Spirit in Action

Rethinking Money - Jacqui Dunne & Bernard Lietaer

Jacqui Dunne & Bernard Lietaer are co-authors of Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity into Prosperity, a book that will open your eyes and transform your thoughts about money and economics. With a view toward rescuing the world from economic and ecological collapse, Jacqui & Bernard write of complementary currencies and the potential they hold - and changes they are making - to transform our communities, nations, and world.

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 18 May 2014
Audio Format:: other

[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along Hold on to your seat and limber up your mind because today's Spirit and Action guests are going to transform your thinking fundamentally. Jackie Dunn and Bernard Lyotard are co-authors of rethinking money How new currencies turn scarcity into prosperity. There is such power and potential in reading this book and in absorbing the economic knowledge that Jackie and Bernard have to share. Jackie Dunn is a skilled journalist and an ecologically oriented entrepreneur while Bernard Lyotard has extensive, diverse, and very high-level experience in the financial realms. Rethinking money should be widely read for it may quite likely be an exclusive key to turning around our economic system. And we're fortunate to have Jackie Dunn and Bernard Lyotard with us here today by phone. Jackie and Bernard, it's wonderful to have you here today for Spirit in Action. Good morning. Great to talk to you. Hello, Mark. Your book is wonderful. Rethinking money, how new currencies turn scarcity into prosperity. I am so jazzed. You have so much information, insight in this book that I highly recommend it to every listener. How did the two of you come together to create rethinking money? It actually came out of a conversation. I was very, very interested to understand how money works and how it's not working. And we were introduced by a mutual friend. You know, we started talking about, "Washed 15 years ago now, Bernard. How did the conversation have not stopped?" Well, it's a great conversation. Obviously, the fruits of it are awesome. Yes, thank you very much for saying that. I think one of the very, very interesting things is how this book is possible because of the depth of Bernard's experience and knowledge. A lot of people have simply got book knowledge, which is fine and wonderful in itself. But Bernard, given his career, has had the opportunity to look at money systems for a variety of different angles. Just very briefly, you know, he has been a professor of finance. He has actually operated one of the top currency trading, all short trading companies in the world. He was a central banker. He was responsible for creating the convergence mechanism in Europe, which they actually came to Europe. Very few people get to be both a gamekeeper and a poacher in their lifetime. So if there was somebody to find that really understood money, Bernard was the guy to track down. And without many, many conversations, the decision to write this book came about, which was basically to tell the story of very ordinary people by thinking outside the box that they were able to address the problems that they faced in their community. Well, and Jackie has made it fun to read. When I write it, I tend to have a bit of a more academic formality while Jackie has been able to talk about it to people who had never heard of any of these topics. So that's the big difference with all my other writings. Could we start off, perhaps? Could one of you tell the story of Khurutiba, how that city became transformed? That's Jackie's favorite story, so she had the balance. Yes, it is one of my favorite stories. So basically, about 25 years ago, the mayor of this town of Khurutiba, which is in southeast Brazil, had a terrible garbage problem. And besides the garbage problem that the mayor of the town was facing once he had no money to clean up the garbage. So he had to think outside of the box. So he realized that there was a public transport system in Khurutiba that was very underutilized. With nowhere to go to get alone, he came up with a very smart idea. He sent out a message to the favelas. These were shanty towns that had grown up during rapid expansion of the city. And the results of the garbage was a lot of diseases and rats and all kinds of problems. He sent out this notice to everybody living in the favelas that for every bag of garbage that was sorted between paper, glass, plastics, that the person turning in the garbage would get a bus token to ride the bus service. So as you can imagine, the kids in particular were attracted to this program and those were also involved. The favelas were picked clean in a matter of weeks, putting the various sorted out garbage into various colored bats that all bins that were on the circumference of the favelas. So they were then able to use the bus service and within time local farmers, growing local vegetables and fruits, accepted these tokens in payment for vegetables and fruits. What Jaime Lerner did was, I think it was now probably conscious about it, but looking back at it from a systems perspective, he linked an unused resource with an unmet need. And in this case of Corachiba, they had the need to clean up the favelas to deal with the disease and the garbage problem. And they had a way of providing a reward, which was a bus token to ride on the buses. This actually became a currency because then this bus token could be used for purchasing other vegetables and fruits as I already mentioned. And interestingly enough, one of my favorite applications is that fishermen go out into the day and on a day that the fish aren't biting, they can actually bring in garbage that is actually trawled out of the waters and bring that in for recycling and also get paid in this, what we would call a local currency. The brilliance of Jaime Lerner is that he created not only this currency, but several other currencies. And in the space, about five to six years, the people living in Corachiba had a standard of living that was