One of the significant challenges we face in our shared system is managing the economy properly and safely.
Many deep conversations about systems, life, society, or even politics and sustainability often connect to the economic aspect of our reality. Somehow, money ends up being blamed for the nonsense we have co-created for some reason.
Money is just a tool. It's neither good nor bad. There is no such thing as dirty or clean money. The way we earn or use money can be immoral, unethical, or completely stupid, but money itself has nothing to do with it. You are responsible and accountable for how money flows in your life and how 'dirty' it might become, not the system or the economy.
Money is a tool. The economy is a process. The system is the playground.
How you define the limits of your playground and what kind of economic processes you use to play with money will determine the quality and the energetic potential of your money. The process and the playground make it harmful or regenerative.
Your personal choices and your capacity to take accountability for those choices are the main contributors to how the playground of our global economy looks today.
The economy as a process is always evolving and perpetually changing. We innovate in the economic sector all the time. We invent new schemes, alternative systems, or structures. We also constantly modify our personal and collective beliefs about the economy.
The economy is a very living and always changing process.
The economy can be many things.
The economy can be product-based. This is where we use natural resources from the Earth to create other stuff. We use what Nature has created to transform it into something else for our personal use.
A product can be as simple as the food we need to survive. We eat vegetables that Nature has produced to use as an energy source to fuel our brain and other life-related functions in our bodies. We use the 'matter' that Nature has created (for free) to transform into energy inside us to do something else with that energy.
There is nothing wrong with selling products to each other that enable us to survive and generate new sources of energy to use coherently elsewhere.
However, not all vegetables have the same 'energetic' cost and economic effort to produce. They also don't have the same energetic potential for your body.
You can take two almost identical tomatoes. One comes from the neighbor next door, who produced it in his garden, and the other comes from Portugal or somewhere else very far.
Consider how much energy it took for each tomato to reach your mouth. How many systemic processes and human resources were involved in selling you a tomato? How much money and how many economic processes were required for each tomato to become a product we can sell to you? What is the actual impact on the biosphere and the use of natural resources for each tomato you eat?
What is the technological, energetic, and economic value-chain of each tomato?
By getting the tomato from your neighbor, you clearly devalue the global economy and don't participate in many different transactions. Some people somewhere might lose their jobs if you stop buying tomatoes across the ocean. Many boats or airplanes would never be required or needed if you only ate tomatoes from your neighbor. Some forests would still be there, and some oceans would still be clean. A lot of carbon would have stayed beneath our feet and not in our atmosphere and lungs.
You are not an 'interesting' client economically speaking because you almost don't use any human or natural resources to satisfy your personal need except for your loving neighbor and his deep passion for growing delicious tomatoes.
No one is being charged for 'administrative fees' of something; no one is paying for customs or carbon tax. No one is riding the big truck or producing the refrigerators to keep your international tomatoes fresh for you.
We would stop manufacturing or selling a lot of stuff if you ensured the tomatoes you eat had the lowest energetic cost to produce and be delivered to your mouth.
But if we ensured the production of your tomato is the most coherent and efficient way of doing it for where you live, most people would actually lose their jobs. Most industries would even disappear.
Most engineers would have no idea what to do with their time, except maybe to grow some delicious tomatoes in their garden and have fun living a simple life.
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Just with this example, we can see how products are interconnected with each other.
The first tomato didn't require much to be produced. It was actually very efficient, resilient, and productive.
The second required: a tractor, a boat or airplane, many computers and other high-tech equipment, refrigerators, huge buildings, enormous quantities of petroleum and toxic chemicals, and many people doing probably very boring jobs to ensure you get your tomato.
We have become so good with our economic 'innovation' that we have even managed to charge you 2-3 times less for a tomato coming from another continent than for the one your neighbor produced.
How is this possible? Mathematically speaking, it makes zero logical sense, but for the global economy, it makes perfect sense. Many actually wonder how it is possible and where the rational logic around it is. Unfortunately, not many get to the point of actually understanding it and doing something meaningful about it in our collective shared reality.
Product-driven economy is highly interconnected with service-driven economy. We actually mainly produce material things to create jobs in service.
If we produced and had less material stuff, most professionals and most jobs in all kinds of specialized fields of professional services would simply not exist.
If we produce less stuff and make more responsible and sustainable choices about how we use our shared energy and natural resources to fulfill our needs, we would literally destroy most of the jobs in the marketplace of professional services, and this would crush the global economy with the speed of light.
To be truly sustainable and coherent with how Nature works, we actually need to start working less and radically simplify our lives to what is actually important, coherent, and efficient.
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Usually, when we start talking about economic depression, degrowth, minimalism, or working less, we scare many people.
The fear is real and should be seriously taken into consideration.
