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

the remaining 5% will succeed at permanently changing our
economies, our societies, our civilisation, and our world.
Just as radically as gunpowder sealed the fate of the feudal system
in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages, those money projects that
survive will determine the direction towards which power will shift
over the next century. What makes this unusually exciting - or
frightening, depending on your viewpoint is that there is no way to
know which approach will prevail. It is not necessarily governments
or corporations, or even the best-funded or best-staffed projects that
have the greatest chance. Some entrepreneurs in garages are
succeeding where the giants have failed. Conventional wisdom has
long held that only the largest corporations could attract top talent
and significant financing-, because size automatically ensured market
clout. None of these well-established 'facts' has held true in the 1990s.
When we talk about the future of money, we cannot avoid talking
about the future of our societies and of our world. This should not be
interpreted as a mechanical cause-and-effect relationship between
money systems and broad societal changes. Societies are
extraordinarily complex systems and, therefore, impossible to
understand in simple mechanical terms. This is truer now than ever
before. For the first time in recorded history, our money game has
become a truly global one. Now that ex-Communist countries, and
even communist China of today, have irrevocably switched to money
as the social motivator of choice, changing the money system may be
the most powerful way available to shift our collective behaviour on
a global scale. In addition, for the first time in history, the effects of
any monetary changes will be multiplied by our information and
communication technologies, propelling us at high speed into mostly
uncharted territories.
Given that the Official Future is not going to happen, what are
some of the other more plausible futures? Here are four very