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

were further refined by the Global Business Network founded by
several Shell alumni, and later published by Peter Schwartz.
The Official Future: ‘more of the same’
The Official Future that we art: told we can expect during the
coming decades is usually based on an extrapolation of what has
happened over the past 20 years or so.
For example, in the Official Future the same political parties are
expected to continue to vie for power in the same places.
Schoolchildren will continue to learn roughly the same things as did
their predecessors. The same crops will be grown, harvested, sold,
prepared, and eaten in much the same way as in the past. Computers
will continue to become faster, cheaper, smaller. We will still pay for
our purchases with our familiar dollars, pesos, pounds, francs, reales
or yen. We may use 'smart cards’ instead of the old bills, magnetic
credit cards or cheques. We may store our small change in an
electronic purse instead of a leather one. Europeans will have
adjusted to using a common currency instead of the national ones.
But when all is said and done, how much of all this really matters?
In the more rarefied spheres of the global monetary system, we may
expect an occasional crisis to shake some individual countries such as
happened For the UK in late 1991, Scandinavia in 1992, Mexico in
December 1994, Thailand in June 1997, Indonesia in December 1997,
Russia in September 1998 and Brazil in January 1999. Once in a while,
the press may also herald a ‘grand scheme'. Such schemes are given
names, such as the 'Plaza Agreement' or the 'Maastricht Treaty',
pinpointing the place where the agreement was made, but giving no
indication of the pragmatic implications for the rest of us.
This Official Future boils down to a continuation of what we have
lived with during the past couple of decades. But the real problem