SUMMARY: We are coming up against the limits of conventional money, which follows zero-sum, win-lose accounting, used originally to count precious metals, whose quantity was conserved in any transaction. In an information-based economy, the quantity of information is readily increased by creation and copying, so we need positive-sum, or win-win accounting.
This document sets forth the rules of win-win accounting, which can release the full power and abundance of the information economy. Win-win accounting is also applicable to a number of other economies, including volunteer, academic, spiritual, political, community and game economies. The win-win economy as an interconnected whole opens up a vast new field of economic expansion which counters the destructive effects of the material economy.
CONTENTS:
In conventional accounting, the quantity of money is conserved, while transferring it from person to person, or from one account to another. Money follows a zero-sum, or win-lose rule. My gain is your loss. The total quantity of money in society is limited to give money scarcity value, and the result is growing poverty in an age of technological abundance.
We need to create new kinds of currency to fight poverty, but there is also a technological reason that will appeal to the rich. This is the need for an information currency. Information does not follow zero-sum rules, but is created and copied all over the place. Information needs a positive-sum, or win-win accounting and currency.
To accountants this is heresy. They rely on the zero-sum rule to balance their books. Win-win belongs in another universe, a separate system where anything can happen. We're on our own there, with a freedom that is close to chaos. The trick is to impose just enough order to extract value, while retaining our freedom.
Computers require total order. They won't be creating information currency any time soon. But we will be doing so from the start in the win-win economy. It takes a peculiarly human faculty to create win-win currency of any kind, and that will save us all from technological obsolescence and give us all a stake in the information economy.
The first rule of win-win accounting requires us to create our own currency. And everything follows from that.
Children have an advantage in taking this first step. Give them art materials, colored pens and blunt scissors, and they'll churn out the currency with enthusiasm. We should ask them to teach us.
Here is our first exposure to chaos, a chaos of different currencies of different names and amounts and no discernible value. How do we extract the first level of order, which is to make the currencies follow a common standard of value?
The second rule declares that everybody's currency exchanges one for one. It doesn't matter what we call our money. It's the amount that counts.
This rule establishes a standard by default. If we don't claim any special value for our currency, it is assumed to be equal to everybody else's.
With a common currency, now we can play games, such as Monopoly or poker. Our currencies may all be equally worthless outside the games, but in the games they will have play value. With a few more rules, we can construct a game economy based on our standard currency.
The third rule emerges logically from our power to create our own currency without limit. We find that it doesn't have any value until we spend it. Our wealth is how much of our currency others will accept.
Children will understand this instinctively. Money is for spending. Otherwise it's just piling up paper. We aren't rich if we can't spend it. And making our own money is just an empty exercise unless somebody accepts it and values it.
In the win-lose world our wealth is measured by how much money we have, and we can be rich in isolation, sitting on our pile of money. In the win-win world, we aren't rich until we give it away. We depend on others to validate our currency. Win-win currency involves two people, the creator and the holder. Win-win currency is binary. Win-win currency is a relationship.
In creating a new economy it is important to follow the law of least effort, the fourth rule of win-win accounting. The rule can also be spelled KISS, for Keep It Simple, Stupid. Our task is so ambitious that it must be made radically simple and easy, or it won't get done.
We see an example of this in the second rule, where the exchange rate of all currencies is assumed to be one to one. Another example: when we come to copy our currency, to print as much as we wish, the standard unit of currency will be one page, the way it comes out of the copy machine.
The fifth rule is an extension of the third rule, that our wealth is the amount of our money people will accept. They could refuse it or trash it, of course, but the right of return gives them another option and closes the economic circuit. The money-back guarantee says, if you don't like my currency, I'll exchange it for someone else's.
The right of return is voluntary, of course, but those who offer a money-back guarantee are in a much stronger position to issue currency. Those who don't will not inspire confidence, and those who can't are the deadbeats and bankrupts of the game economy.
The money-back guarantee puts some backbone in the win-win economy. It sets a minimum standard for player currencies, upon which we can build.
The first rule of win-win accounting tells us to create our own currency, and the easiest way is the copy machine. We could make master sheets and cut up the copies into money-sized pieces, but again, following the law of least effort, the easiest way is to make our money 8.5 by 11 (or A4 in Europe).
This spacious currency format can carry a useful amount of information. We can explain what our currency is about and what to do with it, expound our philosophy and interests, tell the latest jokes, or advertise our yard sale. If we make our money interesting, more people will accept it and hold on to it, and rule three tells us that acceptance is what counts in this game.
