Beyond Greed and Scarcity

~ excerpt of interview with Bernard Lietaer

SARAH : That also influences the unemployment rate.

BERNARD : It's certainly a major factor, but there's more to it. Information technologies increasingly allow us to attain very good economic growth without increases in employment. I believe we're seeing one of the last job-driven affluent periods in the US right now. As Jeremy Rifkin argues in his book, The End of Work, jobs are basically not going to be there anymore, even in "good times."

A study done by The International Metalworkers Federation in Geneva predicts that within the next 30 years, 2 or 3 percent of the world's population will be able to produce everything we need on the planet. Even if they're off by a factor of 10, we'd still have a question of what 80 percent of humanity will do.

My forecast is that local currencies will be a major tool for social design in the 21st century, if for no other reasons than employment. I don't claim that these local currencies will or should replace national currencies; that is why I call them "complementary" currencies. The national, competition-generating currencies will still have a role in the competitive global market. I believe, however, that complementary local currencies are a lot better suited to developing cooperative, local economies.

SARAH : And these local economies will provide a form of employment that won't be threatened with extinction?

BERNARD : As a first step, that is correct. For example, in France, there are now 300 local exchange networks, called Grain de Sel, literally "Grain of Salt." These systems - which arose exactly when and where the unemployment levels reached about 12 percent - facilitate exchanges of everything from rent to organic produce, but they do something else as well. Every fortnight in the Ariege, in southwestern France, there is a big party. People come to trade not only cheeses, fruits, and cakes as in the normal market days, but also hours of plumbing, haircuts, sailing or English lessons. Only local currencies accepted!

Local currency creates work, and I make a distinction between work and jobs. A job is what you do for a living; work is what you do because you like to do it. I expect jobs to increasingly become obsolete, but there is still an almost infinite amount of fascinating work to be done.

For example, in France you find people offering guitar lessons and requesting lessons in German. Neither would pay in French francs. What's nice about local currency is that when people create their own money, they don't need to build in a scarcity factor. And they don't need to get currency from elsewhere in order to have a means of making an exchange with a neighbor.

Edgar Cahn's Time Dollars are a classical example. As soon as you have an agreement between two people about a transaction using Time Dollars, they literally create the necessary "money" in the process; there's no scarcity of money. That does not mean there's an infinite amount of this currency, either; you cannot give me 500,000 hours - nobody has 500,000 hours to give. So there's a ceiling on it, yes, but there's no artificial scarcity. Instead of pitting people against each other, the system actually helps them cooperate.

SARAH : So you're suggesting that scarcity needn't be a guiding principle of our economic system. But isn't scarcity absolutely fundamental to economics, especially in a world of limited resources?

read the whole article in YES! Magazine HERE