Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition (43 page)

In creating new modes of organization that can accommodate the unquantifiable, we are just entering an age of experimentation. Many of these experiments have failed and will fail, for example the Communist block’s forced collectivization with central management by bureaucrats. Doubtless many new forms of collaboration will arise as we digest the lessons of past and current attempts.
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The monetary proposals I have laid forth in this book will encourage nontraditional structures of ownership and management. Just as they will eliminate the profiting from passive ownership of money, land, and the commons generally, so will they discourage profiting from passive ownership in corporations, which today are a vehicle of the control of said assets.

The advent of collaborative gift structures will fundamentally alter the experience of employment. Today, the interests of workers and owners are fundamentally at odds. It is in the owners’ interest for the workers to do maximum work for as little pay as possible. It is in each individual worker’s interest to do as little work as possible for maximum pay. Good management can mitigate this fundamental opposition by tying pay to “performance” and by appealing to professional pride, loyalty, or team spirit, but the underlying contradiction remains. Employees commonly receive rewards for their success in office politics rather than authentic contributions, while recognizing “team spirit” as the internal PR that it often is. “If we are really all in it together,” they wonder, “how is it that I can be fired at any time but the owners cannot? Any lasting value I create is theirs.” In this world, any employee who truly identifies with his employer is a dupe. This becomes obvious whenever a company downsizes or streamlines. “I’ve given you twenty years of loyal service; how can you let me go?” As one insurance executive explained to an employee, “If you want loyalty, get a dog.” Of course, most employers aren’t so hard-hearted, but market discipline hardens a soft heart.

Well, market discipline is going to change. As money aligns with social and ecological good, and as new structures arise that reward contribution to the commonwealth, the relationships around work will lose their spirit of mutual exploitation. The raison d’être of business organizations will shift. Quantifiable contributions to the
good of society and the planet will receive monetary reward, and unquantifiable contributions will accrue rewards of status, gratitude, and goodwill mediated through the new social and symbolic structures emerging today.

Such innovations are the wave of the future. In all realms, the model of wealth from owning will give way to that of wealth by giving. The desire to own, to control, is the desire of the self of separation, the self that seeks to manipulate others to its own advantage, to extract wealth from nature and people and all that is other. The connected self grows rich by giving, by playing its role to the fullest in the nourishment of that which extends beyond itself. As we step into the connected self, organizational structures are emerging that are in tune with it. They align the self-interest of the individual with that of the organization and the interest of the organization with that of society and the planet. Unlike classic collectivist models, they allow the exuberant expression of the extraordinary gifts of the individual, yet turn those gifts toward the benefit of all.

The open collaborative structures of an extended gift economy transcend the old opposition between the individual and the group. When I say that extraordinary individual gifts will turn toward the benefit of all, some readers might protest, “But shouldn’t individual excellence be rewarded?” Conservative friends in particular are immediately suspicious of my ideas, supposing that they entail the subsumption of the individual. They think that in a system that discourages accumulation and turns excellence toward the benefit of all, there would be no incentive or reward for greatness. Meanwhile, the traditional Left accepts the same basic premises, differing only in the conviction that the subsumption of the individual is good and necessary. In this view, a virtuous person labors in noble self-sacrifice for the common good, spurning any reciprocation or reward.

Both of these views come from the paradigm of separation that holds that “more for you is less for me.” More for the group is less for the individual. But in gift culture, that is simply untrue. A great giver of precious gifts can ascend to the highest pinnacle of honor and enjoy all that is within the power of human beings to bestow. Such is the nature and the power of gratitude. Unfortunately, the intuitions of gift culture are alien to us now, for though they live deeply in our hearts, they are absent from the economic and ideological structures of our society. The next part of this book describes how to restore the intuitions and practices of gift culture, starting on the personal level.

The bankruptcy of the economics of the separate self is now plain to see. In the capitalist world in which individual accumulation has been permitted, we have experienced not the exuberant expression of our gifts, but their suppression, their enslavement, and their perversion toward the purpose of taking and controlling, for these activities are what the present money system compels and rewards. Worse, these ostensible rewards have been a delusion: money, its purchases, and its accumulation substituting for connection, love, beauty, play, meaning, and purpose. The noncapitalist world fared us no better. Whether it comes from communist ideology or religious teaching, self-abnegation is life-denying; invariably, the life denied expresses itself in shadow forms that wreak the same consequences, or worse, as the outright aggrandizement of the separate self.

The Age of Separation, however, is winding to a close, and we are beginning to relearn how to live the truth of our connectedness. All that I have laid out so far in this book assumes (and fosters) a shift in our consciousness, without which nothing of sacred economics would be practicable. I am not
calling
for such a shift though—I am observing it, bearing witness to it, and, I like to
think, contributing to it. It is happening as you read these words, and it will happen all the swifter as the multiple crises borne of Separation converge upon us. The world is changing, and ourselves with it. We not only must create the economic structures of the connected self living in cocreative partnership with earth; we can also, right now, learn how to think and live in them.