one-third higher than anybody else at that time living in Brazil. By simply rethinking money, he actually brought up the standard of living of the average person in Corachiba. The garbage piles have all now been transformed into about 13 or 14 beautiful municipal parks. And the town of Corachiba, the city of Corachiba, has been awarded by the UN, a prize for being the most ecologically advanced integrated city in the world, not just in a developing country, but in the entire world. So in a time when municipalities or states or individuals are completely strapped for money, we show how people coming together in their community can make an assessment of their unused resources and their own net needs, design a currency, and not only resolve the problem, but also really it affects the bottom line in terms of having more cash, more capability to have a better life. The wonderful story, Jackie, Bernard, perhaps you can explain why you needed an alternative currency to do this. Why couldn't the national currency in Brazil simply do the job? Well, we prefer to call what we're talking about complementary currencies, because alternative currency would really mean you don't need the national money anymore. And that's not what it is about. It is a complement to the existing system. The first answer to your question is simply because there isn't enough money available where it's needed of the conventional fact. As Jackie explained, Jaime Leonard didn't have access to the funding necessary. The traditional way of dealing with this kind of problem would have been to build those all area and build a favela which streets in it so that the garbage trucks can get in it. That's what other countries have done. Okay, you couldn't do that. So you have to invest something else in it. Now, there's a second aspect. Contrary to what economic theory assumes implicitly, money is not very neutral. Most people believe that the national money is like the dollars in the U.S. or value neutral. It means that it's just a passive medium of exchange that people use because it's most effective to make changes. Well, that is not true. The currency type changes behavior patterns of its users, specifically in the case of bank debt money because every dollar you've seen is someone's debt. It's government debt. It is a corporate debt or it's an individual debt. That's how dollars are created or any other national money. That means it is created with interest and one of the phrases from a classical textbook on monetary economics is bank debt money needs to be scarce so that it's usefulness. In other words, if everybody had enough dollars, the dollar would be worthless. It would have high inflation. The second point about it is that the dollars are actually unbanked debt money created with interest. It uses against each other in competition. Why that is a simple to understand. When a bank creates money at the moment of making a loan, it creates the principle. It does not create the interest. So when you pay back interest on your loan, you actually are using someone else's principle. So bankruptcy is intrinsically built into the system. We're all fighting for survival for money that has not been created. So that is part of the mechanism of competition. By the way, if you want to make a simple best, if you take a million dollars and put into a normal family on the table, one day come back two weeks later, everybody's fighting. It's definitely not a value-neutral process. So that is the other reason. The different type of currency can actually create cooperation instead of competition and encourage cooperation. And that is the other reason why behavior patterns are different. So by their very definition, what we call complementary currencies or cooperative currencies or local currencies, they do not carry interest. Therefore, this competitive piece is taken out of the equation. And as a community has to come together, we strongly recommend that they tend to be hyper-democratic. They have open books. I mean, there's transparency. The community has to come together in the first place to get into a very, very deep conversation as to what the unused resources and unmet needs are. And this fosters cooperation. Unlike, you know, there are several features of interest we can go into if you'd like and explain the functional dynamics of interest and the devastating effect it has not only on the monetary system's own sustainability but an ecological sustainability and how it is absolutely impossible to have community. And I am going to have you tell me that story about interest shortly. I wondered if one of you would care to relate. It's somewhat a pocket full story about a hotel and a hundred dollars being passed around. I think that that is so illustrative of the fact that the way we think about money makes a tremendous difference what it can facilitate and what it doesn't facilitate. Would one of you, Jackie O'Brenard, care to talk about that? Yeah, off the top of my head, if I can say the proper trick is that it was a guy goes into a hotel and lays down a hundred dollar bill on the desk saying that he wants a few minutes to inspect the rooms and he is putting that down into a deposit and he'll make a decision where he's going to rent the room or not for a night. The guy goes upstairs and the hotel owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher takes a hundred dollars and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer. The pig farmer takes a hundred dollar bill and heads off to pay the bill with his supplier, the co-op. And the guy the co-op takes a hundred dollars and runs off to pay the debt to the local prostitute who also has been facing hard times and has had to offer her services on credit. Then the lady of the night rushes back to the motel and pays off her room bill with the motel owner. And the hotel proprietor then places a hundred dollars back on the counter. So when the guy who's inspecting the rooms upstairs comes down, the hundred dollars is still on the counter. And the traveler after he comes down from inspecting the room says that the rooms are not satisfactory and he