Jimmy Breeze's personal annotations on this page
Chrishp bookmarked
on 2009-10-30
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Money, whether pounds or Brixton bricks, isn't wealth. It's just a way of keeping accounts, and swapping one system of accounts for another isn't going to alter the basic productive potential of Brixton.
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True, community currencies may very gently encourage trade with locals rather than strangers. But the gains from more trade with locals are more than offset by the losses from less trade with strangers.
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Nor are the environmental benefits of community currencies terribly persuasive. Local trade sounds environmentally friendly, but it is a distraction: The environmental cost of driving to the shops or growing food on inappropriate local land is far greater than the cost of the carbon emissions of long-range shipping.
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The real benefits, if they exist, are not economic but social, and best explained not by an economist like me but by a sociologist such as Ed Collom of the University of Southern Maine.
Collom's work looks, at first glance, like bad news for the community-currency movement. He has found, for example, that most currency schemes in the United States last only a few years before collapsing. The ones that thrive are in places which already have strong, liberal, middle-class communities, such as Portland, Ore., or Ithaca, N.Y. In the Rust Belt areas that would seem to need them more, they have not taken root.
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But despite the obstacles, Ed Collom is convinced that local currencies can strengthen neighborhood ties and allow people to make friends: They are a focal point for the community-minded, even when they do not last.
That is possible. I live near a determined, community-minded entrepreneur who owns the local cafe, the sort of person who helps to get community currencies started. But rather than minting a Homerton dollar, she has founded a traders' association and is trying to set up a street market. I think she has the right priorities.
This link has been bookmarked by 2 people . It was first bookmarked on 08 Apr 2009, by stuart spivack.
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Money, whether pounds or Brixton bricks, isn't wealth. It's just a way of keeping accounts, and swapping one system of accounts for another isn't going to alter the basic productive potential of Brixton.
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True, community currencies may very gently encourage trade with locals rather than strangers. But the gains from more trade with locals are more than offset by the losses from less trade with strangers.
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