This little book is very interesting in that it is a sandwich of extremely cogent and clear understanding of the relationship of money and economics to spirituality and human values, with a filling of a very problematic practical solution. He gets right the fact that our current money system is one design out of many possible, and that it’s based on scarcity, and what that means for our world. And he has some very surprising and insightfull things to say about surplus, i.e. more than just the usual “our whole economy is based our ability to produce surpluses and then redistribute them”, but onto what surplus is spiritually, and who should own surplus. He questions if surplus comes from human effort, or is bestowed on us by nature. He examines when surpluses have, historically, been at all time highs, and claims that it is when individual conciousness is expanding most quickly (i.e. the renesaince, and right now).

But in between all this good stuff, is a practical suggestion that we establish a basket commodity currency backed simultaneously by both wheat and gold (because they both represent two different aspects of money, the wheat=agriculture=credit =spiritual and gold=land=value=matter. And that the currency be governed by a centralized non-governmental world body. Well, I don’t buy this. It’s not a solution comensurate problems it purports to solve. For one, how can a backed currency ever be sufficient? Also, one of the clear goals that he points out of a currency, that of matching the economic activity in the economy, is just not possible in any centrally managed currency where the matching is being doing by people trying to observe the economy. Currencies should do this by internal design, not by an external process. It also means that the locus of control of the currency has simply been moved from one central agency to another, which does not solve the fundamental requirement of making money truly democratic. The high level transnational economic organizations that exist at the behest of national governments (IMF, World Bank, WTO, etc) don’t appear to be very democratic to me, nor do they seem to serve the interests of the people to me.

What’s a better solution? Open money of course.

[tags]money,Christopher Houghton-Budd,wheat,gold,currency,community currency[/tags]

This sprawling work requiresmuch more than a small description here, which I will do some time (probably as so many others have), but I’ve gotta gripe about it. I wish Mr. Wilber were a better writer, or he would let an editor fix his incredibly repetitious prose. Many people have told me that Wilber is dense and hard to get through, but it’s not really that dense. The book is indeed a brilliant synthesis of a whole bucket load of ideas, but the each section is so over belabored that it gets tiresome. Well that’s the gripe, the things I like best about it are: holons, a synthetic world view which includes a social and individual component of the interior as well as exterior (the four quadrants), ascenders vs. descenders, Plotinus, and the necessary interrelatedness of macrocosmic and microcosmic evolution.

The big problem with this book, is that he states, but does not satisfactorily demonstrate, the claim that the interior/subjective and the exterior/objective are on the same footing. I believe this, but I’m still looking for someone who can really demonstrate it.

I have a real soft spot for a good graphic novel now and again, and this one really hit the spot. The story is interesting, the characters are amazingly engaging, and the art is just fantastic. What’s most amazing about Bone, is that it doesn’t takes an unusual position of litterary self-awarenes. It doesn’t take itself completely seriously, like so many of them do, but it’s also not all silly. So while the monsters are at some points just clearly silly and out of character, i.e. discussing whether to eat their next victims raw or in the form of a quiche, or calling eachother fat, they are also downright monster scary. It’s tough to pull this off, but I, for one, was willing to suspend disbelief and really get into the story, not despite the silliness, but because of it.