picks up the hundred dollar bills and leads. So, what is interesting is that nobody had produced anything, nothing had been earned, but that the whole town was now out of debt and optimism for the future was restored as a result. So debt is something that we carry on our consciousness. I mean, it's shutting down our national government in the U.S. right now because we can't spend anything or we have to, in Europe and other places, they're going into phases of government to close down spending because we can't have debt. And so these complimentary or cooperative or local currencies circumvent the normal thinking that prevents us from spending exchanging. You know, when we have situations of 10, 20, 30 percent unemployment. Actually, not only debt, but actually money that lives in our heads. Maybe we should start by defining what money is, okay? The whole economic textbook invariably paid, what that money is, the minimum exchange, the sort of value and the standard of value. That is what money does, the functions of money, that's not the nature of money. Now, by defining it that way as its function, it's actually also part of the smoke screen that makes it impossible for us to understand money. If someone had, you know, if it was a language where there is no word for transport, we only have the word for horses. One would forever try to perfect horses and never invent a car or a bicycle, would you? Now, money is, in fact, an agreement. It's an agreement within a particular community to use something standardized as a medium of exchange. That is our working definition. The agreements live in our heads, like a marriage, like a political party, like nationality, like a business deal. And when an agreement doesn't work for you, you can change it. You can change agreement, you can make new agreements, additional agreements. And that's what we're talking about. When you have a situation that is not satisfactory in one of those aspects, for example, unemployment, but there are many other dimensions. Now, the relevance that our society isn't being happy about. The way we take our healthy, the way we deal with our kids, the way we deal with the environment, all these things are a result of actually trying to solve all the problems with one single currency, one single currency that is designed to create competition. It has to do with positive things. The industrial age would not have occurred without it. But it is now at its limits, it has beyond its limits. And we're trying to solve the 21st century problems with tools 300 years old in terms of construct. Time that we think about the possibility of creating a three-box. But if we move that are necessary for what we're dealing with in the 21st century. One of the things that you talk about is that a fiat currency or debt-based currency, you talk about both of those terms, that this is only some 300 years old as a way of doing a financial system. Are there any countries that have national currency that is not debt-based? Old modern money. Oh, everybody's been annotating the same model. The model that you're describing now, let's call it the modern money, part of it in Sweden and in England in the 17th century. And actually it has spread from there because it has been an arrangement that has worked very well for empire building. It has worked very well for industrialization. It has worked for England to beat Napoleon and then spread its empire around the world. And everybody has been convinced that that was the best model. And it was true at that time. Now what we're saying is it's investigators behind us. Let's rethink money and make it fit to what we need today. And you talk about two competing needs with respect to really anything that exists, but you talk about efficiency and resilience, and that the debt-based financial system that we have, this modern system, is good at efficiency, but not so good at resilience. Could you explain a little bit what the history of that concept is, that world view, the ecological world view, I think? Well, it actually is not just a world view, it's a hard science. We have been publishing four peer-reviewed articles explaining why any complex flow network and an economy is a complex flow network in which money circulates, any complex flow network to be stable needs to have a minimum amount of diversity. And the best proof of this is in our natural ecosystems. The work is based on 25 years of assembling data from all kinds of natural ecosystems. All natural ecosystems have one thing in common. They're sustainable, otherwise they wouldn't exist there. They're huge ones, like the Amazon. There's more ones, like a little puddle in the back of your yard. And then, of course, in all kinds of climates and scales and environments. Now, what these things have in common that I just said is that they're sustainable. We've been asking the question, what else do they have in common? And what came out of that was that they haven't common to have a minimum amount of diversity. And a maximum, there's a range. And a minimum, a maximum of interconnectivity, which means who eats what. And if you're outside of that, the systems will collapse. The principles, because these two variables are, in fact, completely structural. It doesn't depend on what flows in the system. We know that two networks of the same structure will behave in the same way. And in monoculture, say, a forest, the surrounding towns, may be very efficient. It produces a lot more timber per year, that is usable commercially. However, it's also very pickle. It doesn't have the resilience. It's up a match, and it's all gone. And this is not a metaphor. This is what happens with our money system. When the banks get in trouble and they all get in trouble at the same time, then you'll have a collapse. And we have had a lot of collapses. The IMF has identified 425 countries that have gone through a treadmill of a major system that collapsed in the last 40 years. That's more than 10 per year. When we talk today about the crisis, you only think about the 2007-2008. But that's just the last one. There are many, many, many more before that. So