Wealth

Wealth in a Nutshell

Wealth is access to well-being. Another way to put it: wealth is what brings us closer to what is true, good and beautiful.

Levels of wealth

There are at least three inclusive forms of wealth:

1. Tradable Wealth: Food, shelter, services, time, are all forms of tradable wealth. We are all familiar with tradable wealth--it is the stuff we need and want, the resources that we compete for. Things we can trade are the products or the components of systems.
   
    
2. Measurable Wealth: Our health is non-tradable--we can't give it to one another. We can give our blood, which may affect our health, but we can't give health itself. It is a property of our own being as a whole. However, we can measure our health in lots of objective ways: the miles we run, the number of times we see a doctor, our blood pressure. Another thing that is non-tradable is the productive capacity of a factory. The products of the factory can be sold, or the factory itself, but not its productive capacity. But we can measure its productivity by comparing its output to the inputs it requires. Similarly the health of a forest is non-tradable. Its diversity, resilience, etc, can, as with bodily health and productive capacity, be affected and objectively measured, but it can't be traded. Bodies, factories, and forests are all examples of systems. Things we can measure but not trade are properties of systems as a whole.
    
3. Acknowledgeable Wealth: Friendship, beauty, freedom, civility, culture, happiness, integrity, reputation--these are all forms of acknowledgeable wealth. They are neither tradable nor objectively measurable because their impact is only felt subjectively. We can have friendships of different strengths--from an acquaintance to a best buddy--and though we can tell the qualitative difference between them, that difference is not measurable using any external scale. Rather, it is a difference in quality of relationship between one system (the self) and two other systems (our acquaintance, and our best friend). Similarly our professional reputation comes from our relationships with previous clients, employers or colleagues. We can get a subjective sense of our reputation, but there is no one objective standard to go by in building our judgment. Those things that we can acknowledge but cannot measure or trade are inter-systemic resonances.

These levels of wealth are interdependent. Many communities are resource-poor but health- and culture-rich, but this is only possible up to a point: at some point lack of resources will degrade health and culture. Communities that are resource-rich but don't maintain their other levels of wealth will eventually degrade their capacity to maintain their tradable wealth.

Wealth Acknowledgment

When we barter a dozen of eggs for a pound of your carrots, wealth acknowledgment happens in the act of haggling: It's where we determine how many eggs for how many carrots. When we pay with a coin for carrots instead (because you don't want my eggs), the coin itself is the acknowledgment of the wealth transfer. The advantage is that the wealth-acknowledgment token, the coin, is redeemable elsewhere in the community. And when communities start using paper notes as wealth-acknowledgment tokens instead of precious metal, the number of transactions is no longer limited by the amount of metal available. When communities invent wealth-acknowledgment tokens for investment, like stock certificates sold by entrepreneurs, they further unlock the potential for growth of wealth.

These examples show how the evolution of wealth-acknowledgment systems prepares the ground for the growth of wealth. They also show how wealth-acknowledgment systems are adopted by communities to reduce their risk in making transactions. Bartering is not risky because the wealth is immediately exchanged, but what if we don't need eggs when we sell carrots? Accepting a token allows to give without immediately getting wealth in return, because we know the token can be used to get wealth later. Stocks and bonds work similarly in higher-risk situations. Thus wealth-acknowledgment systems evolve in a feedback spiral with social cohesion and trust. They require some level of trust and cohesion to function, but they provoke much greater cohesion and trust, which allows new wealth-acknowledgment systems to emerge, and the spiral continues.

Grant-making, endowments, charitable trusts, and donations (what we call philanthropy), are all efforts to increase measurable or acknowledgeable wealth. Organizations that seek to increase measurable and acknowledgeable wealth in communities almost always suffer from the lack of money for tradable wealth. To increase our ability to cultivate these levels of wealth, we need a wealth-acknowledgment system that moves beyond money as we know it.

Why do we need Free Currencies?

1. Conventional money is inefficient and unfair. Because communities cannot create their own currencies they are beholden to, and fundamentally controlled by, whoever does. When communities can create their own currencies, they don't have to drain out their own wealth to get money to use for trade. They can start trading right away and export later if they so choose.
2. "Money can't buy me love." The structure of the modern monetary system is based on assumptions of competition & resource scarcity. These assumptions can be applied to tradable wealth, they blind us when we apply them to only measurable or acknowledgeable wealth. These kinds of wealth correspond with overall systemic health and inter-system resonances, the assumptions of scarcity and competition no longer apply. We need a new wealth-acknowledgment system.
3. Our culture and our planet are falling apart. Humanity has grown so large and complex that cultural systems that once maintained the health of our communities no longer can. Similarly, the effects of humanity on the planetary ecosystem are beyond the ecosystems capacity to self-repair. Humanity must take responsibility itself, but currently has no tool and no capacity sufficient to the need for collective action. Free currencies open the path to global and inter-systemic regulation mechanisms.

How do free currencies work?

You treasure what you measure, and you measure what you treasure. Free currencies provide the tools to implement this maxim. What should we be treasuring in our culture and on our planet that we so far have no way to measure or acknowledge?

Throughout history, wealth acknowledgment and measurement evolved by becoming more abstract and less substantial. Free currencies follow this same evolution by becoming a meta-currency system, not just a new single kind of money. The name "MetaCurrency"refers to the platform of technological standards that enable the creation of any form of currency.

It puts currency creation directly in the hands of communities and citizens who can then create currencies for trading, measuring or acknowledging all forms of wealth, to fit their precise needs.

Flowplaces then actually provide a space for using of all these new currencies, in just the same way that web-browsers provides a place to view all the thousands of websites that the Internet, as a platform, makes available.

The great shift of the Internet was in not specifying what kind of data can flow across it (unlike the phone network), the great shift of MetaCurrencies lies in not dictating which new form of wealth expression people should use. Instead it provides the basic building blocks communities need for themselves.

Right off the bat, communities can use free currencies and flowplaces for simple things like Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS), Time Banks, barter networks, carbon-emissions trading programs, baby-sitting co-ops, reputation tracking systems, business loyalty programs, etc. But the most interesting effects will happen when communities apply their creativity to invent new currencies that solve issues that seem insurmountable today.