Monthly Feature – Issue #1

One of the defining features of modernity is the abstraction of basic tools of civilization, to such an extent they often function in direct opposition to their purpose. Money is one of the more extreme examples.

To remember and reclaim the purpose of money, and restore it to its best use in an economy, let’s briefly review its development, eventually focusing on a U.S. perspective.

For most of human civilization, which stretches back over 300,000 years, perhaps even longer, a global understanding that every member of a community must work together for our common good was self-evident.

Survival depends on cooperation, and so families and their interdependent communities would divide the necessary tasks at hand: making tools, clothing, building shelter, gathering food and hunting, raising children, storytelling (to share values), and preserving the knowledge required to do all these things.

All was for the profit of society.

The word “profit” comes from the Latin words “profectus” and “proficere” which mean to make progress, grow, advance, accomplish, be useful, and do good.

Goods and resources were shared communally, often with strong norms ensuring everyone’s needs were met.

Trade was natural, both inside and outside of subsistence communities. A fair and good exchange was a transaction where all parties are equally satisfied.

For hundreds of thousands of years, egalitarian cooperation was the norm until about 12,000 years ago. As societies advanced and began producing surpluses, our capacity to give, store, and exchange grew dramatically.

Rather than physically exchange our surplus goods directly, we started using tokens for convenience. The tokens were like deeds of ownership, representing specific items like grain, seed, crops, or livestock.

Then we expanded on the idea of tokens, and etched symbols in stone as IOUs, for example in exchange for crops not yet yielded. An IOU allowed future goods to be exchanged for immediate needs.

As our shared knowledge increased in sophistication, the concept of tokens was abstracted further into metal chips and shards, which could represent anything of need. 2 chips could be the value of a cow. 4 could be a horse. 3 could be the value of a certain amount of grain. This allowed for more direct and freer trade.

That is money. A symbolic token, used to represent, measure, track and manage the contributions of human beings to society. Its purpose is to manage the resources of a community, to take care of our material needs, and make progress, for our individual and collective good.

The idea of a fair exchange – where all parties are equally satisfied – did not change with the invention of money. But it became easier to forget…

Around 269 BCE, Rome began minting coins in the Temple to Juno Moneta, protector of the state, women, and fertility. Her name comes from a myth in which she warned the gods of impending danger, saving their lives. Moneta derives from the Latin verb monēre, meaning “to warn.”

And that’s where we get the word “money” which means “a warning.” Born in a temple of a Republic that would soon fall victim to dictatorship and empire.

As our population has grown, and our tools of mass production have become more complex, we've forgotten that warning, that money began as a convenient way to share, representing our individual contributions to the well-being of all.

And because of our limited capacity to handle large numbers, we continually fail to grasp that for at least the last 40,000 to 50,000 years, humanity has been one surviving species with an interconnected lineage, all one extended family. And we constantly fail to recognize that all people are “our people.”

Money is a convenient means of managing the finite energy supply of that entire human family: our time, labor, creativity, and contributions. In our modern era we now value money itself as a commodity divorced from its meaning.

But in a moment of emergency, cut off from help, if a direct need for food, clothing, shelter, or human skill arises, no amount of metal tokens or symbols will suffice. At that moment, the worthlessness of money becomes instantly clear again.

Economics: The word economy originates from Ancient Greek, from the word oikonomia, which means household management.

Aristotle popularized the word in 330 BC while systematizing every field of human knowledge, from logic and ethics to biology and political theory creating the intellectual foundations of science and philosophy.

He saw economics and ethics as two parts of the same path, leading to a life of purpose, growth, and wellbeing.

The act of seeking and accumulating money for its own sake, beyond what is needed, he described with an entirely different word: “Chrematistics” which means wealth-seeking. And he described wealth-seeking as unnatural and morally corrupting.

He explained that wealth only has real value to the extent that it provides a good life based on virtue, community, and justice.

Aristotle also popularized the term “politics,” which means the affairs of cities.

For cities to be just, healthy, well-managed and meet their purpose, every member of society must be engaged in their right work, engaged in trades that suit their talents and abilities.

Like a body with an organ that is not well, if citizens are not able to rise to their full potential, the society which depends upon them suffers, and begins to collapse.

That was the state of Greek society that Aristotle was hoping to reform. In his time, the average free citizen worked 6–7 hours a day, due to reliance on natural light, less than 40 hours per week with one day off. There were regular feast days, religious festivals, and public holidays, over 50 per year in Athens alone. In other words he wanted to reform a society that was more equitable than the one we live in today - for free citizens.