that's the problem. This is not a metaphor. The efficiency and the resilience is a consequence of this. So that's why we talk, for example, for wanting what we would call a monetary toolbox. We take the dollar or the euro or a yen. That's all national currency or competitive national currencies, fiat-based national currencies. We call them like hammers. Hammers are great for nailing a nail into the wall. Fantastic. However, you want to paint the room, you can't do it with a hammer. Try it. It's virtually impossible. You need to paint brush. We also need screwdrivers, meat sauce. So what we're talking about, we need a monetary equivalent of a toolbox. Debt-based money is great for certain things. And it's brought us to the level of standard living that we have today. However, that type of money is not good for creating community, creating cooperation. And a lot of social purpose activities, for example, look at all the NGOs, all the charities that are starved for money in this highly competitive monetary system. So new types of currency can actually empower the NGO domain to be as powerful in this cooperative domain as firms or corporations are in the competitive domain. We're visiting today for Spirit in Action with Jackie Dunn and Bernard Liatar. They're co-authors of a book, "Rethinking Money, How New Currencies Turn Scarcity Into Prosperity." And you're listening to Spirit in Action. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeat, for this Northern Spirit Radio production on the web at northernspiritradio.org. You can come to our site and listen to almost eight years of programs we've been doing, of people doing good things for the world, lifting up the good work that's being done around the world. And Jackie and Bernard are two examples of that. You can track them down via Bernard's website, liatar.com, that's L-I-E-T-A-E-R.com, or simply follow the link from northernspiritradio.org. While you're on this site, you can find a number of links to our guests. You can also leave comments. We love to have your input. And we also love your contributions to us. You can make donations on our site, and please support your local community radio station. They're providing an invaluable service to our nation. Again, Bernard Liatar and Jackie Dunn are with us here today. "Rethinking Money" is their book. There's so many threads I could follow, Bernard and Jackie. One of the things that seems fundamental to me is the concept of interest and debt. And I've had for decades, I'm not an economist, but I've had this concern for decades, that interest is truly evil. It leads to consequences that involve concentration of wealth. Is that a fair perspective to say that concentration of wealth will almost inevitably, without countervailing forces, lead to concentration of wealth? Absolutely, and there's other aspects as well. I mean, there's compulsory growth pressure. It's another functionality of positive interest rates. There is also discounting the future. Short-termism would be the technical term for it. And there is a notion of social capital, which is also another devastating effect of interest. By definition, interest is the process of transferring from money, resources from people who don't have enough money to people who have more than they actually need to, they can afford to live up. It's a mechanical process. So, how bad is interest? Bernard, you've worked in the financial systems for quite some time. Does this in some way strike you as a fatal weakness of our society? Or is it just one of the things to take into account? The problem is not necessarily just thinking about interest. The monopoly of currency that has interest, that's the problem. Interest has made possible the concentration of wealth necessary for industrial revolution. The industrial revolution has not started. In someone's garage, with a mini steel mill, that actually became a bigger one. There's not a single case of a railroad that started in someone's garden, right? You need to do these things in a large scale. And that is the characteristic of the industrial revolution, and it requires actually this concentration of resources. So, the problem that we see is that we are imposing a single currency to do everything. Not just industrialization, but also educating or getting rid of the elderly and everything else. That's where the problem is. The feature of interest is a problem in some respects, but it becomes a real problem. But if you only gain it out, the only currency available is the currency that has to build in that feature. You mentioned in the book the example of investments in trees and our needs for short-term investment and then the devalued future production because of interest. So, you compare like an oak, I guess, oak to pines. Pines grow quickly, oaks take a lot longer to reach maturity. Could you recapitulate that and how interest works against sustainability? Well, one feature we mentioned several already, but one you're referring to is what we call short-term investment. Short-term thinking. Any currency that has a positive interest rate discounts the future into oblivion. In other words, anything more than 10, 20 years in the future is ignored. It's rationally ignored if you have a currency that comes to future. If you give a choice to a rational investor of having $100 a day or $100 a year from now or 10 years from now, we always take today because you can deposit an interest bearing account and get more money in the future. Now, that is built in. But there are other aspects that Jack already alluded to because of the feature that interest is not created by the banking system, but it's one you pay interest to using someone else's principle. There is no option to stop growing. Steady growth is unthinkable because everybody will go bankrupt. You cannot pay back your debt because the money would not be available for the interest. That would be one of the consequences. Another feature as well is the booms and bust cycles. The way money is created today is by definition actually amplifying the business side. When the things are good, banks or money and anything that