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

Everybody takes a defensive position, reduces investments, and
therefore the employment opportunities drop further.
This increasing unemployment will make us go through the entire
loop once again: it is a vicious circle, which - once started - is
particularly difficult to break.
Case studies
There are many historic and contemporary examples of this
process. Entire countries have gone through it with devastating
results. We could take several examples in Latin America, where
political instability not only caused foreigners to take their money out
of the country, but the citizens themselves would not invest in their
own country (e.g.: Peru, Bolivia or Argentina in the 1970s).
Unemployment levels skyrocketed, and massive internal migrations
occurred to the larger cities in hopes of finding jobs - which weren't
there either. Their descendants are still there in the barrios, barriadas,
villas, favelas, and other shantytowns. An even more telling tale is
how many African-Americans congregated in the slums of the largest
cities of` the northern United States in less than one generation. After
the mechanisation of cotton picking in the South, for the first time the
black population became economically irrelevant. The result: 'One of
the largest and most rapid mass internal movements of people in
history started.’ Between 1950 and 1970, over five million black men,
women and children migrated from the South to the larger industrial
towns in the North in search of jobs. One generation later, a
significant minority managed to take advantage of the loosening grip
of race discrimination and become middle class mainstream
Americans. But millions went down the spiral: from economic
exclusion to violence and fear, from extremist political positions to
burned neighbourhoods where nobody wants to invest. These
neighbourhoods spawn what is now called the underclass - a