This copying of currency pages answers an important question that has been nagging in the background: What is our currency worth? Rule two says everybody's currency is worth the same, but the same what? Now we have a standard for everybody's currency: a page of information. And we have incidentally invented information currency.
The information game needs a story, a scenario that we participate in, so we know what to do. In this game we are creating and publishing our own money as currency pages. Creating our own money is heresy, of course, an idea that contradicts the established order. But, even worse, our money spreads the heresy by carrying on its face the instructions for how to create more money. Opposing this subversive practice are the treasury agents, called the Inquisition.
The heresy game has a rich history drawn from medieval times, when a knightly quest led to the secret of the grail, which promised untold abundance in romance, healing, rejuvenation, knowledge, wealth, peace, and the bringing of heaven to earth.
The Inquisition was set up to destroy this heresy, and after burning all the heretics the world was safe for war and want for the rest of the millennium. Now, as foretold in the grail legend, the end times are at hand and the old order is collapsing. The grail heresy has broken out again, and the currency pages, called heresies, tell everybody what to do to secure abundance and create heaven on earth.
The good heretic builds up a varied and growing inventory of heresies to offer, some created from scratch, the others copied. While the collection is small, the customers can leaf through it. When it gets large enough, the publisher should issue a catalog, listing the available heresies under different topics or authors.
Another approach is for the heretic to pick out heresies that may suit specific customers, but the customer should make the final selection.
Selection is important. It would be inefficient to dump the entire inventory on every customer, and currency pages distributed in such excess would be seen as worthless. Furthermore, the right of return puts the issuer at risk. Instead, each customer is offered only a limited number of currency pages on each occasion. This means the customer selects the best, and the value of the currency pages is enhanced. In the long run, the issuer distributes more currency pages this way.
Selection is important for another reason. The selected heresies go into the customer's inventory, and go on to another cycle of copying and selection by new customers. The best heresies spread, while the junk goes nowhere, or may even be returned for exchange. The heresies that spread represent a consensus of the players in a given community, and we can see what the people believe, want and support.
By limiting customers to a few currency pages at a time, a regular repeat business is built up, and social contacts are improved. Eventually the customers will have new heresies to offer, new information. And each heretic must strive to create, seek out or copy new heresies to maintain the repeat business. Conventional money is always the same, but currency pages must be always different.
The story so far suggests that a win-win game economy is possible with a few simple rules, making the concept accessible to everybody above a certain age, say five. An information game can start things off and distribute the rules. The heresy game goes further and suggests that higher values are at stake.
Currency pages are the lowest values in the win-win economy, reproduced for five or ten cents. When we play games with this play money, however, it comes to reflect higher values in our lives.
If we have a choice of whose currency to hold, we'll hold the currency of the people we know, the people we trust, the people we love. Our holdings will tend to be proportional to the value of our relationships. The play money may have only token value, but it tells us something about how we value people. And it leads to the sixth rule:
The sixth rule confounds the win-lose players who are always good at games. They're convinced that their superior intelligence will win out in the end, and the reason they're losing is bad luck or a conspiracy of the other players against them.
Our ability to issue our own currency depends on the willingness of others to hold it and value it. This has nothing to do with how clever we are, or whether we can count or remember the rules. It has everything to do with how many friends we have and how willing they are to help us.
If we are interested not in winning, but in helping others, in the game and in life, then we will be valued, and our currency will be valued. If we are known to be honest, trusted and appreciative of others, this character will be reflected in our fortunes in the game. Our currency depends not on our abilities, but on who we are.
Everybody has an informal economy of relationships. Our positive relationships are assets that we can nurture and draw upon. We have informal credit with other people, and we grant them informal credit in return. This is an unmeasured form of wealth that we can create whether we are rich or poor.
The informal wealth that we can create is very valuable, perhaps more so than money, but to the world it does not exist. It literally does not count. But we can make it count.
This doesn't mean we're going to keep book on our friends, record the value of each one, and issue a credit rating. We still prefer to keep our credit informal. But even now our friends and relatives will occasionally ask us for money, or to cosign a loan, or we may have to do those things, and our credit gets tested.
Something similar could operate in the win-win economy. If we want to create currency and credit on a substantial scale, to build up the win-win economy, and make things happen in the world, we will need the backing of our friends.
