[p2p-research] open money week on our blog

[Ryan Lanham]

Michel, here is my hope to get in on your blog set...*

The Need for New Theories of Money
*
Economics might be summed up as the field that studies allocation of
resources.  It might also be seen as a the field that studies the nature and
flow of moneys, or as a field that considers human behaviors in relationship
to happiness and resource allocation.

Remarkably, there is no good definition of the field's proper focal points
or boundaries.  It is, as the literary theorists have taught us to say,
increasingly contested.  While that contest is very much in the "periphery
of discourse" (more academic argot), the periphery is warming up through an
increasingly buzz in various social networks, not least of which is our
little P2P world here at the P2P Foundation, thanks largely to Michel's
catholic interests and sponsorship of discussion on these topics.

Economics, for now, has one dominant school (scarcity-based market theory)
and a set of heterodox sects such as Marxism, post-scarcity economics,
so-called post-autistic schools (which are typically closely linked to the
dominant domain) and other far-flung ideas that are trying to earn a seat at
the table...often while acting as if "the table" is absurd.  Some I read
here (on the P2P Foundation blog and in its research lists) frankly strike
me as laughably naive, but I am losing my hubris in the face of technology
futurism, economic crises and the advances of social media technologies.

Legitimacy as measured by academic appointments largely falls on very
conventional market theories with surprisingly few exceptions; it used to be
radical at the University of Chicago to be a behavioral economist!  Even
post-Keynesian writers are fairly rare in the academy--at least the academy
that anyone seriously considers.  It's a Monetarist World (of money) that
followed a long string of Nobelists from the Chicago School one must see as
conventionally dominant...but also as increasingly decaying.  Those people,
and their relatively close quibblers, tend to rule our big banks and our
economies in general though some, like Timothy Geithner in the US (the
Treasury Secretary), have remarkably little formal economic training of any
sort, and are problematic to classify as to theirs schools of thought much
beyond the dreaded left wing epithet of almost no rational
meaning--"neoliberal" or even worse, "market bureaucrat." Such shouting
doesn't seem to help.

Now, as core newspapers and universities decline and economic crises erode
institutional legitimacy of mainstream thinking in economics, one can almost
smell the ripeness for new radical (and I don't mean the term in the leftest
sense so much as the disruptive sense) theories of money and business.  The
P2P movement is square in the middle of such lines of thinking.  It is so
much in the middle of such thinking that I often worry that I'll tarnish my
own minimal credibility by association with some of the heterodoxy.  Clearly
cranks exist, and most of the ideas are patently crap.  But I've gotten over
that egoism largely by realizing that something meaningful is afoot, and
that Austrians, Behaviorists, monetarists, Marxists and Keynesians are not
the whole family of legitimate thinkers.  Something(s) else is emerging.

In short, we *need* new theories.  I hope those harboring truly radical
concepts start to bring them forward for real critical review.  We are
entering a transforming age and the very survival of our species (the times
demand that sort of seeming hyperbole) may depend on new approaches to how
we allocate stuff and how we judge our happiness and wealth.  Bring it on.
We need new and even outrageous ideas.  We need tests and alternative
currencies and new ways tried first by greeny hippies in Germany and
neo-Fabians and Utopians in France.  We need small nation currency
experiments and micro-credit enterprises to innovate and allow for serious
consideration of alternative models for both near and long-term
consideration.  We need Grameen dollars, twollers and everything else anyone
can think of.  We need ideas.  P2P is the right space for these ideas to be
treated with respectful encouragement and an occasional twinge of
skepticism.  Bring them on.


Ryan


On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 11:16 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Is there any one with special insights on the twollar trend, which we have
> never covered? Next week is ideal for such article, as there will be a spate
> of different articles around the broad topic of open money,
>
> Michel
>
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>
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