Although there have been many different forms of money, the version that has largely dominated Game A is a rivalrous token that can be exchanged for rivalrous goods or services (e.g., food); where the value of the token is determined by the faith the transacting parties have in their future ability to exchange the token for rivalrous goods or services. This faith can be based on the degree to which the monetary token is itself a commodity ("commodity money") that has some intrinsic use value and/or on the pure use of the token as a high fidelity promise of future value exchange.
According to Graeber, a classic implementation of money within Game A tends to look something like this:
1) A political authority "mints" (i.e., establishes unique bona fides for) money and uses that money to compensate the military/policing function of their community.
2) The political authority requires that every member of the community pay taxes in the form of the minted money. This creates a demand among the entire community for some amount of money.
3) The members of the community who are not receiving money directly from the authority, then, are motivated to offer goods and services to those who do have money (e.g., the military) in order to have enough money to pay taxes.
4) At the same time, the members of the military are motivated to use their money to acquire the goods and services that they desire *and* to enforce the taxation requirement so as to ensure the future value of their money.
The net result is a transactional market where the relative demand and supply of money meets the relative supply and demand of goods and services to establish prices (i.e., the value of a given good or service as measured in units of money) without the requirement of top-down direction.
Money plays the very important role in Game A. On the one hand, it generates relatively decentralized decision making (aka "market forces), avoiding the economic calculation problem in the allocation of resources. On the other hand, to the degree to which the monetary system itself can be captured or controlled by a centralized power structure, it becomes a principal tool of hierarchy and control. As a consequence, control of the monetary system is always a peak position on the social fitness landscape and the rightful subject of much power struggle within a given community.
Within Game A, much there is hot debate about what forms of money are most resistant to capture. Broadly speaking, one camp defends "democratically controlled fiat money (like the United States Federal Reserve Notes that are our current form of money) under the premise that only open democratic processes can successfully defend against efforts to capture the monetary system. Another camp defends "an apolitical commodity money (cf gold)" under the premise that politics and political rulers cannot be trusted with so important a tool of control. History seems to show that neither approach is particularly effective. The niche of control of the ultimate scarce resource (rivalrous money) is so compelling that it will undermine the very democratic processes that are intended to protect against it (as is our present experience in Western Civilization) and/or will spontaneously form more or less coupled power structures (the "monied interests") around scarce commodity monies who can leverage their influence over the money supply to extract wealth from the community to their benefit.
It is becoming increasingly apparent that it is not the form of rivalrous money that matters but the centralization of economic life on rivalrous money itself that is the key. The essence of the problem is simple: while human interactions can be generative and result in both positive-sum wealth creation and (more importantly) non-rivalrous wealth creation, rivalrous money is, by design, scarce and therefore subject to the fundamental dynamics of scarcity.
In game~b, we propose to recognize that money is only a measure [metric optimization] and that it is the underlying dynamic of increasing human wellbeing that is the appropriate object of economy. In order to accomplish this, we must simultaneously recover the non-rivalrous in economic life and render the rivalrous a subordinate function under conditions of the highest transparency. We call this form of game~b economy the Wellbeing Economy.
According to Graeber, a classic implementation of money within Game A tends to look something like this:
1) A political authority "mints" (i.e., establishes unique bona fides for) money and uses that money to compensate the military/policing function of their community.
2) The political authority requires that every member of the community pay taxes in the form of the minted money. This creates a demand among the entire community for some amount of money.
3) The members of the community who are not receiving money directly from the authority, then, are motivated to offer goods and services to those who do have money (e.g., the military) in order to have enough money to pay taxes.
4) At the same time, the members of the military are motivated to use their money to acquire the goods and services that they desire *and* to enforce the taxation requirement so as to ensure the future value of their money.
The net result is a transactional market where the relative demand and supply of money meets the relative supply and demand of goods and services to establish prices (i.e., the value of a given good or service as measured in units of money) without the requirement of top-down direction.
Money plays the very important role in Game A. On the one hand, it generates relatively decentralized decision making (aka "market forces), avoiding the economic calculation problem in the allocation of resources. On the other hand, to the degree to which the monetary system itself can be captured or controlled by a centralized power structure, it becomes a principal tool of hierarchy and control. As a consequence, control of the monetary system is always a peak position on the social fitness landscape and the rightful subject of much power struggle within a given community.
Within Game A, much there is hot debate about what forms of money are most resistant to capture. Broadly speaking, one camp defends "democratically controlled fiat money (like the United States Federal Reserve Notes that are our current form of money) under the premise that only open democratic processes can successfully defend against efforts to capture the monetary system. Another camp defends "an apolitical commodity money (cf gold)" under the premise that politics and political rulers cannot be trusted with so important a tool of control. History seems to show that neither approach is particularly effective. The niche of control of the ultimate scarce resource (rivalrous money) is so compelling that it will undermine the very democratic processes that are intended to protect against it (as is our present experience in Western Civilization) and/or will spontaneously form more or less coupled power structures (the "monied interests") around scarce commodity monies who can leverage their influence over the money supply to extract wealth from the community to their benefit.
It is becoming increasingly apparent that it is not the form of rivalrous money that matters but the centralization of economic life on rivalrous money itself that is the key. The essence of the problem is simple: while human interactions can be generative and result in both positive-sum wealth creation and (more importantly) non-rivalrous wealth creation, rivalrous money is, by design, scarce and therefore subject to the fundamental dynamics of scarcity.
In game~b, we propose to recognize that money is only a measure [metric optimization] and that it is the underlying dynamic of increasing human wellbeing that is the appropriate object of economy. In order to accomplish this, we must simultaneously recover the non-rivalrous in economic life and render the rivalrous a subordinate function under conditions of the highest transparency. We call this form of game~b economy the Wellbeing Economy.
Debt: the First 5000 Years by David Graeber