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

creating knowledge, is the next likely candidate for that role. 'As far
into the future as we can see, information will be playing the prima
donna role in economic history that physical labour, stone, bronze,
land, minerals, metals and energy once played.’
As information becomes that key resource, its unique features will
shape a very different society. For our purposes, Harlan Cleveland
and Howard Rheingold have made the best inventories of those
characteristics:
- Information is shared, not exchanged. With any of the previous
focus resources from a flint spear-point to land, from a horse to a
barrel of oil - if you acquired it from me, I lost it to you. After an
exchange that involves information, both of us have it. In buying
this book, for instance, or a magazine or permission to access a
database, it may look as if a traditional exchange has occurred.
However, what is bought, sold, and then owned, is the delivery
mechanism, not the information. Even after it has been shared
with the buyer, the message delivered is still retained by the seller.
When you use software, you are not stopping millions of others
from using it also, as was the case with the key resources of the
past. As a consequence, information is what economists call a
'non-rival' product.
- The most powerful catalyst of the transformation is not
information but the communications revolution. Over the past
decade, the total electronic communications world-wide have
increased by a factor off our. However, during the next decade, we
should expect another multiplication, this time by a factor of 45!
Communicating information literally multiplies its power.
Telecommunications has made information transportable. It
travels through electronic networks at almost the speed of light
and for a very low cost. The nature of information, therefore, is
that it tends to leak. The more it leaks, the more of it we have, and