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

like a dream, it has now become a realistic possibility. All the
necessary seedlings have sprouted and are beginning to take root.
The story of these seedlings, the various innovations now occurring
within money systems, will be told here. You will also discover why
this avenue of change is becoming more plausible as we move
through the current information revolution from an Industrial Age
economy towards the incoming values of an Age of Knowledge.
Sustainable Abundance may sound to some like an oxymoron, a
contradiction in terms. 'Greens' support sustainability, but are
sometimes suspicious of abundance Business will be in favor of
abundance, but may question the emphasis on sustainability These
apparent contradictions will be resolved once the possibilities of new
currency systems are fully understood·
The following core thesis forms the Foundation of this book. We are
now engaged in a structural shift of the world system, and this shift offers
an unprecedented opportunity to give birth to Sustainable Abundance.
Structural change has been formally defined as follows. 'In systems
terms changing structure means changing: the information links in a
system: the content and timeliness of the data that the actors in the
system have to work with, and the goals, incentives, costs and
feedbacks that motivate or constrain behavior.
What is remarkable is that even after identifying the key role of
information systems in structural change the most important of our
economic information systems, our money system, has been ignored
as a key leverage point for inducing the necessary and desirable
changes. This is the void that this book intends to fill.
The fact that changes in money systems are increasingly possible
during an information revolution should come as no surprise. Money
is modem society's central information system, akin to the nervous