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

national money system and a co-operative local economy fuelled by
the complementary currencies. The competitive economy would be
the familiar 'jobs' of today paid in scarce national currency, while the
co-operative economy could encompass all kinds of activities that
people are happy to pay for in a complementary currency always
available in sufficiency. Unemployment and underemployment could
be resolved by people doing work at improving their communities
and payable in local currency.
As in the vignette story 'A world in balance' (Chapter 1) most
people would be involved part of their time in both economies. Or
within a given Family some members would be employed mostly in
the global competitive economic loop, while another might be active
mostly in the local economy. Hopefully both might be 'following
their bliss', ideally both having the opportunity for their work also to
become their job.
Such an outcome is possible within what I will call the 'Integral
Economy' (explained in detail in Chapter 9), which consists of the
traditional competitive economy on one side, and a local co-operative
economy on the other. The former produces financial capital, and the
latter social capital. They can operate in symbiosis with each other, as
represented in Figure 5.2.
I call it 'Integral' because it aims at integrating dimensions that the
official economy has tended to downplay or ignore. But before
understanding how the Integral Economy operates, we need to
become more familiar with the non-traditional currencies, which
would complement the usual national currencies.
What was most surprising to me was to discover how remarkably
close we were to implementing such a solution once before, back in
the 1930s. However, governments at the time did not seem ready to
give this approach a real chance. The Zieitgeist of the 1930s favoured