delicious

In contrast, an OPEN transport network would allow transactions to be made in ANY currency. The rules of the currency would be SEPARATE from the ability to transact. I would be free to stop participating in a given currency if a new and better currency appeared on the transport network (or choose to participate in both). I would no longer be COERCED into adhering to a particular set of rules by virtue of needing a way to transact. I would be free to choose the rules that made sense to me, since access to the transport network is not in question.

Achieving “sustainability” — not just paying for children’s immunizations, for example, but increasing immunization rates over time without continued donor support — is an important goal for many philanthropists, Holden Karnofsky writes on the GiveWell blog. Yet GiveWell, a group that evaluates charities, doesn’t currently list “sustainability” as one of its key criteria. Why not?

If we want to keep our local economies and communities functioning, we need to activate latent forms of capital to support local business. We can’t wait for the government to bail us out. You will be facing unprecedented financial challenges this year. New problems require new solutions. This summit convenes problem-solvers with innovative plans, programs and ideas for managing sweat equity, accessing short-term loans, accelerating payment of receivables, introducing affordable health benefits, engaging greater community support, exchanging offerings with other local businesses, and more. Implementing one of these could make the difference in paying employees, managing a shortfall and keeping your business afloat.

Currencies need to be able to evolve in the same way: not controlled from a central committee, but emerging from the creativity of the users. Open source software allows programmers to "fork" a piece of software if they want to change something. If the changes are liked by the community of users, they are adopted. Open Rules in a currency allow users to "fork" a currency in the same way. If I don't like the rules of a given currency

Americans agree about government arts funding in the way the women in the old joke agree about the food at the wedding: it's terrible--and such small portions! Americans typically either want to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts, or they believe that public arts funding should be dramatically increased because the arts cannot survive in the free market. It would take a lover of the arts who is also a libertarian economist to bridge such a gap. Enter Tyler Cowen. In this book he argues why the U.S. way of funding the arts, while largely indirect, results not in the terrible and the small but in Good and Plenty--and how it could result in even more and better.

In this far-ranging and innovative study Christopher Berry explores the meanings and ramifications of the idea of luxury. Insights from political theory, philosophy and intellectual history are utilised in a sophisticated conceptual analysis that is complemented by a series of specific historical investigations. Dr Berry suggests that the value attached to luxury is a crucial component in any society's self-understanding, and shows how luxury has changed from being essentially a negative term, threatening social virtue, to a guileless ploy supporting consumption. His analytic focus upon the interplay between the notions of need and desire suggests that luxuries fall into four categories - sustenance, shelter, clothing and leisure - and these are exemplified in sources as diverse as classical philosophy and contemporary advertising.

Online, you can literally create your own economy. By that, I mean you can build an ordered set of opportunities for prosperity and pleasure, analogous to a traditional economy but held in your head. There is no obvious monetary transaction, but you're using your limited resources to get a better deal -- the very essence of economics.

Despairing at the stimulus package, some voices on the right have launched a first principles attack on the borrowing it entails. In the Wall Street Journal, Judy Shelton says “let’s go back to the gold standard,” claiming that “Fiat money — i.e., currency with no intrinsic worth that government has decreed legal tender — loses its value when government creates more than can be absorbed by the productive real economy.” Thomas E. Woods at the contrarian The American Conservative notes the intellectual roots of today’s gold bugs: