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

Just one facet of it - the Internet - is the topic of an estimated 12,000
articles per month in the US press alone, and this does not even
include what is written about the Internet on the Internet. Never
before has any technological shift been heralded by such an
information avalanche. George Gilder calls it 'the biggest
technological juggernaut that ever rolled'. Bill Gates claims that 'the
benefits and problems arising from the Internet Revolution will be
much greater than those brought about by the PC revolution'. It is
worth repeating that what drives the change are the gigantic falls in
costs and speed not only in computer chips but also in
communications in general (see sidebar).
Although skepticism is healthy when we are faced with so much
hype, this Revolution could yet prove to be a real one.
Whole libraries are being written about the gee-whiz technologies
involved. The focus here will be only on the meaning of this
Information Revolution and the opportunity it represents for
choosing our money systems in the near future.
To help us navigate this material, this chapter is organized under
the following five headings:
• The nature of information
• Implications for the economy and society
• Implications for money
• Implications for banks and financial institutions
• Wisdom in the information age?
The nature of information
The power structure of every economic system has been designed
to control some critical resource. Information, the raw material for