“The Future of Money: Creating New Wealth, Work, and a Wiser World”

There are whole different families of complementary currencies. One of them is local currencies. One is regional currencies. Another is functional currencies. Another is social-purpose currencies.

A resilient, efficient system needs to be diverse and interconnected. On the other hand, diversity and interconnectivity decrease efficiency. Therefore, the key is an appropriate balance between efficiency and resilience.

The direct consequence is that we have to fight with each other in order to survive.

Look at any financial institution, at any bank. They’re all photocopies of each other. There’s no diversity of institutions and even less diversity of currency.

Therefore, just as you say its very logical that an ecosystem like this will collapse, it’s very predictable a monetary system like this will collapse, too. And it hasn’t finished collapsing, by the way.

Our [American] money system is structurally brittle. It doesn’t matter if you put a very clever guy or a stupid guy at the wheel.

GREED AND COMPETITION ARE NOT THE RESULT OF IMMUTABLE HUMAN TEMPERMENT…

Complementary currencies work in addition to existing money, rather than replacing existing, official money.

They send you into the world to compete with everybody else to get the second $100,000 that never was created and bring it back to them. So if we’re in a world with zero-growth population, goods, services, and money, the problem would be obvious.

Basically, for any complex to be sustainable needs to have a balance between two factors: resilience and efficiency. These two factors can be calculated from the structure of the network that is involved in a complex system.

Conventional money is supposed to be doing everything. By adding in complementary currencies, you actually get different types of things and different outcomes from different complementary currencies.

The clever guy will take a half hour to have an accident, and the stupid guy will take ten minutes.

Money is created through bank debt. When you go for a mortgage through a bank, they give you $100,000 to buy a house and basically send you out into the world to bring back $200,000 in the next twenty years. The first $100,000 is principal, and the second is interest.

I wanna keep creating those situations for myself so I don’t have to be out front all the time. Then when I do have to be out front, I can do it to the max.

We’re creating a TV show of Scrooge, starring Jamie Farr, with Buddy Hackett as Scrooge.

They keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity.

In 1967 I entered Harvard as a freshman, confident – in the way that only 17-year-olds are – that I could change the world.

Labor should not be about creating monuments on hills or statues in parks. Labors monuments and statues are when a young person can find a job, when a person with disability can get access to the ordinary life that others take for granted.

Creating a meaningful life has less to do with how we feel about our past than what we do about our future.

Life is not a means to an end but a series of experiences. Are you creating your series ‘on purpose’ ?

The tax collector must love poor people, he’s creating so many of them.