How to get more money
Town &
Country Planning, February 2000
The value of money is "derived not from nature,
but from law," said Aristotle, writing three centuries
before the birth of Christ, "and can be altered or abolished
at will."
And since we now have a euro, and it will
soon &emdash; whatever the result of any referendum over
here &emdash; be circulating in our shops, it is hard not to
remember what the old philosopher said.
And if you ever doubt it, it might be worth
remembering that &emdash; with four-bedroomed homes in St
John's Wood fetching up to £1 million &emdash; there is
a difference between value and price. Though that maybe what
Plato would have said.
So the question for us is this: if money
is an instrument of law, and a human construction, how can
we get more of it in some of the places that have been
rather lacking in money over the past few generations. And I
don't just mean St Pauls in Bristol, but places like St
Petersburg as well.
So how would you go about creating some more? Since this is
only the second one of these columns I've written, I have to
apologise for so flagrantly plugging my own book, because
this is the question it tries to answer.
And on the face of it, it's an impossible answer. We seen to
have precious little money as it is. But the answer may lie
in the celebrated blindness of the market economy. It
measures such narrow indicators of success and wealth, that
there is a great deal missed out.
What we have to do in any community is find those forgotten
assets and use them as a basis for new kinds of money. And
here are three of them:
- People: according to the market economy, only people with marketable skills have anything to offer. That leaves out the talent and enthusiasm of young people, and the wisdom and time of older people, and all the skills and humanity of everyone in between &emdash; sick, disabled or just unemployed &emdash; that the economy depends on.
You don't believe it, the futurist Alvin Toffler used to ask conferences of executives? How much would it cost you if your new employees were delivered to you without ever having been toilet trained?
- Space: part of the local surveys pioneered by Tony Gibson at Neighbourhood Initiatives Foundation are devoted to seeking this out &emdash; the wasted assets of rooms, buildings, vacant land or SLOAP, which could be linked with the human assets to make something work.
This is, after all, how the highly-successful development trusts, starting in places like North Kensington and Tower Hamlets have made such a success/
- Goods: even the market has wasted products. If it didn't, there would be no need for Christmas sales, or air miles or any of the other supermarket currencies which use surplus products to encourage customers. As many as 15 million perfectly good computers are put into landfill every year by business in the USA.
So what do we do? Take a leaf out of the book of
Sainsbury's Reward Points, and use some of these wasted
assets as backing for local money &emdash; the stuff which
doesn't shoot straight out of the local economy to be
invested offshore.
That's what LETS does, but LETS is only the beginning.
David Boyle is an associate of the New Economics Foundation and the author of Funny Money (www.funny-money.co.uk)
