Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition

Either money grows by devouring the nonmonetized realm, or it cannibalizes itself. As the former is exhausted, the pressure of the latter increases, and concentration of wealth escalates. When that happens, another pressure arises to rescue the system: redistribution of wealth.

After all, we experience money (and property) as an extension of our selves; hence the possessive pronoun “mine”

Our generosity may leave us empty, but our emptiness then pulls gently at the whole until the thing in motion returns to replenish us.

We could easily have a shrinking “economy” that offers more and more, better and better, products like these. And the more there are, the less we need money; the less we need money, the more leisure time we have; the more leisure time we have, the more we can afford to make our own offerings to the gift economy.

The key difference is that we won’t rely on technological improvements in efficiency alone to enable greater leisure. The key is degrowth, not efficiency.

When gratitude inspires a return gift, we must not give it too quickly, or it becomes a mere transaction,

money today

These policies are redistributive because while the taxes fall disproportionately on the wealthy, the expenditures and programs benefit all equally, or even favor the poor. They counteract the natural tendency toward the concentration of wealth in an interest-based system.

dimension, its growth sooner or later encounters limits.2