embodied in both ideologies) a blanket of comparative debates and analyses, further obscuring the single currency hegemony. And on top of this, a layer of institutions, central banks, and academics have pickled and preserved this monetary orthodoxy. The book reminds us that no matter how entrenched, repeated and defended, this structure is still just a paradigm - a particular view of reality - and alternative paradigms exist."
Reviewed at resilience.org
Lietaer is a former Professor of International Finance at the University of Louvain in Belgium. He is currently developing inter-trading systems for community currencies.
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