Make money talk ... sustainably! - References and quotes Philosophy 2021 REFERENCES AND QUOTES COLONIALISM IN THE ANTROPOCENE: THE POLITICAL ECOLOGY OF THE MONEY-ENERGY-TECHNOLOGY COMPLEX “Building on Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s insight that economic processes enhancing utility simultaneously increase entropy, I have inferred that exchange values and productive potential must be inversely correlated, and that the accumulation of technological infrastructure therefore signifies the joint operation of thermodynamics and imperialism. The principles of thermodynamics clearly derive from nature, while the strategies of imperialism derive from society. However, mainstream economists are convinced that their accounts of growth and technological progress have no use for thermodynamics. In their worldview, nature is irrelevant for the constitution of society.” 10 “Neoclassical economic theory is an ideology originally developed in colonial Britain to justify and morally neutralize the exploitation of its extractive periphery. In its modern, neoliberal guise, it has championed ‘globalization’ as a modern euphemism for imperialism.” 12 “Monetary value is not an essence but a cultural veil obscuring material asymmetries by representing unequal exchange as reciprocal. Money cannot compensate for entropy.” 14 “Money cannot neutralize ecological damage in a physical sense. Monetary compensation for environmental damage can reduce contemporary grievances, but it is illusory to believe that ‘correct’ reparations could be calculated, or that they would somehow set things straight. The ecological debt of Britain, for instance, is as incalculable as its debt to the descendants of West African slaves. To raise the price of energy and raw materials, as Bunker suggested, would undoubtedly reduce the current magnitude of ecologically unequal trade (and the accumulation of technological infrastructure) in the world, but it would not make trade equal. Like the notion of making ‘correct’ recompense for past asymmetries, pricing resources high enough to neutralize the damage caused by their extraction would be tantamount to shutting down industrial capitalism.” 15 I ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS – PRINCIPLES AND APPLICATIONS Invention of money. Function of money can evade the laws of thermodynamics. It can created and destroyed. A medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value Money vs barter. means See DOUGHNUT ECONOMICS: SEVEN WAYS TO THINK LIKE A 21ST-CENTURY ECONOMIST, Tony Greenham https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2KgrpFRHJI on money and money as social relations 285 50 hammers in use value vs exchange value. Diamond and water paradox. Exchange value is determined by marginal utility. Use value is determined by total utility. Production for use value is self-limiting, not production for exchange value. 50 hammers in use values rust but 50 hammers in exchange value, money, do not. “Since there is no limit to the accumulation of abstract exchange value, and since abstract exchange value is convertible into concrete use value, we seem to have concluded that there must not be any limit to concrete use values either. This has perhaps led to the notion that exponential growth, the law of money growing in the bank at compound interest, is also the law of growth of the real, or material, economy.” See Dougnut Economy on interest and demurrage, THINKING IN SYSTEMS – A PRIMER on interest as idea 287 Soddy on wealth and money as claim to wealth, as debt, negative wealth. Soddy 1926, “you can’t permanently pit an absurd human convention, such as the spontaneous increment of debt (compound), against the natural law of the spontaneous decrement of wealth (entropy)”. Virtual wealth is physical real assets debt. 288 Tobin and the fiduciary issue. Wealth and money. 289 Difference between money and currency. Growth built into the money system where banks create money through loans with interest! See DOUGHNUT ECONOMICS: SEVEN WAYS TO THINK LIKE A 21ST-CENTURY ECONOMIST, Tony Greenham https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2KgrpFRHJI on money and money as social relations 290 Box 14.3, 1. Fiat money. Ithaca HOURS ! See DOUGHNUT ECONOMICS: SEVEN WAYS TO THINK LIKE A 21ST-CENTURY ECONOMIST 290, 291 Fractional reserve system. Only 10 % 292 Money is a public good. Money is relational. See DOUGHNUT ECONOMICS: SEVEN WAYS TO THINK LIKE A 21ST-CENTURY ECONOMIST, Tony Greenham https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2KgrpFRHJI on money and money as social relations 293 Soddy, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry on thermodynamics and money and how an irrational economic system working against science being used to benefit human kind. Therefore the economic system needs to change money being a big part of the flaws of economic system. Money as an imaginary magnitude obey nothing, no thermodynamics laws. Real wealth however has a physical dimension and obey laws of thermodynamics and this create a conflict when we human thinks wealth behaves like the imaginary symbol money. M. King Hubbert on exponential growth a transient phase in human history. Chessboard of wheat shows the impossibility of growth. 295 Impossibility of growth, doublings cannot go on forever. However, economists believes so and also use it to discount future. 296 Keynes “Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done”. 30 trillion dollars global productions per year vs 2 trillion dollar per year of paper purchasing , electrons purchasing electrons. This speculation growth of money is not possible because growth in money is meaningless unless there is a corresponding increase in real wealth. Zero-sum game between speculator and producer of something something. 