When books and life collide.

[nex0s]

I'm the first one to say that I don't "get" money. Money markets, the way it works, what it's based on. I don't have a feel for it, and intuitive understanding. All my knowledge of money comes out of me making serious effort

Comments

[sunstealer]

Being the biblioholic that you are, you might like to track down a copy of People, Land and Community edited by Hildegarde Hannum. It's a collection of essays and lectures that have been given to the E.F. Schumacher Society and one of them is all about local scrip and communities around the country that have implemented it or some version of local currency trading. The whole book is pretty wonderful.

[knockabout]

Jane Jacobs had a lot of neat things to say about the problems of big currency.

She saw the relative values of currency as a kind of feedback system to let a city-state know whether it should be importing or exporting, and she compares this to the part of our brain-stem that is responsible for inhaling and exhaling.

She goes on to suggest that big currency is problematic in that it joins unrelated economies of different sizes into the same feedback loop. It would be like giving an elephant, a mouse, a human and a dog only one brain-stem to regulate their breathing. Someone is going to suffer.

In the 1960's, the British Pound became strong through its control of North Sea Oil. This had unfortunate side effects, such as the implosion of central England's ancient and respected pottery industry. Why buy expensive English cups when you can get them from Mexico or China for pennies?