This vision involves a fundamental reorganization of society: bottom-up, peer-to-peer, autopoietic, self-organizing.

Contemporaneous with technological extension of our reach was the progression of the mentality of property, as things like land, water rights, music, and stories entered the realm of the owned.

no one can deny that money has a mysterious, magical quality as well, the power to alter human behavior and coordinate human activity.

Like inflation, depreciating currency benefits debtors and harms creditors.

That is why reductionist science seems to rob the world of its sacredness, since everything becomes one or another combination of a handful of generic building blocks.

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.

But what if the assumption of scarcity is false—a projection of our ideology, and not the ultimate reality? If so, then greed is not written into our biology but is a mere symptom of the perception of scarcity.

There were not enough needs to meet the overcapacity of production, not enough social and natural capital left to convert into money.

It is only when high income translates into accumulation, frivolous consumption, or socially destructive consumption that it makes sense to restrict it. In other words, the problem is not with high income; it is with the results of the income getting stuck at some point in its circulation, accumulating and stagnating.