Drawing Word Pictures

IBM’s research labs have created an online tool that allows anyone to see pictures that literally tell a thousand words, to which my friend Zak pointed me. They call it Wordle, and I used it to get

a snapshot of our blog.

Well, even if we hadn’t noticed before, quite clearly we are quite concerned about money. And rather naturally, it bothers us that the present overwhelming emphasis on money as a value in itself, rather than its arguable origin as an efficient and just means of exchange, has led to the control banks have on our lives.

As George Monbiot pointed out in the article Murali referenced earlier, we humans have allowed ourselves to get into a situation where we, citizens of most of the world’s apparently civilised countries, are firmly under the control of banks and banking institutions, who exercise this control through their grip on almost every kind of transaction that governs our intercourse.

An easy way out of this dangerous situation is to have more than one entity do the job, and possibly allow competition between them, in order to enable the efficiency of the marketplace. However, it can’t have failed anyone’s attention that this is in fact how the US operated till recently, with the Fed (The US Federal Reserve) under Greenspan delegating authority for fiscal management to banks and money institutions (but not accountability, which seems to have irked POTUS no end, doubtless striking a chord with unhappy people around the world).

A more elegant solution appears on the face of it to be more complex, and that is to switch over to universal money, independent of national control and of the possibility of business manipulation. Most people will remember how George Soros punished the UK central bank, the Bank of England, for its lax management of the pound sterling relative to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, in 1992.

There is a perception that this failure actually led to the stabilisation of exchange rates and removal of the specter of recession. Today, of course, this view will be seen to be overly generous, that in fact it merely led to a covering up of the continuing holes in economic and fiscal policy – a kind of grasshopper philosophy, or a belief in fool’s gold.

A core argument for universal money is its removal of a source of greed. Removing greed entirely is probably not possible, as it appears to be some kind of survival mechanism – perhaps atavistic – and is therefore possibly hard-coded into most humans. There are humans who survive without greed, but generally not with the same material lifestyle. Arguably then, it is the material lifestyle itself that causes greed, and then that infects all kinds of interpersonal transactions, eventually destroying money’s value proposition, as has just happened.

Unfortunately, this self-same material lifestyle is the key to modern economic well-being. Material needs are seen as essential to survival, and satisfaction of higher needs is a difficult or Utopian proposition, when the basic needs themselves cannot be met. Weaning away from it cannot be done in a day, unless it be a particularly horrific day, and any thinking person would surely much rather find some gentler way.

Similarly, the introduction of universal money, freed of its links to greed and manipulation, inherent in the concentration of control to a few good men, is not an easy task, not even to conceive, much less to execute.

However, unlike greed itself, or the consumptive material lifestyle, it does not have to be abolished from all of human existence overnight, in order to tread a different path. It can be tried in individual countries, especially in partially controlled economies, that are not already inextricably beholden to duplicitously free flows of money. Actually, fully controlled economies would be the easiest to begin with, except for one major stumbling block: control is already handed over to an elite few, who are then bound by greed no less and possibly as completely as our modern Princes.