How did this money meme overtake our societies, now installed in the hard drives of most institutions’ operating systems? The Money Fix explains how the power to coin our USA money based in our Constitution, fell into private hands, as bankers and their political allies created the Federal Reserve in 1913. Millions in many countries withdraw from consumerist rat races, focusing on their precious time, deeper key values and goals, as reported by Vicki Robin in Your Money Or Your Life (2018). Viewers find release from the conceptual prison of the money meme. Most people misunderstand money-creation. These two currencies coexist: Berkshares for local use US dollars for purchases from the national marketplace.Įthical Markets co-produced our TV special The Money Fix, on the politics of money-creation and credit-allocation, covering Berkshares, barter systems, and other swap sites. Berkshares fund local enterprises create community-supported agriculture, cooperative housing, new businesses and restaurants. “Berkshares” in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, issued by the Schumacher Society are accepted by most local banks. Communities thrive wherever central banks restrict money supplies or governments impose “austerity” or mismanage the design of their economic rules. If their nation’s central bank creates insufficient money to complete local trades and employ citizens on local tasks, they create complementary currencies. Money is not wealth, but simply information, the ubiquitous metric for tracking and scoring our human goals and activities, a numeraire, like inches, hectares and centimetres. People are ahead of politicians and economists in understanding the limits of the money meme and GDP. In our series in 2009, 2013 and our 2020 survey, we still find an average 72% favouring expanding GDP. Ethical Markets Media in 2007, launched with GlobeScan, global polling on Beyond GDP in twelve countries, asking whether their publics favoured either money-based GDP to measure national progress or expanding it with scientific data on health, education and environment. In 2000 the Calvert group and I jointly launched the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators, measuring values beyond money, using scientific data on 12 aspects of Quality of Life. If included, that year’s GDP would have risen to $40 trillion. They estimated that $16 trillion worth of these unpaid goods and services ($11 trillion by women and $5 trillion by men) was simply missing from that annual GDP of $24 trillion in 1995. I and Marilyn Waring, a New Zealand parliamentarian, in her If Women Counted (1988) helped the United Nations Human Development Program ( UNDP) to look at this unpaid half of all societies. Total production in all societies, includes this unpaid Love Economy and Nature’s services in our shared biosphere, photosynthesizing the daily free photons from our Sun, creating our food. Money metrics overlook them, economic textbooks call them “un-economic” describing human nature as selfish and competitive, and volunteering as “irrational”. These “Love Economies” buttress all societies. Raising children, as Hillary Clinton described in It Takes A Village (2017) requires loving unpaid care maintaining households and serving on voluntary programs. I document the non-money, unpaid traditional community sharing of goods, services and mutual aid. Such childhood experience of millions, led me to unravel this controlling money meme and how it limited our freedom and life choices. Gender-based caste systems, reinforced by the money-meme, are widespread. ![]() Similar domestic violence is personal in US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive (2020). Could we run away? Our mother said, “We can’t because I don’t have any money”. Men were dominant, women subservient, controlled with punishment and domestic violence. My businessman father kept my mother penniless, grovelling for cash to pay our grocery bills, while he dined out and golfed. Money is now widely used in most countries to control and incentivize human behaviour in today’s “global casino”. I learned growing up in Bristol, a key port in Britain’s slave trade, in a typically patriarchal family, that money is a tool of power. His The Great Transformation, (1944) describes such traditional societies’ markets over-ruled by British laws creating national markets, facilitating global trade and colonial exploitation. Karl Polanyi describes how indigenous peoples in the South Pacific traded shells in their canoe travels among these islands in his Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economics, (1968). How did this happen? Economists analyze money-based markets. Today the money meme rules our lives and interactions in most societies on Earth.
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