Firing Back - The case against money, and the case for a resource-based economic system

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rsBTGkdo08

Video of a talk given by Ben McLeish of the UK part of The Zeitgeist Movement. Unfortunately it can be a little difficult to hear some of what he says - the audio seems to have been captured somewhere in the auditorium rather than from the microphone Ben was speaking into, but it is still well worth listening to. As usual, Ben has new insights and new examples to refresh what for TZMers is now fairly familiar material. One example, albeit of a rather workaday matter, was the fact that individuals don't own their own shopping trolleys (shopping carts). They use one provided in/by the supermarket whilst they need it, and then pool it for others to use. There is a gradual move to towards this access or service model and away from the ownership model in which we retain a physical thing for our exclusive use, the most obvious example being the private car. Technology helps it become more and more possible to access what we need when we need it without outright ownership.

[I also saw separately  a montage of contributions by Jacque Fresco and George Carlin. In Jacque's 1974 Larry King interview, he observes how telephones were built to last so that the phone company didn't need to maintain or replace them too often. This was beneficial to the subscriber (as we used to call them) too - they don't want the phone to break. ]

I will try to get a link to the presentation material that Ben was talking to.


The explanation of fractional reserve banking isn't the clearest one I've come across, but the fact that money is created by banks out of thin air as debt is real, and doesn't need to be understood in detail to be shocking.

The Economic Calculation Problem

I like this short article, with plenty of links,  which counters criticisms of an RBE made from the perspective of the economic calculation problem (which basically says that money is the only way of adding up the attributes of goods and services). The end of article summing up says:

"technology is what makes society work better, not money. Money is a technology, but its obsolescence, whether planned or not, happened a long time ago, and [yet] still we continue to use this destructive tool. We have a better way to obtain decisions now, it's called the scientific method"

pastehtml.com/view/bl72nuukm.html

Micawber

As many will know, Dickens' character Mr Micawber has a maxim about his income being greater than his expenditure. This is of course impossible at a global level where the only thing that is possible overall is that income equals expenditure.

For the vast majority of people, expenditure is greater than income, because money is created as debt. Many people of course have to sell their labour for money to pay back this debt.

The constant struggle to minimise outlay and maximise income that most people face is so destructive, even of the better off who fare well compared to those who face starvation day by day.

In an RBE the emphasis would be on maximum efficiency, not taking resources off each other. If an RBE doesn't work there's nothing to stop us reverting to our current system, so it's difficult to accept the assertion that it won't work. Those that believe it won't work ought perhaps be willing for this to be shown experimentally.

Man made climate change

Someone handed me an article that (I think) debunks the idea that what humanity is doing to the planet is contributing to rising sea levels. The writer seems eminent, if his credentials are anything to go by. The person who gave me the article opined that man made cliamte change is a myth being deployed to control us and others contributed that it's about making money.

All the while there is money, how will we ever be able to tell whether people genuinely believe what they're saying?

As to whether they're correct, well if they are then we need to do something and if we don't do something we're doomed. If they're wrong we're doomed anyway, so we losing nothing significant by trying.

Broadenng this out, the sooner we use up the planet's resources, the sooner we're extinct as a species. That's very simple and undeniable. As we see waste in various forms all around us, we know that we're nowhere near being as economical as possible with our finite resources.

An RBE woould focus on the economical use of resources for human health and well being. There woukd be no incentive to make money, so even if the science was not unanimous, we would know it was not biased by the need to make money, whether by doing the science or writing about it.

Consciousness and quantum theory

For those who don't competely subscribe to the idea of equality for moral reasons, the idea of interconnectedness could be important, but it can be a bit wishy-washy. Playing sugary music over pastoral scenes and saying that we are all connected might lift the spirits, but is not all that likely to convimce on an analytical level.

http://www.matrixwissen.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=53%3Athomas-campbell-the-nature-of-reality&catid=50%3Ameta-theorien&Itemid=80&lang=en

This two hour long lecture starts (well almost) from the two slits experiment, where light is shown to exhibit the properties of either waves or particles depending on what observations, and goes on to explain how this idea that observing something is what makes it real must apply at all levels, not just light particles/waves.


The speaker posits that we're all little bits of a universal consciousness as if we were part of a cosmic computer. The model is not radically deterministic - it has free will - and it also explains positive thinking, prayer, sychronicity and coincidences.

I'm not sure about the first part of the lecture, where the experiments with human subjects are explained. The speaker claims scientific rigour in these experimnets, and I have no reason to doubt it, but it's not clear to me how he gets from the results of those experiments to his theory. I'm going to watch it again to see if I understand more at the second pass.

meta currencies, and all that

http://www.metacurrency.org/
http://newcurrencyfrontiers.com/
http://prezi.com/xmzld_-wayho/new-economy-new-wealth/
http://prezi.com/vcfwa-8ocg7m/metacurrency-strategy-vision/

Someone sent me a link (no 3 above) to a prezi presentation about new wealth in our post industrial information age. The prezi platform is in itself interesting. When I went to the website, I saw a link (4th one above) to a presentation about metacurrency, which itself led to link (2) and thence to link (1).

I haven't grasped all this yet, but the various contributors say that money is just one type of currency showing on our map of the social world. Other currencies incluse trust, reputation, attention and intimacy, but we don't map these or see them as currencies.

This fits in with colloaborative consumption and alternative trading systems (LETS and the like) but bestrides them (hence the meta) and posits that there can be a network of these currencies (ways of measuring the flow of value).

Have a look and see if you grasp it better than I do. It is very thought provoking.

Future ICT

http://www.futurict.org.uk/ is the website of the UK hub of this "proposal"

'The FuturICT flagship proposal intends to unify hundreds of the best scientists in Europe in a 10 year 1 billion EUR program to explore social life on earth and everything it relates to. The FuturICT flagship proposal will produce historic breakthroughs and provide powerful new ways to manage challenges that make the modern world so difficult to predict, including the financial crisis.'

Some of its ideas/plans are similar to those of The Venus Project.