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

Is not my ability to labor, and my life itself, a gift too?

Debt-pressure is endemic to the system. While some may repay their debts, overall the system requires a general and growing state of indebtedness.

followed by complex interdependency, symbiosis, cooperation, and the cycling of resources.

Today’s economic system rewards selfishness and greed. What would an economic system look like that, like some ancient cultures, rewarded generosity instead?

first, we reach a collective, politically mediated agreement on the right amount of nature to turn toward human purposes: how much of the produce of the sea, how much of the soil, the water; how much of the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb and transform waste; how much of the land’s ability to recover from the scars of mineral extraction; how m

good available to all who have earned the trust of the community.

tending over time toward the minimum amount of redistribution necessary to maintain social order.

Today we live under a barrage of sameness, of impersonality.

Money is a system of social agreements, meanings, and symbols that develops over time. It is, in a word, a story, existing in social reality along with such things as laws, nations, institutions, calendar and clock time, religion, and science. Stories bear tremendous creative power. Through them we coordinate human activity, focus attention and int