And that means we'll need friends, and we'll need to build our relationships. We can't go it alone in the win-win economy. We have to pay attention to people, love them, spend time with them. We can build our credit by playing with them as well as doing things for them. Building our credit with win-win fun and games is more appreciated than sacrifice.
As we consider where the value of relationships comes from, we'll find that love is the true coin, and that fun and games and laughter are the small change that add up. Reliability and trust also play important roles. We can build a lot of credit before we actually do anything for people.
And when we do, it is love that makes it a pleasure and a win-win. Without love it is an obligation producing guilt, a lose-lose that destroys credit. Love is the top currency of the win-win economy, and the point. Building our credit to make things happen is just an excuse. The real point is to build our relationships and find love.
Win-win accounting is good for modeling win-win transactions. When the wins are fun and games, love and laughter, we see wealth creation in its purest, non-material form. It is an energy flowing into our lives from some unlimited mysterious source.
What we are measuring in the win-win economy is energy. Some would say, spiritual energy, making this a spiritual economy. Others would just say spirit, a natural human energy, as in sales spirit or fighting spirit. It works either way. We don't have to make a religion out of this.
But it does address the classic religious issues. "Love one another" is the win-win formula for riches. It's been around a long time, and it's always been difficult, because it doesn't fit in a win-lose world. Could our win-win games and relationships make it easier?
There's actually a scientific reason why we don't have a win-win world, why we can't afford to love one another. It is the law of conservation of energy, which sounds like the law of least effort, but is actually something very different.
This spirit or energy we're tapping into is powerful stuff. We don't know how to store it, so we have to pass it on into the world. Nobody else knows what to do with it, so it dead-ends, and we can't accept any more.
This is why we need win-win accounting. We need a win-win economy to channel our energy into the world and put it to work. There are urgent needs out there not being met by the money economy, and maybe urgent needs in our own lives.
Once we have an outlet, an energy sink, then we can afford to love, and move into a new quality of life, a new state of being. Some call it personal transformation. Some call it salvation or the kingdom of heaven. Some call it happiness. Whatever it is, it's the prize, the big win.
It turns out that the purpose of the win-win economy is to raise ourselves to a new state of being, not to save the world. This accords with the wisdom that inner change is necessary before outer change can be effected. After we have secured our inner transformation, then the rest of our world will be transformed.
We have a hard time keeping these priorities straight. But even our backwards thinking can be put to use. We are accustomed to look for external, technical solutions to our problems. Win-win accounting looks like just such a fix.
And it is! A win-win economy can meet major social needs. We can throw ourselves into building such an economy. But to make such an economy go, we have to build the relationships and find the energy that flows into the economy and makes it go. The economy turns us around to find the source. Which turns out to be what we really wanted. And the more energy we find (our first priority) the more our world is transformed.
It looks like we're fixing the world, but we'd better not believe it. Our external work is setting up the infrastructure, the channels through which energy can flow. Then we can afford to find the energy, and if we fail to do so, our work is in vain, and nothing happens.
We'll probably fall into the purpose trap repeatedly. That's where a grand and noble goal becomes our prime purpose and false god. Groups organize around such a goal, which is then the group priority, and becomes impossible to deny. Historically, many have sacrificed themselves to such ends -- which becomes all sacrifice and no end.
The purpose trap is just a hairbreadth away from the ideal of serving some cause greater than ourselves. Being engaged in a great work can indeed be energizing, inspiring, transforming. The energy equation tells us why:
If we are given a great goal, that becomes an energy sink in our lives, which allows us to contact the universal energy source, and enjoy the heavenly experience of passing that energy through us.
The goal may be inspiring. That's how we know it's a true goal. We contemplate the goal and find it energizes us. So it's easy to make the goal our god. But the source of the energy has a better claim to divinity. The energy flows from the divine source through us to the work we do in the world. We have to keep returning to the source.
It's easier to worship the work or the goal. That's something we can see, while the divine source is invisible. Hence the purpose trap. If we're lucky, we can stay connected to the source even when focused on the goal. Otherwise we have to stop and find the source again.
The gallant knight finds the grail by finding a lady to serve. She becomes his divine source, loving her is his salvation, and serving her is his energy sink. His attention, will and ego are all displaced outside himself, upon another person. Escaping this mental baggage is essential to transformation, and the formula of chivalry is a life-changing spiritual exercise.