moves are even something that won't move. But when there is a recession, you can't get money for the most worthy and solid economic purposes. So what happens, the boom becomes an inflationary out of control situation like we had in real estate in America in the last cycle. And when there is a period of recession like we have today, well, it goes deeper and deeper. Actually, there's something interesting we should throw in there. For example, you know, Mark, why do you think that Switzerland is such an economically stable country? Well, because I read your book, I know it's the WIR. But anyway, usually, you know, what your listeners will be thinking. They're thinking to themselves and say, well, you know, Switzerland was neutral in the last World War. You know, they have a number of major banking corporations headquartered in Switzerland. Maybe that's the reason why. And just to team off what Bernard's talking about, the booms and bust cycle, Switzerland has actually dealt with this issue by a complimentary currency called the WIR, a WIR. And how this came about is really a very interesting story. Almost 80 years ago, 17 businessmen received a letter from their banks saying that their lines of credit were either going to be cut or completely terminated. And they're all sitting around, you know, with their heads and their hands wondering, what are they going to do? How are they going to pay their invoices? How are they going to pay their employees, you know, how are they going to get through the next month? They realized that they were actually going to their banks in order to obtain loans in order to pay one another, maybe for supplies, maybe for labor, whatever it might be. And what they realized is that maybe it would be a great idea to actually have a currency that would circulate between them and what was born was the WIR. And here we are, 80 years later, where 20% of business in Switzerland uses the WIR. And the WIR usually comes into greater predominance in a downturned economy. So business in Switzerland has an ability to pay its employees and its suppliers in a currency that is later convertible into sites with banks. And what are the features of the WIR that make it better? I mean, it's a complementary currency. But there's things you talk about like Demerage and some of the complementary currencies. You have different features of currencies. What is it in the WIR that makes it function well there? If you're selling something back to me, that would be partner. However, with my credit, I can buy something from another party. And if you can sell something to a fourth party, we have created a currency between us. Now, let's assume that if you take a normal business guy in Switzerland and ask him, I'm going to offer you thousands for his friends or a thousand V, and by the way, they have the same value, one to one. He will always take this risk rank if you're giving the choice. The reason being that with this risk rank, he can pay his taxes, which really cannot. And he can also fix vacation to Mexico, and he can buy stuff in China with this risk rank. With the V, he has to spend it among 70,000 members. Now, if you are in a boom period, say, then you come in and ask me to buy something for a thousand V, and I'll tell you, welcome back next month, you know? But we are in a recession, and I have my staff, which is half idle. I'll grab the V, so what happens is that the V expands automatically when there is a recession and reduces in volume and in number of participants when there is a boom. So it stabilizes the economy of somatically. It's time for cyclical. That is the key. And it's time for cyclical enough that it actually stables unemployment, and it stables the economy in general. Now, it's time that the V is a small volume of the percent of total. It still doesn't at the right time. It expands at the right time, and it is decided by the business owners themselves. That's what makes the big difference to it. But you also speak of design and currencies, and again, we're talking about a number of examples that our listeners will find in rethinking money, how new currencies turn scarcity into prosperity, by Jackie Dunn, and Bernard Liattard. It's an awesome book, both in terms of understanding how finances work and could work, and providing a number of concrete examples in the world. And so Bernard, I think particularly drawing on your wealth of experience with respect to financial systems. You give examples from all over the world of these complementary or cooperative or local currencies. What are other features that can be designed? You talked just about the Weir. What are other features that can be designed into currencies to make them have a desired operation? A very fascinating example is the question of how do we deal with our aging population. About 20 years ago, Japan really hit this problem squarely, because it has the fastest growing, growing population in the world. And where are we going to get the resources to take care of people outside the medical care system? Clearly, people need to go to the hospital for dialysis or they break a leg. Obviously, there's a medical care system to take care of them. Back then, there was a big issue about how do we take care of our elderly that do not need to be institutionalized, but they need some kind of home help or supervision. So they created something called a three-eyed keeper, which means caring friendship tickets, whereby I go down the road or next door to a neighbor of mine and I might help an elderly gentleman, for example, by driving into the doctor or to the dentist, may bring him shopping. For example, they just double check to make sure that the bath rail is actually well screwed into the wall, because that's an accident waiting to happen. Anyway, for every hour that I spend taking care of this elderly neighbor, I get a credit in my fully-eyed keeper account, which I can save up when I have a flu, I need somebody to pick up my children or save up a larger amount for an eye or much older, I need somebody to come in and take care of me. Or additionally, I can actually transfer this credit