Many of us have severe traumas in our systems related to scarcity, poverty, hunger, and many other very unpleasant and deeply painful experiences. Most of us today have no idea how we would actually survive if we were to lose our job or have less money by working less.
It's normal to be scared.
Especially when we have no alternative to do it differently. If I don't have a nice neighbor who grows delicious tomatoes I can eat, and there are no more tomatoes from Portugal (or I don't have any money to pay for them anyway), how would I even survive or live?
The fear is real. And the mitigation and adaptation strategies to deal with this fear should ideally be put in place before the global economy crashes for real. Because if not, we might destroy ourselves with a world war at the same time that the economy crashes. If people are losing jobs but have no idea how they will continue feeding themselves, they will create social chaos.
A social chaos that emerges because of the deep fear of survival is uncontrollable and most of the time highly devastating for the entire system.
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So, what are the alternatives?
If money is not the problem and if we assume the system is also not wrong or already unfixable, we can start by putting new economic processes in place that make sense for us and how Nature produces stuff normally and for free.
We can create a concept of Wisdom-based Economy or Gift Economy or anything we desire. Since the economy is just a process, we can do whatever we want with it. We decide how coherent or not it is for us and what must be done to change it.
The concept of knowledge-based economy is not new. Many economists have been talking about it for a long time.
Service-based economy and knowledge economy are not the same thing and do not follow the same logic.
In a service economy, I might go fishing somewhere and sell the fish to you. Me doing the effort of going to fish and bringing it to you is what I offer. You think you pay only for the fish, but in reality, the fish itself is actually free. You are paying me for the effort I made to bring the fish to you.
You are paying me for my service. And you also now depend on my services to continue eating the fish. This is how economic dependence (and even slavery) is integrated into the system.
In a knowledge-based economy, things would go differently. I would not go fishing for you. You would come on the boat with me, and I would actually teach you how to get your own food in a simple and easy way. I would give you the wisdom and knowledge to become independent and be able to answer your own needs without me trying to sell you something for the rest of your life.
I don't work for you or for your needs. I work to empower you to answer your personal needs in a much simpler and more coherent way without you needing me or my services to survive or to simply live.
Yes, it could be less 'economically' interesting for me to teach you how to fish instead of selling you the fish I caught for you, but logically speaking, it will have way more value for me and you in the long run.
I would not spend my life fishing for everyone. And you, by trying to fish yourself, will actually realize that the water is becoming very dirty and there is less and less fish. And, when you see this with your own eyes, you might start fishing more responsibly and actually take care of Nature that feeds you.
You will know how Nature truly provides you with unlimited abundance, but only if you know how to respect her and take care of her coherently in the process.
Wisdom-based economy is not based on the perpetual growth of numbers on financial charts that mean nothing. Wisdom is about deep systemic logic and coherence of the whole. It has nothing to do with money or our usual way of doing business.
Wisdom is not about creating more jobs and working always more to be able to buy more stuff. Wisdom is about working in the most efficient way. It's about generating the most significant benefits by using as little resources and energy as possible.
In a wisdom-based economy, you become richer, happier, and wealthier by working less and using fewer natural resources.
How is this possible?
Easy.
Natural resources are not unlimited. We can endlessly regenerate them if we know how to do it. But they are not truly unlimited. Energy and resources in Nature are about cycles. You break or disrespect the cycle, you lose the availability of the resources.
You cannot have an endless amount of fish whenever you want. And if I sell you a fish, I cannot sell it to someone else or eat it myself. This is what we call an economy based on something 'limited' and something we can count. It's logic. If I give it to you, I don't have it anymore.
But knowledge is exponentially accumulative. If I sell you knowledge, I actually don't lose it myself, and I can also sell it to others for the rest of my life.
I can generate endless economic value from my knowledge because it is not a limited resource, and I am not missing anything by sharing it with you.
In essence, product and service-based economies follow a subtractive economic logic. It's based on the concept of scarcity and something limited.
Knowledge and wisdom are based on an accumulative form of economy. The 'stuff' you sell is truly unlimited and you don't lose anything by selling it to others. And this can grow exponentially without us feeling depleted of our personal resources or energy. We can generate economic value and even increase the factor of wealth exponentially without using more natural or energetic resources from the Earth.
We don't need more resources or energy in the system to create more money. We just need to learn how to use the resources and energy we already have more efficiently and coherently than we do now.
The economy is a process that we can use in a subtractive way that ultimately creates scarcity and poverty for all of us, or we can use the economy in a regenerative and accumulative way that creates abundance and wealth for all of us.
The formulas we use in the economy are not the problem. You not knowing how to understand or use those formulas in a meaningful, responsible, and wise way for you, Nature, and all of us is the actual problem.
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