meeting-10-JW-notes | New School Futures

Some notes on value creation

By John compiled this in preparation for (and then after) the meeting on 14th August 2023
with Sandro Pampallona, (e.g. article), Paula Bollini (e.g. article) & Felicity Jones

Felicity recently sent me an article indicating the interest in seeking a new approach to development. I was also struck by Sandro & Paula's statement (last Friday) that the winning of funding often impedes (rather than advances) development projects.

(How) can development / education work without money?

The vision of a value-creating, non-monetary framework chimes with my aims for a better HE system.
Would it be reasonable to explore the issues by comparing monetised and non-monetised systems?
E.g. the logic of summation compared with the logic of 2nd order synergy.
We could analyse the benefits v. shortcomings of unit-based currencies then apply the former & omit the latter.

The idea of money

By money I mean the quantified (i.e. unit-based) currencies system produced by private banks and regulated by national banks and governments. Traditionally, (in basic economic theory) money is regard as:

A medium of exchange
A standard of deferred payment.
A unit of account
A store of value

PROS:

: It can act at a distance (i.e. without the need for face-to-face meetings)
: It can catalyse endeavours otherwise doomed by collective pessimism or natural calamity.
: Its rigorous adherence to the rules of arithmetic reduces the potential for dispute.
: Its fungibility means it is not restricted to particular categories of things it can be spent on
- : (e.g. unlike barter, money works without a double coincidence of wants)

CONS:

: By acting at a distance it dissipates the original intent and reduces face-to-face collaboration.
- (e.g. charitable donations may represent willingness but monetisation eclipses the feeling.
- (i.e. by converting goodwill into numerical codes that are profoundly inert & forgetful.)
: Its rigorous, summative nature means that it works against the natural synergies that create value.
: When seen as a store of value its fungibility makes ethical deeds equivalent to unethical ones.
: The monetisation of the sharing economy / the digitisation of charity

(big claim 1) - VALUE IS SYNERGISTIC

The claim that money is a store of value (see (4) above, in The pros and cons of unit-based money) seems the most dubious. It certainly needs explanation, as the term stored seems to equate the recording of monetary value with how we cherish and look after real things (e.g. provisions such as apples, flour, eggs). Perhaps this is a reasonable claim if we acknowledge that neither money nor perishable foods can be stored indefinitely. However, this overlooks the profoundly different way that money and things lose their value. Both are mutable and entropic but these attributes accrue in different ways. The entropy of money (i.e. cash) comes from extrinsic causes, of which it is ignorant. So when the face value of a currency declines this happens only as an aggregate reflection of (more) real events within the relevant economies. By contrast an apple's value declines as its constituent synergies weaken and fail. Perhaps most importantly, within an ecological system, value is not a sum of parts but a net synergy-of-synergies.

(big claim 2) - MONEY IS SUMMATIVE

Georg Simmel: the quality of money "consists exclusively in its quantity" (Simmel, 1900).
i.e. numbers are designed to be profoundly self-identical (1=1, 2=2, 3=3 etc.).
This means that they only combine via addition or subtraction (they cannot merge together fruitfully)
By designing the identicality of coins we lose opportunities to find new synergies.

Cultures of effective conviviality

We need informal, tightly-bounded interpersonal ties that enable local networks to collaborate and survive.
- Chinese - guanxi (關係) or wu wei (無爲)
- Korean - jeong (정)
- African - ubuntu

A critique of accountancy

Invented only 5k years ago (very recent on a evolutionary timeline)
Monetary units (e.g. coins) designed to invoke only summative reasoning
Summation is a presumptuous extension of set theory
- (n.b. the Yoruba number system avoids hardline distinction between integers<?>)
It is predicated on the tacit agreement that A=A=A
- (where the A's are coins of same denomination)
- i.e. it assumes that these elements are sufficiently similar to carry identical value

Transaction

Transaction is a precursor to integrating (making value within) specialised activities
Transaction (e.g. barter) maintains the continued separation between goods traded
- (n.b. as a practice it may also uphold/reinforce local social bonds)
This is also true where unit-based currency payments represent half of the transaction.
Assuming identicality in transaction was useful for reducing unwarranted negotiation (time)
David Graeber discusses the transition from social obligation to payment with unit-based money
- e.g. barter implies social goodwill and a shared sense of obligation (I owe you one)
But where obligation is complex, social, emotional & moral, unit-based money is simple & granular.
2nd order synergies derive from combination and merging processes.
- merging is an essential part of the social order (see sympoiesis).
- Emergence is a production of new value

The fungibility of human ethics

Human reasoning probably evolved to conserve social expediencies and alliances (Rivera, 2009).
In other words, perhaps the logic of ethics is relativistic & partisan (i.e. fungible)
This is akin to the fungibility of money (why it may seem natural to us).
If so, are there any emotional elements associated with money? (feeling of avarice / comfort?)
- “Regardless of the amount, the liveliness of attached hopes gives money a glow” (Simmel, 1900)

One-dimensional charity

Since the 10th century, almshouses were administered by local parish councils.
By the 19th century they were attracting support from wealthy benefactors.
By the mid 20th century, charities had begun to mushroom into global NGOs, supported largely by corporate philanthropy.
Since then the privatisation (& monetisation) of healing, care work, and charitable deeds has increased.
This may have changed meaning of 'charity'.
- e.g. (English) word 'charity' evolved from translations of the ancient (Christian) Greek word 'agape' (ἀγάπη), which situated the giver, receiver, and the act of giving within the context of a field of love between God and humanity.
- In this regard, one might regard traditional religious notion of charity as, at minimum, a three-dimensional event.
- In the last few thousand years ideas of giving and trading became represented in linear form.
- See paper by Xun Lin & Hua Huang, (2017)