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

When there is no standard of value, different humans want different things. When money is exchangeable for any thing, then all people want the same thing: money.

money today

some of the most painful times of my life were when I was unfulfilled in my work, when I was not applying my gifts toward a purpose I believed in. I remember quite well a meeting with a software company in Taiwan, where I worked as a translator and business consultant in my twenties. We were discussing some new technology, 3D sound or something lik

Deposits would be subject to a negative interest rate, too, only smaller than the reserve interest rate.

To be truly rich is to have sovereignty over our own time.

The next part of this book describes how to restore the intuitions and practices of gift culture, starting on the personal level.

Generally speaking, money lost to demurrage must be injected back into the economy; otherwise the level of reserves would shrink every year,

The equivalent in modern economics of “universal means” and “universal end” are “medium of exchange” and “store of value.” One way to understand the effect of negative interest is that it splits these two functions.

In the new thinking, monetary policy strives to match the base interest rate to the economic growth (or degrowth) rate.

—Lester Brown