Tom

In regards to Hanno’s suggestion…probably not. Not if gold/silver/precious metal is the basis of exchange. The issue here is counterfit of exchange and the amount of trade that exists now versus then. The average schlub on the street would not be able to tell what real gold. The benefit of paper money, especially in the modern world, is that it is extremely hard to counterfit. There are dies and watermarks and all sorts of neat things. Gold is just yellow metal. How does the average guy test that? I know that counterfitting is still a problem in modern times, but to a lesser extent, especially because possible counterfitters face the fury of national governments. Also, the gold standard failed because there was more trade, more production, and more people than there was in “olden times.” Bretton Woods died 30 years ago…I don’t think it is going to be revived. Without confidence in the system, trade would decrease, and the whole point of currency is to stimulate trade. Also, if they were to use a metallic standard, prices would go up,because there is not nearly enough of precious anything to fill the void. Could you imagine buying bread with gold, with the amount of gold available in the world, with the amount of people in the world?

Now if the countries were to adopt Bretton woods, where currency is set at an exchange rate to gold held in Ft. Knox or whatever, it would still fail. A bunch of little countries would be incredibly fluid geographically and economically. Individuals would and could not have confidence in any countries currencies.

People will flow to that that they have the most confidence in. In antiguity, it was the vestiges of religion. In the future you speak of, unfortunately, it will be the multinational corporation and bank. These are the players on the international market that have the most skin in the game and do the most trading on an international basis. The majority of people go to the corner store to get their food and satisfy their most basic needs. The amount of international trade that they do, even in small country world, will be decidedly small. Larger than it was before, but still small. Currency is not so much a function for the immediate community. Its fortunate for the small community, because it cuts down on negotiation costs, but ultimately its really unnecessary. People build up relationships with the people trade with, especially when outside the community trade decreases, which again is what would happen in the absence of currency.

Anyway, Boeing, Pfizer, all sorts of banks, and IBM, etc. would get together and figure out a monetary system, based on faceless credits. It would be easy now, because technology can easily measure global production, which I imagine would be the basis of the system. I actually have developed a form of that system for the here and now…a conversion from the here and now. I have yet to prove it, because I don’t have the manpower to demonstrate it. (A lot of contemporary measurements for a lot of different countries). But it is theoretically possible, and without the warm and fuzzy feel from a lot of established large countries, and in the absence of large amounts of rare metals, this is the best option. There has to be some collusion, and the best option in this scenario is multinationals.

My guess, using human nature as a guide, is that each of the new splinter groups will attempt to use the tools available to it to maximize their own well-being.

A lot of the possible futures depends on what percentage of time is spent between real and virtual space, since an infinite (for all practical purposes) amount of value can be created in virtual space using only creativity.

I figure that by mid-century, what we now know as reality will be useful mainly as a service industry for virtual and outer spaces. One possible future is one in which we have near-infinite energy resources using large solar collectors (which can be made as large as we want–you just blow up a silvered ballon in orbit, let it harden and cut it in half.)

I expect that that particular world, shortly before money became meaningless, could have a discrepancy between the poor and wealthy of perhaps nine orders of magnitude in personal wealth. The poorest on the planet, however, would have appoximately the same holdings as lower-middle-class Americans today.

There are a lot of dystopias possible, of course, but part of what I am trying to accomplish at UrbanAgora is setting up guidelines to steer people away from those and towards futures that actually work for humanity.

Prescott, do a thought experiment:

Shatter the nations of the world into fifty thousand separate states. (Don’t tell me it couldn’t happen, use your imagination.) If this occurred, what kind of economic system would develop during the process?

Billy Joe, you can chime in on this one, too.

Tom

If governments are irrelevant and fragment and disappear in the next few decades, what happens to money in the global economy? Will a non-governmental system be able to come up with a stable replacement for government-issued money, or will we all live and die at the whim of currency speculators the way small third world countries that still have their own money do today? A global economy can’t function without stable money, but money 30 years from now will probably seem very alien to us today.

Belgium, for goodness’ sake

I expect the final EU consitution never to be passed by any kind of referendum, Belgium to split into two parts, Scotland to leave the UK and Quebec to secede–all before 2010.

Tom

Have a good day, go outside, it’s a beautiful here for a change.

Tom