Share the power of money making - 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 Excludable and nonrival goods. Intellectual progress is a collective process 173, 174, 175 Problems of medicine and patents 176 Market cannot handle pure public good. Public goods are nonrival and nonexcludable. 177 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 destroyed when loans are paid back but because of interested more money is required to pay back pushing an increase in money supply. 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 Money created with loan and interest creates a strong growth bias. 100 % percent reserve requirement. 294 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 Tightening up financial sector 407 Seigniorage for distribution. 456 Seigniorage back to government. Banks create interest bearing loans that requires a growing economy to be repaid. 467 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, Regenerative economics 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. 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 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 I PROSPERITY WITHOUT GROWTH Obscuring complexity of finance. Henry Ford, “It is well enough that the people of this nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” Less 5 per cent of money made by Central banks. Commercial banks create money out of nothing, out of giving loans.169 Community banking. Example SPEAR, Unified Field Cooperation and credit unions. Make money work for people and environment in the longterm. Chicago Plan, 100 percent bank deposit of government money, and IMFs. Economy is not an end in itself but a mean to prosperity. “Similar proposals call for an end to banks’ power to create money and the implementation of a so-called ‘sovereign money’ system. In such a system, governments would no longer have to raise money for public spending and investment on commercial bond markets. Instead they could spend directly into the economy, as and when financing was needed, subject only to the caveat that such spending was non-inflationary.” “When economists of the calibre of Simons, Fisher, Friedman, Keynes and Bernanke have all explicitly argued for a potential role for [sovereign money], and done so while believing that the effective control of inflation is central to a well-run market economy’, argues Adair Turner in a characteristically guarded tone, ‘we would be unwise to dismiss this policy option out of hand’.” What’s at stake here is the nature of money itself as a vital social good. See MYTEN OM MASKINEN: ESSÄER OM MAKT; MODERNITET OCH MILJÖ on money and interchangeability. Economy is not an end in itself but a mean to prosperity. 173 “In short, we need a convincing macroeconomics for a ‘post-growth’ society. One in which neither economic stability nor decent employment rely inherently on relentless consumption growth. One in which economic activity remains within ecological scale. One in which our ability to flourish within ecological limits becomes both a guiding principle for design and a key criterion for success.” 177 I MAKING MONEY AND BANKING WORK FOR SOCIETY - POSITIVE MONEY I QUANTITATIVE EASING - BIEN I HELICOPTER MONEY – A DISASTROUS BASIC INCOME – CLIVE LORD“But the helicopterists are not interested in limiting activity on environmental grounds. As long as the aim is growth, not combined with ecological fiscal rules, the risk is that payments to the general public, whatever their name, will bring rip-roaring ecological destruction nearer.” Helicopter money - A disastrous basic income I Helicopter money - Wikipedia To encouragement Next encouragement