We've always had a spiritual economy, among family and friends. We give them credit based on how much we love them.
It's an informal economy. We don't write down any accounts. We keep the credit in our hearts.
That informal economy has been eroded by the money economy, which has taken over more and more of our lives. Things like child care are commercialized and become a major economic burden. Money has become our bottom line, our god. It runs our lives.
That might be OK if money took care of all our needs and desires, but that has never been the case. Money follows its own rules, its profit-and-loss, balanced-books accounting, and provides only what is profitable. Everything else is excluded from the economy, including such trifles as a livable environment and the needs of billions who have no money.
We tried in the 20th century expanding the role of government to take care of the needs unmet by money. But that turned out to be a largely futile effort. Nonprofits and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are more effective, provided they don't get too big.
We have a money-god which can only do about half a job, and that's a good enough reason for us to become polytheists and find some other economic gods to do the rest. A spiritual or nonprofit economy of some sort, comparable in power to the money economy, looks like a good idea.
It's tempting to think that we can come up with an accounting system and a new kind of money to provide a balance, but first we have to individually find our faith in the new god.
Money runs on faith. The dollar and other world currencies have long ago lost their backing in gold or silver, and are now empty symbols. We individually and collectively give the dollar value by our shared belief in its value. It's a national and world religion of the strongest sort. The dollar is a spiritual currency.
Any new kind of currency must also depend on our belief in its value, and this must be built up in each individual.
Values come from people, and we can place values upon on the things money can buy and the things it can't. The wish list covers the things it can't. We can put values on these in imaginary currency, and we may find that our non-monetary needs are comparable in value to our monetary needs. This is our internal model of a spiritual economy that might coexist with the money economy.
This imaginary currency we create is also the prototype for a new kind of money. Note that we create it. It doesn't trickle down to us through a hierarchy. We are the gods of the new money.
When we go through the wish list, we can put values on desires in our own personal currency. When we add these up we have our total investment funds available for our future.
Wants are wealth in the spiritual economy. The more we want, the more personal currency we create. This wealth is still zero in the eyes of the world, but we know what it's worth, and we may actually feel internally rich enough to attain some of our desires.
In an economy of personal currencies, the values we place on our desires would attract help from people who wish to earn our currency. We can do this now in our informal economy, by sharing our desires with friends. If they help us, they earn informal credit.
What if we issue handsome personal currency notes to the friends who help us? Without a market for the notes, they're just notes, a nice acknowledgement, an expression of thanks. We all know the credit is banked securely in the heart, and the note is unnecessary.
That's a crucial principle, that the spiritual economy can always be reduced to the informal economy of the heart. If we create a new money system to restore some balance to the world, it's a game, not a god. It can't be allowed to run us. We are the gods of our money, not the other way around.
Our starting point, where all we have is our informal economy, remains the solid center of our spiritual economy. It's OK to spend some time practicing these new concepts on our informal economy. Informal credit or heart credit is the best kind. It's OK if nobody takes our personal currency seriously. It's only a game.
It's Kids' Currency. Play money. We'd better not take it seriously. The whole idea of personal currency is a joke.
Actually it's education. We model our informal economy, externalize it, so we can see how it works. Then we can put the game back in the box.
Yes, it's crazy to think we could run an economy on a zillion unstable personal currencies. But it's definitely something we should play with.
There are better ideas for building a stable and powerful spiritual economy. Kids' Currency is organized under a teacher or sponsor currency. Educational and nonprofit institutions can provide a stable currency and infrastructure, described at length in "Spiritual Currency."
Kids' Currency teaches that we can strengthen our personal currencies by linking them to institutional currencies. We don't have to. We may learn more by conducting wild experiments with our currency. Or we can just not bother with a personal currency at all. On the other hand, if we're smart enough, we may be able to manage our personal currency to have independent market value.
These are all games we can play, and stop playing. If we see a need in our lives or in the world, that is not being met by the money economy, we can create a currency to deal with it and organize the effort to take care of it.
In fact, it may be our duty to do so. We've been in thrall to a false god of money who makes us do certain things while the rest of the world falls apart. When we take the first step, of valuing in our own money all those unmet needs and desires, we're starting to restore some balance.