The conditions of ancient Greece he wanted to improve did not include the half of society that was enslaved, working in brutal conditions. And while Aristotle supported the status quo of slavery, many other notable thinkers and schools at the time criticized, challenged and outright rejected it.

Aristotle had also regressed from his teacher Plato’s strong belief in gender equality, including women as equal candidates for the role of philosopher-kings in his vision of an ideal society, one where leadership should own no private wealth at all.

Only a few thousand years later, during the early stirrings of the Industrial Revolution in the 1600s, did the meaning of “economy” start shifting from Aristotle’s idea of managing a household, “oikonomia,” to describing the trade, scarcity, and the growing surplus wealth of empires and nation-states.

Instead of distributing that surplus to meet shared needs, it was increasingly hoarded by a rising class of wealth-seekers. Exploitation wasn’t disappearing, it was scaling up through extraction, transatlantic slavery, the rise of early wage-labor systems, and the private seizure of land.

For most of human history, land was never parcelled out the way we understand ownership today. It was held in common, managed by clans, tribes, or villages as a shared resource for survival, not as a commodity to be bought, sold, or hoarded. The idea that someone could own the Earth would have been absurd, like claiming to own the sky.

But over time, those who captured or inherited land claimed ownership over the food, water, shelter, and natural wealth it provided. And those cut off from it lost their ability to live independently, becoming dependent on wages controlled by the landowning class. The enclosure of land set the stage for the enclosure of life.

For hundreds of thousands of years, most human societies had organized labor through kinship, communal obligation, or coercion, not by individuals selling their time on an open market.

Many hoped this shift meant freedom: the chance to travel, seek opportunity, and live with autonomy and dignity. But instead, as most were dispossessed of land and once-shared resources, they were forced to sell their labor simply to survive. What was once unthinkable, renting yourself by the hour became the new definition of freedom.

Our first economist was the Scotsman Adam Smith, He wrote “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” in 1759. And “The Wealth of Nations” in 1776, the same year as America’s “Declaration of Independence.”

These two books are widely considered the founding texts of modern economics. In the first book Smith argued that a just society depends on our ability to imagine the lives of others, especially those suffering injustice. He believed inequality numbed the wealthy to the reality of the poor, and conversely: “The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful... is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”

This is also the book where Smith introduced the concept of the “invisible hand” which was used to describe human instincts toward moral empathy, not markets.

In his next book “The Wealth of Nations” he describes personal desire and self-interest as a driving force behind trade and resource distribution. And therefore, Smith warned, without ethics, and clear civic and social guidelines, economic systems collapse. He fiercely criticized both slavery and the exploitation of human labor through undervalued wages.

Let’s now focus on the USA.

Thomas Jefferson owned a copy of “The Wealth of Nations” and would later reference Smith’s ideas in his letters, around free trade, labor, and opposition to monopolies that restrict free trade as the British East India corporation had done to the tea market in the colonies.

Despite intense debate at the Constitutional Convention, the 'freedom' to continue slavery was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. It was just barely ratified in 1787, passing by only three votes in New York, and over the strong objections of Gouverneur Morris, the author of the Constitution’s final draft and the convention's primary speaker.

In a series of powerful speeches Morris had railed against slavery on the convention floor, warning that it would bring “the curse of Heaven on the States where it prevailed.”

He warned against a constitution that would allow the concentration of power and the corruption of public office by the wealthy saying: “The rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest. They always did. They always will... They will have the same effect here as elsewhere, if we do not, by the power of government, keep them in their proper spheres.”

At the same time, from 1786 to 1794, anti-tax rebellions continued to erupt across the new republic. First in Massachusetts (Shay’s rebellion), then in Pennsylvania (Whiskey Rebellion).

Veterans and farmers rose up against the new power structure which had replaced the British crown with now so-called “American” landlords and rent-seekers. Paranoia spread among the founding fathers. The uprisings were soon crushed by George Washington and the newly consolidated federal government under the authority of the new constitution.

The founders were deeply indebted to European bankers for the cost of the revolution. To secure control, they quickly established a national bank to enforce a national currency, taxation, and centralized authority. From this perspective, the U.S. Constitution was not the fulfillment of a revolution, but the moment it was stopped in its tracks.

A few years later U.S. Founding Father Thomas Paine pushed back against the new emerging class structure, explaining in his pamphlet “Agrarian Justice” (1797) that “the earth, in its natural, uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race.”