Before I explore more deeply the shift in personal economic thinking and practice that is part of sacred economy, I will summarize its key macroeconomic elements. Some are coming into place already; others are still outside the purview of acceptable political discourse and await a deepening of the crisis for the unthinkable to become common sense.

The transition I map out is evolutionary. It does not involve confiscation of property or the wholesale destruction of present institutions, but their transformation. As the following summaries describe, this transformation is under way already, or incipient in existing institutions.

The reader may notice that, except where they are off the map entirely, most of these developments fall on the left side of the political spectrum. That is because they gradually redistribute wealth from the rich to everybody else. Whereas the moneyed classes have always desired higher interest rates, and labor lower interest rates, this book foresees them going negative. Whereas liberals are fond of social welfare programs, this book foresees their universalization in a social dividend. Whereas corporate interests advocate the
gutting of environmental and social protections, this book foresees the reclamation of the commons. The single major exception to the foregoing is the elimination of the income tax, which will actually benefit that small subset of the wealthy whose wealth comes from entrepreneurial productivity rather than control of money and property generating economic rents.

Motivation:
Negative interest on reserves, and a physical currency that loses value with time, reverses the effects of interest. It enables prosperity without growth, systemically encourages the equitable distribution of wealth, and ends the discounting of future cash flows so that we no longer are pressed to mortgage our future for short-term returns. Moreover, it embodies the truth about the world, in which all things decay and return to their source. No longer is money an illusory exception to nature’s law. Finally, since money in some sense represents the accumulated power of millennia of technological development, which is the common inheritance of all human beings, it is unjust for someone to profit merely by owning it, as happens in the current system of risk-free positive interest.

Transition and policy:
We were on the brink of a transition to decaying currency in 2009, as central banks pushed interbank interest rates to near zero and flirted with breaching the zero lower bound. Today the economy is in an anemic recovery, but the underlying problems of stagnation and debt still remain. Each new crisis, each new bailout, offers the opportunity to buy out unrepayable debts with decaying currency, thereby rescuing the financial infrastructure
without further intensifying the concentration of wealth. Moreover, when traditional monetary stimulus and Keynesian fiscal stimulus fail beyond doubt, as has happened in Japan, then central banks can hardly ignore the obvious next step of pushing interest rates below zero. To prevent currency wars, this should happen as a coordinated policy of all sovereign powers, or it should be built into a global currency.

The Federal Reserve does not at present have the authority to levy negative interest on reserves or to issue depreciating bank notes. In any country such authority resides, as it should, in legislative bodies. The time is ripe for this idea to enter the economic and political discourse, as central bankers fret about the impotence of their monetary tools. The current stagnation of the velocity of money demonstrates that lowering interest rates to zero stimulates lending only if there is the prospect of significant economic growth. The new round of quantitative easing will only underscore this point as excess reserves increase. In the absence of growth, banks would rather hold money at zero interest than lend it into the economy. But would they be willing to hold it at −2 percent? Or −5 percent?

Effect on economic life:
For everyone but the investing class, the everyday experience of using money will be the same. Hard as it may be for the wealthy to imagine, most people today live paycheck to paycheck and rarely accumulate more than a couple months’ worth of savings. For the more affluent, savings would still be possible, but the value of savings would gradually decrease over time unless invested at risk. There will be no way to grow money risk-free, to make “money work for you.” Even government bonds will pay zero interest or less. For large purchases, whether on
the personal or corporate level, low-interest or zero-interest loans rather than savings will be the primary financing vehicle. (This is happening already anyway.) Businesses will have access to investment capital that does not require them to devote a high proportion of their future cash flow to servicing debt, removing the “grow or die” imperative that governs economic life today.

Motivation:
Polarization of wealth is inevitable when people are allowed to profit from merely owning a thing, without producing anything or contributing to society. These profits, known as economic rents, accrue to the holders of land, the electromagnetic spectrum, mineral rights, oil reserves, patents, and many other forms of property. Because these forms of property either were prior to any human being or are the collective product of human culture, they should not belong to any private individual who does not use them for the benefit of the public and the planet.

In addition, today it is possible to profit by depleting aspects of the commonwealth such as biodiversity, aquifers, soil, ocean fisheries, and so on. These properly belong to all of us, and their depletion should only happen by common agreement and for the common good.

Transition and policy:
Some states and nations already levy land-value taxes, and others have nationalized oil and minerals. The country of Bolivia and the state of Alaska, for example, assert public ownership over oil rights, so that oil companies earn money
only for their services in extracting the oil, and not from owning the oil. Shifting the tax burden away from labor and toward property will become more and more attractive as wage earners’ situations become desperate. Finally, as intractable regulatory battles over water rights show, building resource conservation directly into the money system is an idea whose time is coming.