to another part of the country where my mother resides and somebody can come in and look after her. What we found out of this complementary currency, fully-eyed keeper, is three very, very important things. One, as I alluded to already at the beginning of this story, is that the elderly can remain in their home greater dignity, and they have somebody keeping an eye on them, and the day-to-day care and needs outside, you know, the medical system are taking care of. What also grows up between these neighbors, usually intergenerational, and that's something that's a major problem in our society today that we're all siloed, given our age bracket, you know, this very little crossover integration of the generations. In this, younger folks are taking care of older folks, and relationships grow. So I get to know my neighbors, I get to hear the oral history of this older person, you know, friendships grow up. And additionally, the care of these people is not a burden to a local government or the national government by virtue of me being paid in this complementary currency. And also, another feature is, you know, volunteerism is fantastic. You know, there's a great spirit of volunteerism here in the United States and other parts of the world as well. But there is a problem with burnout, and there is a problem with, you know, keeping track of volunteerism. This way, it can be quantified by actually paying for it in a currency. And also, the burnout is less likely because, you know, I am earning something which I can then use for my purposes. So, the Furia-Kipu system is very successful. It's networked all over Japan. There are about 500 systems all over the country with two central clearinghouses. And a variety of that is used here in the United States, the most common complementary currency in the United States is something called time banking or time dollars. There's about 400 such systems dotted all around the country with one to two new systems starting every single week. And an application of this, for example, is in New York where Mera Bloomberg has actually endorsed the time banking system, which is operation of five boroughs for the visiting nurses program. But there are applications of a time dollar which is backed by a person's one hour of time. And it could be used in mentoring, it could be used in tutoring, it could be used in babysitting, it could be used in repairing bicycles, whatever it might be. There's no end to how people can inventively find ways to earn and spend time dollars. And the feature of this is that even in times of economic contraction, people still need care. They have plenty of time because they're unemployed, I suppose. So it works countercyclically in the same way? No, I wouldn't use that term, but it does mean that people's unused resources, which is that you pointed out available time and the unmet needs, which as long as your arm, can be met. And time banking works particularly well in societies in demographic groups, such as the elderly, such as students, such as people that are unemployed or underemployed. The elderly care is not countercyclical because people even need it all the time, actually. So a countercyclical would mean it actually compensates for the business cycle. And in the case of spine banking, it actually is happening all the time. It's a permanent function. Don't mean to be an economic expert here, but I'm assuming it could work countercyclically in that people pay for a home health nurse to come in when money's flush, but when it's not flush, people are unemployed, then they have a lot of volunteer time and they can come in and volunteer. Does that make sense that in that sense it would be countercyclical or not? Yes, it can be. You can stretch it that way. However, in the case of Japan, the process has been continuous. In other words, there is no drop when there's a blooper. Maybe other people are doing it. That is possible with different players. But the kind of support that is needed is happening throughout the year. Now, of course, in Japan, we could argue that for the last 20 years we have been in the recession. So we haven't gotten enough of it yet for finding out what would happen if there's a boom period. That may be the almost answer. Yes. The term countercyclical really means in a business context, the time banking and the Fourier people and a number of local currencies operate for social purpose, and the social needs are ongoing. I think that's probably a better way of parsing it. I want to pass one of my personal theories that I've carried for a couple of decades past you, and see if it makes sense to you. One of the issues that I have with our concentration of wealth, I realize that part of it can be caused by our currency and by how that operates, interest, and so on. Another reason it might be caused is because of our increasing technological society. We've automated more things. So those who own the machine end up being able to do the production of a hundred people through their machine, maybe with one employee, that kind of thing. And we could extrapolate this to the ridiculous, if you will, where one person owns all of the machines on the world, therefore has a right to 100% of the income, and nobody else has a right to anything else. Now, we'll never reach perhaps that endpoint, but does that make sense to you as part of our technological advance and our ownership concepts? That that's a danger. That's one of the perhaps forces adding to our concentration of wealth in increasingly few hands. I think actually something different is happening with 3D printing, which I'm sure some of your listeners are currently aware of, which is the ability to manufacture locally, very, very locally, like using a 3D printer. So basically, if you needed a part for your Hoover, rather than having to right away to the Hoover depot to send out your part, you could actually go down to something like a kinkos, a version of kinkos, and download the specs and create it there in 3D modeling. There and then walk away with your part and fix your Hoover. The idea of being able to manufacture to micro level, and