“It is the value of the improvement only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor owes to the community a ground-rent for the land which he holds.”

Paine was advocating for what we now call a universal basic income, as a dividend paid for by surpluses, to support those who had been dispossessed of their natural inheritance. His recommendations were ignored or smeared as radical (by the new American land owners).

Eventually Gouverneur Morris would call the constitution a failure for its inability to restrain the slavers whose expansionist dreams caused chaos and mass casualties when the new republic under Jefferson, then Madison expanded their borders westward claiming native territories, and invaded the north to annex Canada in 1812.

The economy was left in shambles, the White House was set on fire by British soldiers and another revolution against Madison was brewing. Morris and others threatened to secede and form a New York-New England Confederation.

But Madisons’s administration stabilized the new Republic through mass slaughter of Native peoples, relentless land seizures, along with an expansion of slavery. This rekindled a sense of patriotism framed as a moral “Manifest Destiny,” but driven by economic ambition, racial supremacy, and military conquest.

By the early 1800s, the average American free man, woman and child was working 70-100 hours, 7 days a week. They were working harder than the free people of ancient Greece. And more hours than the peasants of medieval Europe. But at least they weren’t slaves.

Industrialists who claimed individual ownership over newly emerging tools of mass production were now fully engaged in what Aristotle had described as Chrematistics – wealth-seeking, an economic and moral failure.

Adam Smith had never used the word “capitalism.” Louis Blanc, a French historian and economist, popularized the term around 1850 in his book “The Organization of Work” at the same time the United States was collapsing into a civil war over slavery.

Blanc used the term “capitalisme” to describe a new social order, created by wealth-seekers. A factory-owning class had emerged, paying workers only a fraction of the value their labor produced under horrific and often dangerous conditions.

Thomas Jefferson had vehemently opposed this emerging social order, which Abraham Lincoln was now calling “wage slavery”—where workers, stripped of land and independence, were forced to sell their labor to factory owners, at any price.

This was the origin of “socialism”, often mistaken for an economic system that does not recognize private property. Socialism began as an argument for more control over personal property, in its widest sense.

The word “property” comes from the Latin “proprietas” and “proprius,” meaning “one’s own.” Property referred not just to material possessions, but to your body, time, labor, and liberty, all that is properly yours. In its earliest use, property was inseparable from personal agency and autonomy.

Socialism emerged in response to the growing concentration of power, as an argument that the essential foundations of life — the things we all depend on and did not create alone, like air, water, land, the soil, and the transformative technologies that shape society — must remain shared, or at the very least publicly accountable.

Inventions like the wheel, the printing press, the internal combustion engine, air travel, and electricity were collective breakthroughs built on generations of shared human knowledge. These are not private achievements, and cannot ethically become private monopolies. They are tools of civilization itself and to allow a small group to enclose them and charge rent to the rest of humanity for access is not freedom. It's feudalism in modern form.

Open source access and / or public ownership of global-scale technologies creates personal liberty by ensuring that all people can freely participate in society, innovate, communicate, and meet their needs without dependence on gatekeepers who profit from exclusion, rather than adding value.

Jonas Salk, who developed the first effective polio vaccine in 1955, famously declined to patent it, saying: "Could you patent the sun?" His point was clear: life-saving knowledge, especially when built on collective effort and intended for universal benefit, should belong to everyone.

The word “socialism” has, of course, been twisted, misused, and misapplied, invoked by authoritarians like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao to justify centralized control and political repression, whose horrors are used as historical propaganda to further crush human rights and public infrastructure efforts.

But in the United States, during the Roosevelt administration, principles aligned with democratic socialism were practically applied, not through violent revolution but through the regulation of shared infrastructure, including: The banking system (FDIC, SEC, Glass-Steagall). The energy grid (Tennessee Valley Authority, Rural Electrification). Massive public works and infrastructure (WPA, CCC, public housing). Social safety nets (Social Security, unemployment insurance, labor protections, the 40-hour work week, weekends off, minimum wage, and overtime pay).

​​Mental health care also saw its first major federal investment, with the construction and expansion of psychiatric hospitals and hygiene clinics funded through the WPA and PWA, marking the beginning of national responsibility for mental well-being.

Monopolies had been dismantled, and top tax rates exceeded 90% for those who had extracted the most value from society. This wasn’t a punishment for success—it was a return to the society that made that success possible. A debt repaid.

These policies were the first major efforts to manage an industrial economy for its collective good, empowering those working the hardest to build it, and creating the first majority middle-class society in the history of humankind, massively increasing standards of living and overall quality of life.