Of course, this places a burden on the lady. Unless she is a damsel in distress, she may not be able to absorb much of the service energy coming her way. This is where an external goal comes in handy. "You can show your love for me by slaying the dragon and restoring our land to peace and prosperity."
The formula is cast in sexist terms because the male is the hard case. The male will and ego dominate the world, and are in fact the dragons to be overcome. Women find it much easier to love and serve, but if they are serving male vanity it's a lost cause.
Chivalry still lives. We know those roles. The woman is in the power position if she can direct the service energy into some major goals. Then she can love and serve also, and find the grail. Why should the men have all the fun?
We can build a win-win economy as an energy sink with redeeming social value, so that we can find love and pass the energy into it. There are three parts to this process: seek energy; find energy; sink energy. The three parts have to handle the same amount of energy. If one is short, they all are short.
We've looked at the purpose trap, where we develop a grand goal to work for. But if that's all we do, we starve for energy.
At the other extreme are thrill-seekers and hedonists, who seek energy but lack purpose. They can't absorb much energy, so they get their fill and stop. Or they continue to find energy, and release it in all-night dancing, riotous behavior, violence or destruction. Thus seeking and finding energy has a bad name, and is suppressed in our society, leaving us with the purpose trap.
The adolescents' wild energies stem from the divine source. In the grail legend, Parsifal has to defeat the white knight of purity and embrace his heathen black-and-white half-brother Feirfiz before he can find the grail for keeps. Feirfiz's energy may be criminally misdirected, like that of gangsters today, yet that is the same energy we need both to complete our purpose and to transform our consciousness.
What are the top values in the spiritual economy? We value energy, especially love energy, and the people we love, and personal salvation or the transformation of consciousness, and the knowledge of how to find these things.
We've kept these great goods hidden throughout history, and why?
Perhaps they are too much for us. A problem of abundance. We've failed to balance our energy equation, and whenever the energy breaks out, it does mischief.
The eastern concept of karma describes this situation. Whenever we tap the divine energy source, we are responsible for the energy we channel into the world. Whatever we do with it, it will change the world, and we will reap the consequences. Karma just means cause and effect, and our ignorance keeps producing effects that rebound on us and refuse to go away.
The eastern approach is to act in harmony with the world, so that it accepts our energy with scarcely a ripple. That's a good policy to keep in mind as we design energy sinks to absorb a lot more of our energy and let us function at a higher level.
Building a win-win economy and channeling our energy into it appears to meet this design criterion. Win-win transactions by definition hurt no one and benefit both sides. The energy we put into such transactions does not impose loss or unwelcome change on anyone. And we shall see that projects and institutions in the win-win economy will act to restore harmony and reduce imbalance in the world.
We've looked at creating win-win currency in games and win-win credit in relationships. From the lowest values to the highest, our riches are generated by ourselves, within our hearts, and within our immediate circle of relationships.
The win-win economy has an intensely local focus, unlike the win-lose economy. In the win-lose money economy we pursue riches out there in the world. That pursuit and that money system combine to drive the global juggernaut of commerce and politics and misery and destruction.
After we've found our win-win wealth locally, we may want to spend it more widely, and have some effect on the world. How do we make our personal currency and credit acceptable beyond the people we know?
Up to now we've been on the fairly solid ground of what we know and what we can do immediately. Now we launch out into the unknown, speculating on what we can do to create a win-win world. The scenarios that follow are just some of the possibilities we can derive from the rules of win-win accounting. We can put all such possibilities into the heresy game and select the most promising.
Networking is something we all do to some extent, and it is encouraged by the heresy game, where we distribute information in the form of currency pages. But we will reserve the networker label for those of a missionary bent, who distribute most of the currency pages and recruit people to the game.
The networkers' currency will be the most common and familiar, the most widely accepted and held. Networkers will also exchange currency pages with each other in an area, and sometimes over long distances. Their currency will be recognized and held among themselves, and will become known as network currency. It may even have brand names, such as Grail Dollars or Funny Money, all interchangeable one for one.
When other players want to travel, or exchange currency or credit outside their circle of acquaintances, they can ask their local networker for network currency. They can provide their personal currency in exchange. The networker is then a banker, taking deposits in personal currency, providing accounts in network currency, maybe issuing checkbooks and making telephone transfers.
Could networkers build a win-win economy? That's debatable. They are just players who can come and go. That's why we shall look for institutions to do the heavy lifting. But on the local level, networkers can provide the first level of expansion for the economy, and develop the exchange of currency pages into a computerized information service, connecting a community and promoting win-win transactions.