that movement away from centralized industrialization model, I think, is what's very, very interesting and supports what we are writing about here in this book about the need for local currencies. So I think we're on the cusp of huge technological breakthroughs, which means greater need for entrepreneurship, greater need for social entrepreneurship. And we get from here to there as successfully as we can without rethinking money and having new monetary systems, not only to support the new economic models, but also to be imbued with the values and the ideas that we want to carry on. We can create currencies to actually carry the values that we want to see, not only for ourselves, but also for our children. To emphasize what Jack is saying, I would make a distinction between jobs and work. Job is something you do for the money and is an industrial age construct. The work hasn't emerged in the industrial age. Work is something you're passionate about it, and this is a very old work. It goes back to the beginning of the English language. So jobs, the future of jobs is actually going to evaporate all the reason that they mentioned, and that Jack had just mentioned. There is an enormous amount of work to be done. They don't expect a competitive currency to be used in order for you to encourage to do these things, the work that's needed. So the idea of a job for everybody is going to die with the industrial age. That's where they die, and the only thing that China has done by opening up is accelerate the process that was going to happen anyway, but slower, perhaps. So now we're in the fast movement of that process. So the solution is not to create jobs in the future. It won't happen. So we need other currencies for doing that, and that's what we're talking about. I'd like to switch the conversation. I mean, there's so much of value that people are going to get by reading, rethinking money, how new currencies turn scarcity into prosperity, by Bernard Lietar and Jackie Dunn. You can find a link to the site, leotar.com via northernspiritradio.org. Get the book, read it, and be enriched. That's what I think I have to say for our listeners. I want to shift the conversation right now, however, to a little bit about personally what motivates you and the objectives that you bring to this. I mean, Bernard, you have this long history in finance. You are in education and research right now. You're with the Center for Sustainable Resource Development at Berkeley. Jackie, your founder of Dan New Resources, and I noticed that for Dan New Resources, you talk about nurturing or helping entrepreneurs develop a quadruple bottom line. You say people, planet, profits, and this is the one that got me and hooked me and said, "These people have to be on spirit and action. The power within." Could you talk each of you about your motivations, why this is important to you? Is it not just because you want to get rich and have lots of money? Well, I don't think we've written this book with any of you to make any money out of it. So this is not a get rich scheme, and any matter of means, I think Bernard would join me in saying that the desire to write this book and Bernard has written several other books is that money be made understandable. It's something that is so emotional for all of us. I mean, we have shame around money, whether you've got money or not. I mean, there are issues no matter what part of the other spectrum you fall on. Everybody has issues around money. For those that are very wealthy, it's the issue of trust. How can I trust those around me? Are you dating me because you think I've got money? Can I trust my family? That trust becomes a huge issue. And for those who don't have much money, I mean, the day-to-day existence can become a hand-to-mouth situation. And I think while impetus to create modern money, I think was enormously noble. It was written and devised in another time with a very different set of values on earth. That's very, very different than it is today. And probably a very different spiritual outlook. We need a shift in our monetary system. Again, we're not talking about replacing the conventional system. We're talking about working in tandem, providing greater choice to people. And I think what really propelled me, and I know has propelled Bernard, is it doesn't have to be that way. And by unfurling the many strands of money and explaining how it works in as simple English as possible to lift up the curtain and show simply how it works and how it can be reworked to work for humanity. We work for people who have money, and we work for people who don't have money, that we can then move forward with greater possibilities for humanity. Because if we continue with the same type of money, the same monoculture of money, the same scarcity of money, we're not going to make it. We're simply not going to make it. That only will the system itself continually collapse, and as Bernard pointed out earlier in our conversation, there'd been 425 systemic collapses of the system since 1970. I mean, that's a serious number. If that was a car, you would bring it back to the shop and turn it in as an absolute lemon. Because it has been so shrouded in economic theory, all very well-intentioned. But it seems so compelling for us to try and explain as simply as possible so that people are no longer afraid of it. They get empowered by understanding it, so that means they can get into a conversation within their community. And the community can be a business business community. It could be an old people's retirement community. It could be the community of their village, of their neighborhood, of their city, of their state, of their world. And hopefully, by reading this book, that people can get engaged in the conversation, which I believe they have been excluded from because of the mystery that has shrouded it. And we have the opportunity for the first time in human history to have the democratization of money. I think that's the bottom line. And in order to engage in that conversation, in bringing about greater democracy in money, you have got to understand the rudiments. And