A selection of the best articles on alternative economics:
Money and the Crisis of Civilization
By Charlie Eisenstein
In the face of the impending crisis, people ask what they can do to protect themselves. “Buy gold?” “Stockpile canned goods?” I would like to suggest a different kind of question: “What is the most beautiful thing I can do?” This is an updated version of the popular article we first published on October 3, 2008.
I Am… We Are… It Is
By Larry Harvey
Burning Man is this wild party on the one hand, and the most public-spirited city in America on the other. The essential cause of this is the giving of gifts. A gift economy is founded on principles that are diametrically opposed to those that dominate our consumer culture.
The Impossible Alternative
By Daniel Pinchbeck
Our current economic system is institutionalized psychopathology, a parasitic virus, and its perpetuation would likely lead to the termination of the human experiment in an accelerating series of catastrophes. The alternative is extremely difficult to imagine, until we realize it.
Reinventing Money: An Eco-systemic Approach (Part 1)
By Bernard Lietaer
By modeling our financial system on nature’s complex networks of interconnectivity, we can escape global financial meltdown by developing diverse complementary currencies and mutual credit systems.
Program Your Own Money
By Douglas Rushkoff
We are watching a financial meltdown, but what’s dying is not business itself, but a financial parasite. The future actually looks brighter unencumbered by an investment industry that is a drag on business.
A Farewell to Advertising
By Ken Jordan
Digital advertisers track your online behavior, creating a detailed personal profile that is owned by the company that constructs it, which can do whatever it pleases with that information, including sell it. Emerging technologies could support a different model that respects our privacy, acknowledges our intelligence, and responds to actual needs, not manufactured desires.
An Army of Jacks to Fight the Power
By Peter Lamborn Wilson
Money could be seen as an exteriorized soul to be locked away so that our bodies acquire magical invulnerability. But it need not be hidden away — it can be circulated and “beget” itself endlessly in usury. It constitutes humanity’s one really totally successful experiment in magic:
Evolving Toward Local Credits
By Thomas H. Greco
The tidal wave of globalization smashes all but the biggest boats. Local communities can regain control over their own welfare by encouraging human solidarity and private, voluntary initiative and creativity. The first step is to organize regional mutual credit clearing associations.
Abundance and the Generative Logic of the Commons
By Roberto Verzola
The growth of the information economy has made it imperative to deal with the phenomenon of abundance. Unlike the long history of commons research, studies of abundance are few; thus, we are just starting to build theories about it.
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