Sacred Economics with Charles Eisenstein

“Money is an agreement. It doesn’t have value all by itself. It has value because people agree that it has value.” – Charles Eisenstein

THE SHIFT TOWARDS THE GIFT: Economic globalization has served to reduce transactional redundancy by stripping out the local social infrastructure and communal relationships which form the foundation of a robust local economy. After this infrastructure was crippled, they sold this infrastructure back to us as opportunities to “join” global marketplaces competing against other local economies for shrinking supply chains.

Timebanking will not address all of these issues, but it is a beginning step towards cultivating that critical social infrastructure and maximizing social capital towards a more equitable mix of economic solutions such as cooperative enterprise, B2B bartering, mutual credit, local exchange trading systems (LETS) and a social safety net much nearer to that provided by gift economies than our present day circumstance.

“Economic growth means that you have to find something that was once nature and make it into a good or was once a gift relationship and make it into a service. You have to find something that people once got for free or did for themselves or for each other and then take it away and sell it back to them.” – Charles Eisenstein