I hope that's what this book gives. And also, the extraordinary stories of very ordinary people, like you and me and our listeners, how they have been faced with a crisis, such as Jaime Lerner. But there are many, many, many everyday ordinary stories and how coming together with their community, getting involved in the deeper conversation. They have been able to link the unused resources with unmet needs and have done fantastic things. Now, I'm not saying that everything that's been done on the rubric of a complementary currency has been fantastic. There have been failures, but we learn from failures. And as Bernard likes to talk, it's like the early days of aviation. Yes. I see the ironautics of the Wright brothers is where we currently are in the monetary domain. It's a miracle that it flies, but hasn't been proven that flying is possible. Now, let's start using it for important things and useful things. Bernard, would you care to amplify it all about your motivations for this? I get the feeling that sustainability and the vision of the future, instead of this time limited, you know, what are the next quarter profits, that you're trying to enlarge vision, and that comes from the spiritual place as far as I'm concerned. What is it for you, Bernard? For me, it is about the rebalancing of human history. All patriarchal societies in history have always imposed a single currency top-down with interest. It dates back to Sumer, Babylon, Greece, Rome, and Cinderella's also at times. All battery focal societies, the side that honour feminine values have always had in monetary ecology, multiple currency systems. And I think with the environmental crisis, the climate change issues and everything else that we are currently see looming, we need to rebalance masculine and feminine energies. This is not just about men and women, by the way, it's much broader than that. We're dealing with relationship issues, relationship with the divine, relationship with each other, relationship with nature. This relationship needs to be healed in a new balance between masculine and feminine energies. That's the way I see it. And I think we can only bring this down to earth by having the appearances that actually reflect these values. And you can do it with a single new one, not just a forming of an existing system, keeping it better than a monopoly. We need a system that is more flexible, that can adapt to the needs of specific communities, whatever scale they're operating. You said, Jackie, that this changeover, I mean, it's going to help address the needs of everyone, rich and poor. And I accept that, I believe that. I do not believe that a lot of rich people will perceive it to be in their interest. And there's something that toward the end of rethinking money, you talk about some, if you will call them, failures or difficulties. For instance, in the 1930s or 1920s and 30s in Austria and Germany, where there was some local innovation with respect to currency, which ends up addressing horrendous unemployment and dysfunctional economy there, that eventually the national bank felt threatened by and shut down, said, no, it's not allowed these complementary currencies. How hard will we have to work against some vested interests to bring this innovation? I haven't seen anybody saying you have to shut down these. More, I think these complementary currencies have been ignored by at least most people within the United States, in spite of the rise of time banking, et cetera. I've never met anybody who enjoys a monopoly, who is not ready to defend it. Okay, so I wouldn't put it then necessarily in terms of rich people and poor people, by the way. We're talking of institutions. The banking lobby has a monopoly currently enforced by the governments, and therefore prefers to keep it that way. It prefers the status quo. However, as shown in Switzerland for 18 years now, since the last Great Depression, this dual-gruncy system actually stabilizes the entire economy. It actually helps in doing what some banks try to do without much success. You know, there's no loser in this evolution. Yes, there is an institutional threat to monopoly, yes. But I think the time has come to be ready to face it and actually go on. Nobody is prohibiting anybody to start their own currency. It's perfectly illegal to do so. Just do it and pay taxes on it, and taxes need to be paid in dollars, yes. That's the legal constraint that actually, you know, there is not a tax avoidance scheme. But when you respect the law, you can do what you want to do. So there is a caveat to that that time banking has received three rulings. Thank you, Bernard, from the IRS saying that time banking transactions are tax exempt because they're doing such great social purpose work that you need loads and loads of dollars to do. So they've gotten three rulings to be tax exempt. But everything else, you have to pay your taxes and you have to pay your taxes in dollars. I sense a revolution in the making with respect to how we think about money and certainly rethinking money, how new currencies turn scarcity into prosperity is a key step in that. I've had my mind opened to a number of possibilities that I had no idea we're there. So I have to thank you, both Jackie Dunn and Bernard Lietar for writing this book, for getting the word out, for helping provide a future for this earth that is sustainable. And thank you so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. Oh, thank you so much, Mark, for such great questions and for this amount of time with you and your distance. We really appreciate it. Thank you. Wish you a lovely day. We were able to fit almost all of my interview with Jackie Dunn and Bernard Lietar into this broadcast, but there remains a single bonus excerpt, which I'm sure you'll want to listen to. So go to NortonSpiritRadio.org and look for the bonus excerpt from this show. I also want to note that today's program was brought to you through help from our programming assistant, Cassie Cassius. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeat, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing. (upbeat music)