We've seen how currency holdings can reflect the much larger and unmeasured credit in relationships. We can also create measured credit by keeping books. The networker-banker does this when setting up an account. One advantage of credit over currency is that it can be transferred by telephone.
Instead of giving me information in a currency page, suppose you phone me up? Then I may take the information down in a phone memo, put your name in the "from" space, and you get credit for that.
Eventually I have stacks of phone memos measuring people's credit, and most of the information has been used or transferred elsewhere, so I might as well throw away the phone memos and record the credits in a book.
Now we have book credit, we can give credit for all kinds of transactions. It still won't rival the unmeasured credit of relationships, but we can use it to build the win-win economy.
Currency pages and game currency are good for learning the rules of win-win accounting and playing games, but currency is a vestige of the old win-lose material money. Credit is closer to the spirit of win-win. Currency is subject to the right of return, a link with the win-lose world. When we give currency away, it can pass around anonymously and come back to ruin us. When we give somebody credit, it stays in our book and nobody else can claim that credit. And if that person offends or betrays us, we can remove that credit instantly.
Most players start out with a win-lose mindset, and believe in accumulating other players' currency. They will probably create money-sized notes and play them in win-lose games.
Even win-lose players have some understanding of credit. They may get the notion to play on credit and use leverage to build a financial empire. This will start to subvert their win-lose beliefs.
Win-win players believe in credit, but may find it easier to accept other players' currency than to keep book on their friends.
Keeping currency doesn't do much for us, so we may want to bank it with our local networker and get network credit. Then we can participate in a community information network and maybe trade goods and services.
Some players may want to work for credit. The networker will need help with the community information service. The usual rate is 100 of the network currency per hour. Later we may see volunteer hours, worked for any reputable agency, accepted for credit.
Some players may want to develop their personal currency far beyond the standard established with currency pages. They may develop a level system, their currency going up by a factor of ten for each level. Six levels and you're a millionaire.
Whatever way we play, we can't lose. We can only learn what works and what doesn't in the win-win economy.
We don't know which ways will thrive and drive our new economy. Maybe it will be a game economy with keen competition to advance levels. Maybe it will be an information exchange where the best ideas for a win-win world are debated. Maybe it will be a trading and help network where we generate our own abundance. Who knows? It's up to us.
Structure is the enemy of spirit. Structure and systems are the deadly institutions of mind and society we are trying to escape. The enlightened spiritual teachers always say "not that, not that."
As we create just enough structure to hold our win-win economy together, let us also embrace chaos. Let our heresies be entertaining but ambiguous, contradictory. Let us keep changing the rules of our games. When we learn the few rules of win-win economy, then we are freed from further structure, and can play any silly games whatever with our currency.
Chaos cannot bind us, nor can it be bound or destroyed. We learn to live with chaos by being strong inside. We impose our own sense from the principles we live by. We don't depend upon the shifting logic and symbols of the game, but we can enjoy winning streaks and go on to something else.
Just as energy follows thought, we can create our own order out of the flexible substance of the game, and turn it to our purposes. The game economy may come to resemble pure spiritual economy, existing in people's heads and hearts more than in paper and accounting systems.
Let the win-win economy emerge from a chaos of games and the invisible values of the heart. Most of the activity may appear wild and amorphous, but some of it will feed into an information network and trading system and even connect with volunteer hours, nonprofit organizations and the information economy. But that is all an optional development that doesn't need to trouble the fun and games from which it derives its energy.
While we've been struggling with the concept of creating our own currency, a win-win credit system has been quietly established for many years. Its standard unit of value is the volunteer hour.
Volunteer hours are earned by volunteers working an hour for a nonprofit organization or voluntary group. These credits are recorded once in the organization's books, but they are a credit to both the volunteer and the organization.
We do not yet recognize volunteer hours as win-win currency. That would require volunteers taking ownership of their hours, like savings in a bank account, and being able to transfer, reinvest or spend them in meaningful ways. Time Dollars systems, in operation in several cities, have taken steps in that direction, but lack a basis in win-win accounting.
Volunteer hours have been recorded by the thousands or millions in every community. They are stable, standardized, inflation-proof, validated and recorded by trusted institutions. Volunteer hours are ready to be the bedrock currency of the win-win economy. Nonprofit organizations are in position to be the banks.
