Sacred Economics traces the history of money from ancient gift economies to modern capitalism, revealing how the money system has contributed to alienation, competition, and scarcity, destroyed community, and necessitated endless growth. Today, these trends have reached their extreme—but in the wake of their collapse, we may find great opportunity to transition to a more connected, ecological, and sustainable way of being.
This book is about how the money system will have to change—and is already changing—to embody this transition. A broadly integrated synthesis of theory, policy, and practice, Sacred Economics explores avant-garde concepts of the New Economics, including negative-interest currencies, local currencies, resource-based economics, gift economies, and the restoration of the commons. Author Charles Eisenstein also considers the personal dimensions of this transition, speaking to those concerned with "right livelihood" and how to live according to their ideals in a world seemingly ruled by money. Tapping into a rich lineage of conventional and unconventional economic thought, Sacred Economics presents a vision that is original yet commonsense, radical yet gentle, and increasingly relevant as the crises of our civilization deepen.
"Skimming three chapters reveals no sign that the author of the above book knows first-year undergraduate economics, why the current economy is arranged the way it is, or what policy tradeoffs would be involved in their hopeful ideas. May I recommend to you the standard introductory text Intermediate Microeconomics by Hal Varian, which I recently gave to a friend of mine?"
Whilst reading up on the evolution of our current economy may be worthwhile to get a fuller understanding of human behaviour, I do not see what relevance it has in understanding how a fundamentally different economy would work. We don't expect chemists to study alchemy, we expect them to work with current day ideas of best practices. Its clear our current economic practices are fundamentally broken, they're almost a lesson in what not to do.
Compare with Binding Chaos[0], which rejects the Eisensteinian gift economy in favor of a "network-first" approach of stigmergic principles and epistemic communities(a wavelength similar to Telecomix[1]):
Skimming through that led me to stigmergy as a way to organise social action, it's an interesting concept, thanks chipsy. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy
Inspired by Sacred Economics, Kindista is an open-source social network designed to help people share with other people who live near them. Check it out at https://kindista.org/ and/or the Common Lisp source code at https://github.com/kindista/kindista
I'm working on building a sharing/exchange network with built-in reputation and points given to people who work for the good of the community. In other words, the bank generates currency only for those that create value in the local economy. It's called the Jack of all trades Universe or JoatU for short and you can read more at http://joatu.com and check our github (it is open source of course): http://github.com/joatuapp
Possibly the only thing dumber than 'sacred' geometry. At least he should be able to shuck a few thousand from the new age crowd to sign up for a course based on this book.
Sacred Economics traces the history of money from ancient gift economies to modern capitalism, revealing how the money system has contributed to alienation, competition, and scarcity, destroyed community, and necessitated endless growth. Today, these trends have reached their extreme—but in the wake of their collapse, we may find great opportunity to transition to a more connected, ecological, and sustainable way of being.
This book is about how the money system will have to change—and is already changing—to embody this transition. A broadly integrated synthesis of theory, policy, and practice, Sacred Economics explores avant-garde concepts of the New Economics, including negative-interest currencies, local currencies, resource-based economics, gift economies, and the restoration of the commons. Author Charles Eisenstein also considers the personal dimensions of this transition, speaking to those concerned with "right livelihood" and how to live according to their ideals in a world seemingly ruled by money. Tapping into a rich lineage of conventional and unconventional economic thought, Sacred Economics presents a vision that is original yet commonsense, radical yet gentle, and increasingly relevant as the crises of our civilization deepen.
Sacred Economics official website: http://sacred-economics.com