Working in the new world of currencies (or current-sees) gives one a sense of being a pioneer looking upon a new landscape for the first time. This is appropriate because the currency landscape that is coming into view from over the horizon is indeed completely new. Yet, a big part of pioneering is not just about discovering the new, but also about discovering that the familiar itself is also ready to be re-seen. The light of such re-seeing is much of what’s surprising and fresh about this currency frontier.
Wealth is another familiar concept at the center of our work in currency design that begs to be re-seen. Let’s take a look at this map of Wealth as “A Living Systems Model”:
Systems have boundaries through which its inputs and outputs must pass in order for the system as a whole to maintain its coherence. Systemic well-being depends on maintaining a flow in between these inputs and outputs. Tradable wealth corresponds to this aspect of systems. In living biological systems, food and water are two of the most essential inputs to the system. For larger-scale systems, such as cities or corporations, the inputs include raw resources for building its structures and humans that make it hum.
Systems also have emergent patterns that are properties of the system as a whole. In biological systems, one of the most familiar such patterns is health. Health is not something you put into a system, but an emergent property of the whole. We can objectively measure health in many ways. For example, how well can the system perform certain functions: Can you run one or ten miles? How much abuse of certain types can the system withstand: How often do you get colds? How often do you fail to repel invading viruses? For cities and corporations as systems, we can measure things like productive capacity. Systemic properties are major indicators of the wellbeing of the system. All systems work hard to do things that maintain and strengthen these patterns. In fact, you can think of the sum of inputs and outputs to a system as being in the service of maintaining its emergent patterns.
Systems never exist in a vacuum. They are always part of an environment, and they exist in relation to other systems in that environment. The pattern of those relationships is also part of the wellbeing of any particular system. The quality and beneficiality of those relationships to a system will vary from system to system. There is no objective measurement of the wellbeing of the pattern of relationships, rather it is system specific. But systems can certainly acknowledge, and in many cases even rank, the qualities of these relationships from their point of view. We are intuitively familiar with this: We can acknowledge and even rank our friendships, our experiences of beauty, etc.
So, the levels of wealth correspond with these basics of systems thinking. As noted above, tradable wealth is about a system’s inputs and outputs. Measurable wealth pertains to the properties of systems as a whole. Nameable wealth is about relationships between systems, while rankable wealth expresses the vitality and performance of a system. True wealth exists when all of these levels are in harmony. None is intrinsically more important than the others. It is interesting to note when we have direct experiences of systems that have differing wealth at each of the levels. Many “wealthy” people who travel to poor countries to do service projects come back astounded, having learned of their own poverty of relationships after experiencing previously unimaginable riches of community solidarity. In this case, we could speak of a deep mismatch between tradable and nameable wealth.
This re-seeing of wealth allows for people to more deeply understand the currency landscape. Currency is the primary tool we use to facilitate wealth building in general. Money is one specific version of this tool we invented to facilitate tradable wealth-building. However, trying to apply it to building measurable and nameable wealth creates deep problems. The properties of money as we know it now are keyed (more or less successfully) to the properties of inputs and outputs of systems. Whatever one believes about debt issuance of money and the operations of the Federal Reserve, it is at least appears reasonable, in our cultural context, to match the scarcity of information tokens to the scarcity of the stuff that the tokens facilitate moving and exchanging. Inflation, therefore, is a marker of a mismatch between them. But it is entirely unintelligible to think that you should use the same scarce information tokens to facilitate the construction of non-scarce systemic properties like health and education. That we try to do so sheds light on why there is never enough money for healthcare and education, not to mention for the arts, civic society, and all those other parts of our society that are about inter-systemic relationships themselves (rather than systemic inputs or outputs).
Moreover, re-seeing currencies also leads to an understanding of just how important a multi-currency universe is. Even though there are clear discontinuities between the different levels of wealth, there are also many, many shades of gray within and between them. Relational wealth encompasses the clearly rankable (as in friendships) to the only nameable (as in love). Tradable wealth comes in many different types, as in material stuff of varying scarcity, and time, which is scarce, though the scarcity of which is shared among all people. We need specific tools geared to building wealth for each of these shades, and more importantly in coordination with each other. i.e. related currency complexes that simultaneously allow for trade, measurement, ranking, naming, and seeing the possible wealth of any system so that we can build integrated wealth.
It appears that our universe is set up so that new entire types and levels of systems are continuously emergent. Systems not only have inputs and outputs. They have patterns that are properties of the system as a whole, and exist in relation to each other in an environment. It is also the case that entirely new systems constantly emerge out of smaller systems. Atoms emerge from sub-atomic complexes, molecules emerge from atoms, and single-celled life emerges from molecular complexes, and eukaryotes emerge from procaryote complexes — all the way up to societies emerging as cultural complexes that themselves emerged from tribal complexes.
At any given moment in a systemic complex, there is the possibility of an upward spiral of emergent systemic novelty that will be beneficial to the whole of that systemic complex. Possible Wealth is thus the next level of wealth. So what is the currency of possible wealth? What helps facilitate the building of possible wealth? If we define current-sees as “formal information systems that allow communities to interact with currents or flows”, then a currency that facilitates possible wealth should be one that is built to interact directly with all those flows that lead to emergence. There is more to come!
Author: Eric Harris-Braun | Edited by: Emaline Friedman
