Their ideas draw from a valid source: the realization that the scarcity of our world is an artifact of our collective beliefs, and not the fundamental reality; however, they are inherently inconsistent with the money system we have today.

At stake are two competing visions of human nature, and therefore two visions of how to run society. One says, “Free people from economic exigency, and they will do beautiful work.” The other says, “Provide beautiful work, and use economic exigency to induce people to do it.”

gifts not of money but of the use of money.

The new kind of money that emerged in ancient Greece derived its value from a social agreement, of which the marks on coins were tokens.7 This agreement is the essence of money. This should be obvious today, when most money is electronic and the rest has the approximate intrinsic value of a sheet of toilet paper, but money has been an agreement

Local currencies only work if there is a local system of locally circulating production for which it can mediate exchange.

in today’s commodity markets, most investors never touch the things they buy. Their transactions are a set of rituals, symbolic manipulations invested with power through shared beliefs.

Revolutionaries past, recognizing that illegitimacy of most accumulations of wealth, sought to sweep the slate clean through confiscation and redistribution. I advocate a gentler, more gradual approach. One way to look at it is as a tax on holdings of money, ensuring that the only way to maintain wealth is to invest it at risk or, shall we say, to

Money is no exception. Its original purpose is simply to connect human gifts with human needs, so that we might all live in greater abundance. How instead money has come to generate scarcity rather than abundance, separation rather than connection, is one of the threads of this book. Yet despite what it has become, in that original ideal of money

I am not a “primitivist” who advocates the abandonment of civilization, of technology and culture, of the gifts that make us human. I foresee rather the restoration of humanity to a sacred estate, bearing all the wholeness and harmony with nature of the hunter-gatherer time, but at a higher level of organization. I foresee the fulfillment, and not