Bernard Lietaer - The Future of Money - Full Book

I roved to me classroom next door, overhearing what appeared to be an introductory course in Economic History.

'During the early stone age, humans used the same tool for many different purposes: a broken stone fragment would be used for everything from killing prey to cleaning one's nails afterwards.

During the 19th and 20th centuries mere wens to have been a similar fixation with trying to use the same monetary tool - national currencies – for everything from global trade to paying for someone's education a for elderly care. To use another metaphor, this would be similar to assuming that the nervous system is the only information carrier in the human body, ignoring the role of the circulation of the blood, the lymphatic system and a wealth of biochemical links.

'This idea of “ one fits all" in monetary systems finally had to be abandoned when information and nano-production technologies ensured that the majority of the population had no production related 'jobs". Today, less than 30% of the world's population still has full-time jobs of that type. This has freed the vast majority of the people to dedicate themselves instead to whatever they feel most passionate about - their "work" - mostly in their local or virtual communities. The old scarce national currencies had never been designed to support such an explosion of random creativity.

‘Of course many of the Industrial Age economic concepts such as Gross National Product (GNP) had to be revised. It originated as ways of measuring military potential in the earlier decades of the 20th century. Among other flaws, GNP measured only those activities, which involved exchanges in national currencies. This led to increasingly strange anomalies. For instance, identical activities (someone taking care of a sick child) would be classified as 'employed’ and part of the GNP - or not - simply because in one case the carer was paid for the service in national currency and in the