 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in The Ecology of Money for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
In this Schumacher Briefing, Richard Douthwaite argues that just as different insects and animals have different effects on human society and the natural world, money has different effects according to its origins and purposes. Was it created to make profits for a commercial bank, or issued by a government as a form of taxation? Or was it created by its users themselves purely to facilitate their trade? And was it made in the place where it is used, or did local people have to provide goods and services to outsiders to get enough of it to trade among themselves? The Briefing shows that it will be impossible to build a just and sustainable world unless and until money creation is democratized.
About the Author
Richard Douthwaite studied economics at the University of Essex and the University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica. He set up and managed a boatyard in Jamaica on behalf of the island's fishing co-operatives before spending two years as Government Economist in the British colony of Montserrat. He has lived in Ireland since 1974. His book, The Growth Illusion: How Economic Growth has Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many and Endangered the Planet, was published by Green Books in 1992 and an extended and updated second edition appeared in 1999. His other major book, Short Circuit (Green Books, 1996), gives dozens of examples of currency, banking, energy and food production systems which communities can use to make themselves less dependent on an increasingly unstable world economy. In 1998-9 he was a consultant to an EU-funded project to establish experimental community currencies in Scotland, Ireland, Amsterdam and Madrid.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book is an absolute must-read. Guides the reader, in easy to understand language, through the world of money. What is money? Where does it come from? Who creates it? Who controls it? Why does it matter? - these questions and more are all answered. Just read it!
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I bought this book based on a personal recommendation.
I was hoping to find a good explanation of "money from first principals" - what exactly it is, what it has been, how it works not just as it leaves my pocket for the till of the local shop, but how it works between banks and internationally. I suppose more than anything I wanted to understand where its value lies.
This book was not quite what I expected, but it still met all my above goals. It provides a very clear review of different forms of money over the ages, what their value was based on, and the implications of their differences to their respective societies. However, the main intent of the book, I suppose, is to advance an argument for the adoption of a new form of currency (or rather a mix of several) to address contempory social and environment problems. It was written before the global economic collapse, but displays uncanny foresight regarding it, and its proposals are also very interesting as a future alternative to avoid any such further crashes.
Best of all, it is written very clearly in plain language, assumes no prior financial language, and is very short (though so dense it requires careful reading).
I was hoping to find a good explanation of "money from first principals" - what exactly it is, what it has been, how it works not just as it leaves my pocket for the till of the local shop, but how it works between banks and internationally. I suppose more than anything I wanted to understand where its value lies.
This book was not quite what I expected, but it still met all my above goals. It provides a very clear review of different forms of money over the ages, what their value was based on, and the implications of their differences to their respective societies. However, the main intent of the book, I suppose, is to advance an argument for the adoption of a new form of currency (or rather a mix of several) to address contempory social and environment problems. It was written before the global economic collapse, but displays uncanny foresight regarding it, and its proposals are also very interesting as a future alternative to avoid any such further crashes.
Best of all, it is written very clearly in plain language, assumes no prior financial language, and is very short (though so dense it requires careful reading).
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
this book certainly succeeds in the difficult task of explaining how
"local" currencies can and do work .what richard douthwaite has done in this compact and informative book is to show how "the people" can democratise money.this book could become required reading as the penny drops and we all realise we need an energy descent action plan.he has refreshing views on how economies can belong to the community,rather than vice versa .i envisage a time in the future where copies of his book ,dog-eared and well thumbed will be used as a point of reference.
"local" currencies can and do work .what richard douthwaite has done in this compact and informative book is to show how "the people" can democratise money.this book could become required reading as the penny drops and we all realise we need an energy descent action plan.he has refreshing views on how economies can belong to the community,rather than vice versa .i envisage a time in the future where copies of his book ,dog-eared and well thumbed will be used as a point of reference.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