There is a spectrum of win-win currencies we can create, from the most casual to the most formal. Volunteer hours, at the formal end of the spectrum, provide an anchor or reference point that all other win-win currencies can relate to. At the informal end of the spectrum, we create personal currency and game currency to learn the system, express our values, and assert that we, not institutions, create the currency and the values that go into the win-win economy.
This is true in the volunteer economy also. Each volunteer hour is created by a volunteer, working an hour for love, in a win-win transaction that benefits both the volunteer and the client or community. Only then is the volunteer hour validated and recorded by the agency.
These volunteer credits are currently locked up in the agencies' records, a statistic crediting the agencies' contribution to the community, and used to solicit grants and funding. But there is a movement to make volunteer hours or community service a requirement for welfare and other services, and this could make volunteer hours a portable credit that volunteers would own and spend.
This suggests that a win-win currency and economy is not a distant prospect to be built up from scratch over many years, but is ready for implementation now by established institutions.
The volunteer economy has a number of striking features that turn out to reflect a deep natural wisdom and justice.
One of these is equality. Everyone's volunteer hour is equal, assuming it gets validated by an agency. Everyone has the same number of hours in the day, the same chance to earn credits, the same earning power regardless of age, education, or location in the world.
We can even extend this earning power to the bedridden and incapacitated, people we normally think of as clients, not volunteers. They have a lot of time on their hands. If they are given a job to do, such as making phone calls to other patients, tending a plant, rehab exercises, reading, anything at all, it speeds their recovery. This work is highly productive, since it reduces their demand for medical services. The work can be scheduled and recorded, and the volunteer-client can feel like a productive member of society.
Similarly, students are volunteers, even though they are helping themselves. They already earn academic credits, and in some schools they have to earn community service credits as well. Self-education is a valid product of volunteer work, since society benefits from an educated population.
Another feature that has been tested is rationing of services. If a health clinic is free, it will be overloaded. If clients are given a choice of paying in cash or hours, the load goes down, a surprising number pay cash, and the poor and needy find a volunteer job.
The same principle applies to welfare clients. Faced with a work requirement, those who have undeclared income or capital will quietly drop from the rolls. Others may start with a volunteer job and graduate to paid work.
A third feature is entirely new, arising out of giving volunteers ownership of their credits. This means the credits are portable, and can be spent or redeposited anywhere. When moving, a volunteer would register with a new agency, just like opening a new bank account, and have credits transferred from the old accounts.
Volunteers could even transfer credits from one agency to another within a community. Why would they want to do that?
To a nonprofit agency, its volunteer hour deposits are important. Like the hours worked, the total deposits are another statistic that funding agencies will look at. We shall also look at volunteer deposits as a way of validating agencies' credits. When volunteers deposit or keep their hours in a particular agency, they are helping that agency. So volunteers may redeposit their hours to support a particular cause or service.
If volunteer hours are to be exchangeable for welfare payments and other benefits, then the question of validation comes up. The function of the nonprofit agencies in creating win-win credits is to validate the volunteers' hours. But who will validate the validators? Are the credits recorded in the books any good? Is the organization performing a useful service? Are the volunteers actually working?
The government and other benefactors will want to know this. The question will also come up when volunteers transfer their credits. The new agency accepts the old credits and issues new ones in its own name. The old credits become assets which the agency owns.
Like the volunteers, the agency will want to own credits in organizations it supports or approves of. It could refuse to accept a volunteer's credits, but there's a kindlier solution in the right of return.
The right of return imposes a minimum standard on the volunteer hours which exchange one-for-one in the banking system. Each agency which grants its volunteers transferable credits must provide this money-back guarantee: If its credits are not acceptable it will exchange them for credits from another agency.
For nonprofits in good repute this is no problem. They receive transfers of credits all the time and can offer these assets for exchange. A problem will be felt by unknown or dubious agencies which are losing credits and have no inflow of assets. This imbalance occurs when an agency does not have the support of its volunteers.
The volunteers, investing their credits in the organizations they support, determine which agencies can provide good transferable credits with the right of return, and which fail to do so. Instead of constructing a validation bureaucracy to keep watch on a million agencies, we let the volunteers do it. They are close to the problem and know whether an agency is doing a good job.
Can we trust the volunteers? Those who are working for welfare checks and benefits will spend their credits immediately and have little or no balance on deposit. Only the true volunteers will accumulate large quantities of credits to invest. Their influence in validating agencies through their investment will be proportional to how long they've been volunteering. This form of governance will thus be exercised by people distinguished by experience and service to their community.
