The Future of Money- Sept 29,2010-the introduction....

After all the time we spend getting, keeping, and spending money, Bernard Lietaer, my hero and the  author of "The Future of Money" asks,
"How many of us really know what it is, and where it comes from?
 Here are the other questions he sets out to answer:
Why is productive work so scarce?
Why do we seem to be so short of time, when growth in technology and productivity was supposed to create an age of leisure?
Why is it ever more difficult to pay for good education for our children and for good health care?
Why is it that the more we "make it" financially, the less we hve a sense of real community?
Why is long term sustainability not a high priority in our society?
Why are so many people obsessed with having money?
Why is the global financial system increasingly turbulent and what does that mean to regular folk?

This book sets out to make clear the way money really works in our time, and a history of how it got that way. He belongs to no particular school of economics but  sets out to demonstrate how different monetary systems impact the way people interact in different societies, the societies themselves, and the physical world on which we all depend. He is interested in what is possible beyond greed and scarcity. He proposes that there is another way, and that each of us can take it! There have been monetary innovations "road-tested" in various places that actually provide effective solutions for full employment, education and health care without  adding taxes or burdensome interference from central authorities, and I'm with him that we can do with becoming aware of them!

This morning in Seattle, meditating on what really matters to me as I age, I watched salmon making their way up a fish ladder. The builders of the fish ladder included a viewing chamber along the wall of the highest compartment in this  route designed to allow the spawning fish to get around a dam. It is late in the spawning system, but this year was an especially large migration, and there were about ten mature salmon in the viewing compartment. It was near low tide, so the speed of the water flowing downstream was great. The  huge, powerful old salmon were nearly immobile in the flow, their great grey bodies working just to stay in place. I had no idea how difficult it is for them to get back up the river to their original streams. Every so often a young small salmon would leap into the tank heading in the opposite directions, out to the sea and the  full life of salmon in the ocean. They were beautiful and shiny compared to the scarred behemoths powering upstream.
Among us humans, old people usually have  the money and the power (if not the muscles), and if we have not given up on life, usually some intent to leave a legacy.  We've done our spawning (if we were going to do any) but after the legacy work, we die too. To-day I am inspired by the salmon not to give up on working for a world where everyone's needs are met, and everyone's gifts are needed.