Since the 1970s, as society became saturated with advertising and consumerism, we abstracted money even further — increasingly treating it not as a medium for exchange, but as a commodity itself.

Instead of using money to create real value, wealth-seekers had begun to gamble with it, and profit off its fluctuations during the Gilded Age of the late 1800s with the creation of trusts, monopolies, and financial speculation. This was the cause of the stock market crash of 1929, and the Great Depression had in part been a driving cause of WW2, but all these lessons had been forgotten.

Wealth-seekers returned to investing their tokens in money markets. Now their personal fortunes were totally dependent on the infinite growth of wealth-seeking mega-corporations in the business of extracting as much real value from society as possible. They’d forgotten the real value of wealth as Aristotle had put it: having a virtuous life, a thriving community, and the well-being of society. They’d forgotten the real value of profits: human progress.

Like any form of authoritarianism that concentrates power in the hands of a few, an economy dominated by massive corporations strips the majority of real private property, liberty, and the ability to participate meaningfully in society.

They call it “free trade,” while doing everything in their power to block social interventions that might curb their wealth or break up their monopolies. Small and family-owned businesses are swallowed up, cratering the opportunity for meaningful work and lives. And they pretend market dominance is a divine order, going so far as pretending it’s the teaching of Christianity.

Corporate-owned media outlets almost never cover the social democratic policies that transformed American society from the 1940s through the early 1970s, the same ones creating much more optimal economic conditions today across much of Western and Northern Europe.

Today, it takes two full-time incomes to maintain what one could once provide. Real wages have stagnated, purchasing power has declined, and monopolies dominate nearly every industry. Housing, healthcare, education, and food have skyrocketed in cost.

Privatization has gutted essential public services. Hospitals and clinics have been shut down or consolidated for profit, leaving rural communities without nearby care. Between 2005 and 2023, 146 rural hospitals in the U.S. closed or were converted to non-acute care facilities, with 81 shutting down completely.

Prisons are often run by private companies incentivized to keep cells full, cutting corners on rehabilitation and safety. Libraries, post offices, and local services have vanished, turning once-connected towns into isolated outposts where corporations control every market, and even the landscape starts to look the same, same chain stores, same strip malls, same empty downtowns. Homelessness has increased.

Meanwhile, wealth has consolidated at historic levels, and systems originally designed to serve the public—like utilities, transportation, health services, education, the media, and even the internet—now primarily serve the profits of a few.

In reality, shared infrastructures like media, communications, food, energy and the monetary system itself, do not function best when captured by the greediest. Their success and value can only be measured by their benefit to the public interest, just as Adam Smith and Aristotle before him advised.

Not to mention Jesus, Moses, Muhammad (PBUH), Hinduism, Buddhism, indigenous wisdom, and every other major tradition of humankind, which all agree that when we use material things for human benefit we thrive. But when our humanity is used for material benefit, we suffer.

Final Note:

Economics, the management of our household, is purely a function of ethics. Those ethics extend from our outer to our inner worlds.

We also manage the scarce resources of our time, thought, and attention. We tend to the emotional energy of our relationships.

The way we manage our inner worlds shapes our ability to care for the outer ones — the material realities of our homes, the plant and animal life we steward, and the shared infrastructures of our communities.

In the 21st century we also draw from and contribute to deeply interdependent global networks. Right now our economy is radically mismanaged.

Money is supposed to represent the value of someone’s work, their contribution to the household of a society. If it stops serving in that function, it's no longer working.

Our first billionaire was John D Rockefeller. He became a billionaire not by providing record-breaking value to society, but by seizing absolute control over a critical resource: oil.

He also controlled railroads and supply chains giving him unchecked economic and political power. That's why we broke up his company, Standard Oil.

As of April 2025, there are a record 3,028 billionaires worldwide, collectively holding a net worth of $16.1 trillion, according to Forbes' annual list. ​

The United States leads with 902 billionaires, followed by China (including Hong Kong) with 516, and India with 205.

America’s 10 richest billionaires made 1 billion per day during the pandemic. That is the labor equivalent of 1 million doctors a day. Or 6 million farmers a day.

There is no billionaire that provides the labor or value equivalent of 1 million doctors or 6 million farmers a day.

Their captured wealth sits in monopolized industries, stocks, and in the seizure of public goods. And that has massive negative effects. It means money stops circulating through wages, small businesses, and local trade.

It means prices are inflated on the assets that billionaires hoard — housing for example — making home ownership unaffordable for the majority.

