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

familiar money system, and we are even less likely to re-examine
them in search of solutions.
Part One brings our hidden assumptions about money to the
surface. In doing so, it also brings to light new potentials for our
interactions with money. It is not about how to make, invest or spend
money. There are already plenty of books about all of that. It is about
the concept of money, and how different money systems shape
different societies.
You will learn why fundamental changes in our money system
have become inevitable. While these changes may seem frightening
in their scale, they also hold the promise of unprecedented
opportunity.
The Information Age promises to change fundamentally within
decades our entire economy and payment habits. Whether gradual or
cataclysmic, significant world-wide changes are under way in the
realm of money. The well-known contemporary management expert
Peter Drucker claims: 'Every few hundred years in Western history
there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades,
society - its world view, its basic values, its social and political
structures, its arts, its key institutions rearranges itself and the people
born then cannot even imagine a world in which their grandparents
lived and into which their own parents were born. We are currently
living through such a transformation.
When no safety net has been prepared, experiencing such an
unparalleled shift can be very frightening. Just ask any one of the one
billion Latin Americans, Asians or Eastern Europeans who are still
reeling from their own personal encounter with the cataclysmic
monetary changes that occurred as a direct consequence of a radical
shift in power from their governments to international financial
markets. James Canrille, who directed Bill Clinton's campaign in