297 Illusions of that growth of money can grow without physical limits results from: 1. Production of real goods and services increases. But this cannot continue forever on a finite planet! 2. Financial assets grow or increase in price demand for money grows. But bubbles burst! 3. Financial capital grow because speculation transfers resource from those who produce to those who speculate. But this transfer has limits even if it is obscured by economic growth. It is impossible for real money to grow without limit! 298 Using seigniorage to print and spend money as a fiscal policy 334 Box 17.5 Monetary and fiscal policy and steady state 335 Box 19.1 on invention invented without profit motive. 374 Ecological economics and explanations for financial crises. Financial assets, abstractions, IOUs on real wealth. Negative pigs and positive pigs. “The production of real wealth is limited by biophysical realities—the availability of raw materials provided by nature that can be transformed into market products, the availability of energy to power the transformation, and the availability of ecosystem services, including waste absorption capacity, that are ultimately needed to sustain economic production. When real estate prices boom, as happened in Thailand and the U.S., the flow of services from land and existing houses does not increase, and there is no new source of biophysical value to match the increase in debt. The same is true when stock market prices soar with no underlying increase in productive capacity. When the value of present real wealth plus biophysically constrained production capacity is no longer sufficient to serve as a lien to guarantee the exploding debt, the debt must implode. To reiterate the words of Frederick Soddy, ‘You cannot permanently pit an absurd human convention, such as the spontaneous increment of debt [compound interest] against the natural law of the spontaneous decrement of wealth [entropy].’” 401 “For a time growth in financial assets can sustain the illusion that the economy continues to grow even as the resources essential to economic production become scarcer, but ultimately financial assets are, for society as a whole, debts to be paid back out of future real growth, and the illusion of growth cannot persist indefinitely.” 401, 402 Complex systems and the simplistic market 402 “Eventually, growth in real physical production confronts biophysical limits and must stop. Growth in the monetary value of financial assets is still possible for a time, but when continued investment of borrowed money drives up the value of financial assets more rapidly than the increase in real goods and services, collapse is inevitable, even if we cannot predict precisely when it will occur.” 403, 404 Finance and distribution. Inequity iceberg. Financial assests already owned by the wealthy grows faster thus increasing inequality. Computerly programmed redistribution of real wealth. And the computers requires existing wealth. “Even when financial assets do contribute to the real growth of market goods and services, for the richest nations, which host the largest financial sectors, marginal costs of economic growth often outweigh the marginal benefits. In this case, the few reap the financial benefits, while the many, even those living in those richest nations, pay the social and environmental costs.” 404 Tightening up financial sector 407 Seigniorage for public good 456 I MYTEN OM MASKINEN: ESSÄER OM MAKT; MODERNITET OCH MILJÖ Idén om pengar och alltings utbytbarhet. 26 Different money for different spheres 28 World market prices are socially constructed and negotiable. Fetish of machine rests on the fetish of money 60 The thermodynamic maintenance of technosphere requires money and its idea of interchangeability of everything. Money is a relation, a way to regulate claims. Exchange value is inversely proportional to exergy content means See DOUGHNUT ECONOMICS: SEVEN WAYS TO THINK LIKE A 21ST-CENTURY ECONOMIST, Tony Greenham https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2KgrpFRHJI Money and law of entropy crashes. 61 Money cannot compensate for entropy as money is only an exchange relation. See DOUGHNUT ECONOMICS: SEVEN WAYS TO THINK LIKE A 21ST-CENTURY ECONOMIST, Tony Greenham https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2KgrpFRHJI No exchange can compensate form entropy. Nature is not helped by money. 63 Money goes against the most fundamental principles of organization in living systems, against life. Life is built on differences not like money which erases differences. 64 Money as dissembedding mechanism. Money can be seen as a semiotic sign, part of system of signals that intervenes in the processes of nature 171 Bateson, Russell, money and the mix up logical types. 172 Economy is dissipative not generative. See Generative economics. Money sustains the illusion that we can fix biosphere but money is just a social relation, a claim to others time or resources. 175 The distinguishing trait of the modern society is the abstract usage of language with which it strives to encompass and engulf other cultural systems of meaning, a sort of cultural imperialism. Imperialism as who gets to build models of whom. Economic word of utility is an example. Utility as an imperialistic concept. Utility is given meaning by the cultural context and is nothing without it. However it becomes a tool to reduce cultural preferences to a manipular measure. The interchangeability is the foundation of modernity and money gives utility a material and socioecological potent form. Technology as a cultural accepted way to achieve certain culturally accepted goals. 