For a detailed treatment of the volunteer economy, see "Spiritual Currency."
We now live in an information economy. Information and computers are already the predominant factor of production. But information doesn't fit the material win-lose accounting model. Information economists are looking hard for new ways to value, charge for and prioritize information. Maybe the win-win model is what they're looking for. Win-win currency could be the way to value information.
A win-win information currency could unleash the full power of computers and the information economy and create unprecedented abundance. But even if the information economists apply the rules of win-win accounting, they lack a standard of value for information currency.
What is a unit of information? What is it worth? These questions can be answered for gold, but not for information. We came close with our currency pages. We said the unit of information was 8.5 by 11 inches. We let its value emerge by making and trading currency pages, then created network currency with the same value, and finally linked network currency to volunteer hours.
Information has such an uncertain value that we have to measure it in terms of something stable. The only stable win-win currency we've found is volunteer hours.
The information business may well create an information currency that follows win-win accounting rules. But information has no fixed or measurable value. They will have to find a standard somewhere in the win-win economy and base information currency on that. There is just one measurable standard in the win-win world: the volunteer hour.
If the information economy adopts this standard, there will be a tremendous demand for volunteer hour deposits as reserve currency, and those agencies which have attracted volunteer investments will derive a generous income from their banking services.
Social services provided by nonprofits will then have a new source of funding, a steady percentage of the ever-growing information economy. Just in time: the government is pulling out of this area.
We find from playing with currency pages and phone memos that the value of information is the value to the individual consumer. The currency pages are worthless until somebody accepts them at face value. The phone memos are a better measure of value, because the person writing the memo can write down exactly what it's worth, and give the sender credit for that amount.
We can expand from phone memos to a general principle: The way to value information and pay for it, is for the consumer to create information currency on the spot, and enter it in a credit system.
This raises the question, is the consumer's credit any good? In the win-win economy, the best credit is volunteer hours, which are easy for anybody to obtain. We've speculated that local networkers will want to adopt the volunteer hour standard for network currency, and this will be even more true if the information economy adopts the same standard.
Then our personal currencies, game currencies, network currencies and volunteer hours will all feed into the information economy. If our credit is good, we can feed at the information trough. Nobody will be information-poor in the win-win economy.
We've looked at two win-win currency standards: currency pages, used to introduce us to personal currency, and volunteer hours, the basis of an institutional currency and banking system. Many of us will generate both.
Networkers can link the two currencies by declaring a value for their network currency in volunteer hours, such as 100 = one hour. Networkers will act as bankers much like the nonprofits, and this will be a good education for a career in win-win banking.
The nonprofits may sponsor games and information services that use network currency, because this creates a demand for volunteer hours, and leads players to volunteer.
The networkers will be involved in banking and information systems, and network currency will be a form of information currency. Furthermore, it will be based on the volunteer hour standard. The information business may find the grassroots information networks a rich source of currency, information, and workers, and build up the infrastructure to provide convenient access to everyone.
We could find our game economy growing into the predominant economy of the future, one where we generate the money and the values, participate in a fantastic engine of abundance, and where nobody is left out.
In parallel we would see the nonprofit and volunteer economy expand to replace most government functions, and tackle the neglected needs that threaten to overwhelm us.
Just as we all have the same number of hours in the day to create volunteer hours, so we all have one vote, which is political currency. We don't even have to work to get it. It's just given to us. Not surprising that we practically give it away.
In current practice some political campaign buys our vote with a few dollars of advertising, and then they get to use our political currency, which can be turned into thousands of dollars of government spending and special favors.
Now that we've learned something about creating and spending our own currency, maybe we can hang on to our voting power and spend it the way we want to.
It doesn't take an act of Congress to take our power back. One group, the National Association of Independent Business, has been doing it since the 1970s. Their members get to vote by mail eight times a year on issues they're concerned about which are coming up for legislation. The results are passed on to the legislators, who are then rated on how they vote, and the ratings are fed back to the membership at election time.
For a detailed description of this process, see "Private Voting" in the March 1980 edition of Reason.
Now that we're getting Internet-worked we could be spending our millivotes (one-thousandth of a vote) on issues that concern us, throughout the year. We would have to work through a nonprofit or interest group, to validate that we actually spend no more than one vote per election.