Community Currencies:
A New Tool for the 21st Century

Community Currencies: A New Tool for the 21st Century

The three most important concerns of our contemporaries in the developed nations are remarkably convergent--unemployment, the environment, and community breakdown--and there are strong indications that these same issues will remain on top of the agenda well into the next century. Emerging technologies promise to keep unemployment a major issue, even if all Western economies get out of recession. By 2010, China will introduce as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as the entire world does today. And community breakdown is one of the most systemic, deep, and complex societal trends of the past 30 years, with no signs of any reversal.

Precisely because we will have to live with these issues for the foreseeable future, only a long-term structural approach can successfully resolve these problems. Here I show how community currencies could contribute to tackling all three problems and also permit us to "retrofit" economic motivation to desirable human behavior.

1. Aligning Moral and Economic Incentives

When these incentives conflict, problems will arise. For instance, when there is an economic incentive to do something a regulation or law prohibits, we need costly and permanent enforcement systems. Even in the presence of such enforcement systems we expect smuggling and many more imaginative forms of cheating to occur. More evident are cases where moral pressure is supposed to overrule economic interests. Consider, for instance, the well-known saying, "Money is like manure; it does good only if spread around." This sentiment has been espoused in less florid language by most religions for a long time. However, this moral pressure is diametrically opposed to the concept of receiving interest on money, which provides a built-in incentive to hoard currency. Whenever there are such structural contradictions many people are unable to afford, or simply do not care enough, to follow the moral advice.

It is possible, however, to design a coherent and operational currency system so that this apparent structural contradiction disappears. In other words, by questioning some traditional implicit assumptions, we can realign the moral and economic incentives so that they are in harmony.

2. Functions of Money

Since the breakdown in 1972 of the Bretton Woods system, the world has been living with pure fiat currency--that is, there is nothing material backing the currencies of the world. Nonetheless, money has continued to fulfill a number of different functions, only two of which are essential:

• A standard of measure. We compare the value of the proverbial apples and oranges by expressing each of them in dollars, for example.

• A medium of exchange that is more efficient than other forms--barter, for instance.

• A store of value. Historically, this has only rarely been the case. For example the word capital derives from the Latin capus, capitis, which means head, and referred to heads of cattle just as is still done today in Texas or among the Tutsi in Africa: "He is worth 1,000 head." Another example: in Egypt through the Late Classical period, and in Europe throughout the Middle Ages and until the late 18th Century, wealth was stored mainly in land and its gradual improvements.

• A tool for speculative profit, most emphatically today when more than 95 percent of all currency transactions in the world are motivated by speculation, and less than 5 percent are for trades of goods and services. This has been systematically possible only since August 1972, when President Nixon created the floating currency nonsystem we now have.

• A tool of empire. The control by the former Soviet Union of the external trade of Comecon countries via the "convertible ruble" is a recent example.