THE FUTURE OF MONEY Bernard A. Lietaer - library.uniteddiversity ...

There are two ways by which our health relates to money and work.
Evidence points out that jobs without meaning can make you sick
and even kill you. The prestigious Canadian Institute for Advanced
Research reached the startling conclusion that 'medical services have
little if any effect on national health levels'. Instead, what most
influences health is a work situation where people are in control of
their lives. The difference in life expectancy between rich and poor is
explained primarily by the different control they have over their lives
and work. 'Something is killing the great lower classes of the modern
world, grinding them down before their time. The statistics show it's
also killing the middle classes, who live longer than the poor but not
as long as the rich.’
The money connection
The problem with work is finding someone who will pay you
pounds for it, i.e. make it a paid job as well. The scarcity in jobs is
therefore money scarcity, as economists since Keynes have known.
But does money have to remain scarce? Why not create your own
money in sufficiency to complement the scarce national currency, to
enable more work to be paid? Sounds crazy? Too simple?
It is nevertheless what many communities in various parts of the
world have already done. I will show later that the results of such
money innovations prove that this process is effective in practice,
why it does not create inflation, and which prototypes are the best
candidates for generalisation.
But at this point, let us first establish the nature of the job problem,
and why it has irrevocably changed over the past decade.
Unemployed? Who? Me? Today’s job problem