It means wages are suppressed, as corporations owned by billionaires maximize profits by cutting labor costs.

It means our governments become corrupted, as billionaires purchase representatives to enact policies that protect their wealth and power.

There is no metric by which a billionaire “earns” their money that reflects real value. They make their billions through monopolization, financial manipulation, and political capture. And we pay for all of that.

Today, the richest 1% (millionaires up to billionaires) now own nearly half our global wealth, while billions of people struggle to meet basic needs. Because it’s so difficult for human beings to conceptualize big numbers it’s easier to just imagine a family of ten wherein:

1 man owns half the house, the biggest rooms, most of the food, the thermostat, the security system, and has all the keys.

His 2 brothers own what’s left, share a big bedroom, have access to the kitchen, and bathrooms.

The other seven live in the basement, sleep on the floor, and work nonstop to keep the house actually running — cooking, fixing, cleaning — all while paying the bills for a home they don’t own.

If one of these 7 people asks for a key they’re accused of being a radical and threatening the social order.

In this example it's clear to see that most of humanity is deprived of personal property and liberty. And increasingly, we navigate and inhabit the tightly controlled domains of a digital multiverse in which we no longer have autonomy over any shared space at all.

It’s not just about ethics. The survival of our global household depends upon remembering the only value of wealth, which is how well we care for each other. Not what a few are able to extract.

EPILOGUE

In this context it is recommended to begin accounting for money and currency in two categories:

Real Currency (Well-Being):

This kind of currency is not ownable, it’s not held but experienced, not scaled but shared. It’s a currency whose value is our quality of life and the well-being of all human society.

Profits (progress) includes: Tangible benefits like positive shifts in culture, personal and community growth, empowerment, care and well-being. Mentorship and model shareability. Narratives that inspire human values.

Measuring Real Currency:

Quantitative Metrics: Surveys, participation rates, and engagement metrics for quantifying social impact, community development, well-being indices.

Qualitative Metrics: Assessments of cultural shifts, global understandings of social and historical narratives, and community engagement through case studies and testimonials, use-case highlights, and comparisons.

Trading Note / Token Currency (Financial Energy):

The abstracted measurement system we use to circulate real currency.

In valuing our business enterprises it’s recommended to always take a full inventory of liabilities:

Ethical and Cultural Debts: Commitment to social values, truthful narratives, sustainability, and positive social impacts.

Employee Welfare: A commitment to respect and care for all team members. Investing in people over projects.

Operational Costs: Financial, environmental, and human costs, related to value development.

Real Currency Valuation

Real Economy-based businesses must have dedicated Real Currency Valuation Managers justifying the valuation and Annual Impact Report for Real Currency balance sheets.

This role is responsible for:

Real Currency Assessment:

Quantitative Metrics: Gathering and analyzing data on participation rates, engagement metrics, and community feedback.

Measuring quantitative progress in the quality of life for those served.

Qualitative Metrics: Conducting case studies, collecting testimonials, and documenting cultural and material shifts.

Improvements in the quality of life for services provided. Measuring qualitative progress in the improvement of life for those served.

Mentorship & Shareability Assessment:

Shared knowledge being key to social development, we must track the progress and outcomes of mentorship and open-source model effectiveness.

The following qualitative models are available for reference:

Quiet’s Cultural Currency: When we care for people more than their projects our purpose is more defined. We are trading in collaboration, spirit, and cultural assets that grow through sharing. Metrics include participation in collective and shared cultural experiences, and community well-being.

Social Impact Entertainment (SIE) Impact Measurement: Learning from Skoll Center, Participant Media, SIE Society, and other case studies. Using qualitative and quantitative tools to measure changes in attitudes, behaviors, and social norms through media. Similar frameworks include media reach, content analysis, and community engagement metrics.

Social Return on Investment (SROI): Used by organizations like the New Economics Foundation, SROI measures extra-financial value such as environmental or social value, mental health improvement and community cohesion.

Gross National Happiness (GNH): Bhutan's model, based on Buddhist philosophy, evaluates the country's success through psychological well-being, community vitality, and environmental sustainability.

Human Development Index (HDI): Developed by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul-Haq, and used to measure a country's development by the United Nations Development Programme, the HDI incorporates life expectancy, education, and income to assess human development beyond economic growth.

Social Impact Bonds (SIBs): Conceived by Ronnie Horesh, a New Zealand economist in 1988. A success-based investment model where returns are based on predefined social outcomes.