178 Cultural perceptions make unequal exchange seem equal in similar way in both the Inca empire and textile manufacturing in 19^th century England. Modern perceptions about wage and market prices. Technology is like the godlike figure of the Inca ruler both seen as cornucopias, but their productivity as a cultural illusion concealing unequal exchange. They are fetishisms. 180 Money is not sensitive to local ecological conditions 190 “First we can establish that the modern market’s “general purpose money” and the generalized concept of utility with which economics has used to legitimize the principle of the interchangeability of everything, more or less universally ends up in conflict with local value hierarchies”. See THINKING IN SYSTEMS – A PRIMER, Regenerative economics and THE EMPATHIC CIVILIZATION: THE RACE TO GLOBAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN A WORLD IN CRISIS on subsystem, hierarchies and embodied experience 190, 191 “When the crops of the arable land becomes exchangeable to technical infrastructure, technoeconomic growth in one part of the world system can be a threat against basic provision in another. This becomes clearer if we again view the logic of growth in a physical light. The idea of the interchangeability of everything, the foundation for the totalitarian abstraction of national economics, has ecological and social consequences that cannot be understood without some basic concepts from thermodynamics. By breaking down local value hierarchies that previously codified the complexity of the local resource flows it opens the “locks” to the entropy river wide open and it leaves us a system whose blind mechanics simply is to reward a maximum and accelerating resource consumption. Such is the logic of money. We have handed over our important decisions to a sign without meaning.” See THINKING IN SYSTEMS – A PRIMER, MEASURING REGENERATIVE ECONOMICS: 10 PRINCIPLES AND MEASURES UNDERGIRDING SYSTEMIC ECONOMIC HEALTH and THE EMPATHIC CIVILIZATION: THE RACE TO GLOBAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN A WORLD IN CRISIS on subsystem, hierarchies and embodied experience 191 I DOUGHNUT ECONOMICS: SEVEN WAYS TO THINK LIKE A 21ST-CENTURY ECONOMIST Rethinking of money 76 Money is social relationship based on trust. See MYTEN OM MASKINEN: ESSÄER OM MAKT; MODERNITET OCH MILJÖ, Tony Greenham https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2KgrpFRHJI, ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS – PRINCIPLES AND APPLICATIONS 152 Bangla Pesa, endorsed by 4 others and backed by own goods and services, Blockchain and Ethereum. Distribution (and ecological limits) has to be put in the design of the financial ecosystem. 155 Regenerative finance. 1. shrink, simplify, diversify and deleverage finance e.g global financial transactions tax See Tobin tax. 2. Longterm investment. State investment and private investment for longterm like Triodos. 3. Redesigning currency. Torekes. 193 Search for gain and rate of return. Aristoteles on interest, “For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of an modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.” Problem of search for gain drives shareholder return, speculative trading and interest bearing loans all depend on growth. See ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS – PRINCIPLES AND APPLICATIONS. Financing meeting limits, Fullerton and Evergreen Direct Investing. Money contrasting against nature. Nature feel entropy as tractors rust, crops rot, smartphones break, building crumble but money just keeps increasing because of interest. Demurrage! Silvio Gessel, make money deteriorate. Keynes was impressed by the idea! See ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS – PRINCIPLES AND APPLICATIONS, MYTEN OM MASKINEN: ESSÄER OM MAKT; MODERNITET OCH MILJÖ 223 Demurrage currency to boost regenerative investment in tomorrow. Search for gain replaced by the search to maintain value. Demurrage is similar to negative interest rates used as emergency measure by Japan, Sweden, Denmark Switzerland and the European Central Bank. It shows that thinking different can work. How everything is connected demurrage – exchange rate, capital flows and pension fund. 226 I WHAT THEN MUST WE DO - GAR ALPEROVITZ - C-SPAN Old ways to bend trends doesn’t work anymore. 13:40 Probable solution must face up to the underlying issue in all (social) systems i.e who owns the wealth. Alter to benefit the vast majority. Feudal, 19^th small farmers, Soviet union state owned. 13:56 Change the ownership of wealth or the pain continues. 15:28 Systems about who owns the wealth. “if systems are about who gets to own the wealth, because power flows from wealth, and if you don’t want it in the state because they overcentralize it, then either there is a decentralized way or there isn’t a way” Cooperations, worker owned companies, credit unions and land trust show another way. 19:56 Democratizing ownership 22:41 Taxpayer money, public funds, could be put in credit unions or city banks to use them for community purposes instead of putting them in a big bank that use them to make profit (lend out money) 29:22 How money is created. 29:55 Money is crazy making 30:10 “A larger transformation, over 30 years or so, building upon this emerging transformative, potentially transformative vision of changing who gets to own the capital. Socializing the capital like coops in a radically downhome American way that doesn’t end up centralizing everything but also does change and transform who gets to own.” 48:01
To encouragement Next encouragement