ERE Book Club: Sacred Economics

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Gilberto de Piento
Posts: 1942
Joined: Tue Nov 12, 2013 10:23 pm

ERE Book Club: Sacred Economics

Post by Gilberto de Piento »

I can't remember how the ERE book club is supposed to work but here goes. I just finished Sacred Economics which you can read for free at: http://sacred-economics.com/read-online/

The book was long and sometimes slow but it had some interesting ideas:
A negative interest rate to keep money in use rather than being saved (probably not good for us)
Protect the commons (like the environment) by imposing costs for damaging it
More use of the "gift economy" where people help others with no expectation of direct repayment

One part that really made sense to me was that the author thinks that we've damaged our society by making everything available for money. There's now no reason to build a relationship with anyone since everything is a transaction.

Dragline
Posts: 4436
Joined: Wed Aug 24, 2011 1:50 am

Re: ERE Book Club: Sacred Economics

Post by Dragline »

No rhyme or reason to the book club -- just benign neglect that falls upon yours truly.

But now that you've asked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mws6nSzeJos

For thoughts on Eisenstein and Sacred Economics:

viewtopic.php?f=18&t=6100&p=88821&hilit ... ics#p88821

Jin+Guice
Posts: 1276
Joined: Sat Jun 30, 2018 8:15 am

Re: ERE Book Club: Sacred Economics

Post by Jin+Guice »

Just finished reading this book.

I highly recommend, though there are a lot of economic details (not difficult to understand, but I found them boring. Possibly confusing if you've never had exposure to how fractional reserve banking works, because, imo, that shit is fucking bananas).



My personal takeaways are:

1) The author and I are in rough agreement in worldview. For me this means that there is a systemic problem in society that each of us contributes to. We each have the power to change the part we contribute to. The problem is still under-characterized and not well understood, so unique approaches from different people who got there through different worldviews are appreciated (by me).

2) The author got there by thinking about the money system and then re-imagining it. As such, I'm not sure how I feel about his specific recommendations, such as trying to revert back to a mostly gift economy or negative interest rates (though this is an oversimplification of the book's ideas). It was interesting to read about the details and recommendations the book had, but I'm not sure if I agree or disagree with the specifics.

3) The most interesting part to me was the author's ideas about how money contributes to our separation from each other and the ecological world. He points out that one mode of economic growth has been monetizing things that used to be nonmonetized. For example, paying for childcare from strangers rather than a parent, family member or friend providing it "for free."

I find the thesis of the book difficult to articulate. It's something like "with our current conception of money, monetizing things remove the spiritual element from them." Thus as we expand our economy, we move things from the realm of personal to impersonal, which cheapens our every day experience and lives.

As another consequence of our current money system, we end up with homogenized culture and bias things that can be measured for economic efficiency but not those that can't (which contributes to ugly box stores like Walmart rather than more interesting, beautiful and varied city centers).


4) The thesis of my own project is something like "how do we individually and collectively combat egocentric pathological culture, using modes that are under our control immediately and in the near future?" I think that "Scared Economics" argues that we do this by putting the sacredness back into our goods and services, our work and our transactions with each other.

To me, this is where it merges with ERE. His way of doing this is to stay more focused on things that actually contribute to human need and greatly reduce our reliance on the monetary economy. While he is at times critical of the concept of financial independence, because it offers a chance to save enough money to remove dependence from anything but the monetary economy, I found the spirit of ERE in the book, mostly in his focus on increasing self-reliance and interdependency as well as increasing the collective commons.

5) Eisenstein sees money as the dominant religious force of our time. I agree with this and think it is useful to look at money, finance, industrialization, commercialization, consumerism and the myth of progress as religious forces.

6) I really appreciate anyone who doesn't take the view the capitalism vs. communism as the defining argument of the world, but rather points to the strengths and weaknesses we can combine/ drop from both.



There were several times where I found myself questioning the book. I'm not sure about his specific methods. I think money can be a useful tool and I wonder if Eisenstein doesn't place too much blame on money and seek to repeal it back too far?



ETA: Here's a short summary of the ideas in the book from the author (@mF shared this video with me):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GoFzU3cRE4

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