GivingMarket/BigChange

Over time, /SmallChange could add up to /BigChange. The developments imagined below would almost certainly require some sort of central processing of Giving transactions, some facility for matching personal gifts with monies held in trust accounts, and the assumption that giving is more about transaction than about relationship. More than likely, there can be no central processor big enough, no matching system trusted enough, and no transaction at all without relationship. Seems the best way to be sure that your fortune keeps on giving in perpetuity is to teach your kids the value of giving and then leave them all your money when you die! The following evolutionary developments may well happen -- but almost certainly in an unrecognizably distributed form that would be difficult to observe and document directly.

Program Giving

What happens when giving is automated with algorithms, hooked up to payroll deductions, searches for fitting targets, and invited as so many tiny, nearly costless transactions? We get an explosion in individual giving and action that might parallel the explosion in individual investing when stock trading commissions were deregulated, discount brokerage and computerized trading became feasible, and payroll deductions for mutual fund investing emerged. In the last week of June, more than 70% of trading on the NYSE was generated by computers, a record, up from the previous week's record of 55% -- not because program trading spiked, but because retail volume all but dried up. In 2001-03, consumer spending is credited with keeping the economy going and growing even as business investing collapsed. Could individual giving and action keep community moving even as corporate and community institutions fail?

Community Endowment

What happens when program giving allows for perpetual giving based on pre-determined wishes? Then any individual could put even a small amount into a perpetual giving estate account. These accounts could match giving by the living participants in the GivingMarket, could be automatically managed to give in perpetuity, and could ultimately be rolled into a central matching fund as giving rules became obsolete over time. Ultimately a massive endowment fund would be created, totally outside the control of any board or trustee, managed directly, electronically, and nearly costlessly by the giving decisions of all the living participants in the GivingMarket. What's more, as individuals are more and more looking for personal and community assets that could be pledged as initial investments in projects, in order to attract giving in the market, then all of those assets become more value-able in this market and even the poorest people come to discover what it is that they have to offer that might be valuable to some others. The example that comes to mind is the Australian Aboriginal fishermen who sing to the fish and literally call schools of fish to where they can be caught. Certainly there are folks who'd like to see or learn about this, and good things that could happen as a result in their village, but their offering is not yet listed on any market or exchange. Bringing these skills and offerings to the fore creates a whole other kind of community endowment.

Foreign Exchange

What happens when anyone with some real passion and a credible story can scribble it on a small piece of computer screen, minting little pixelated stories about how they would like to make the world a better place and then can exchange those little minted stories for any world currency or other resources they need, at a price determined in the GivingMarket by givers' demand for that sort of project and organizers' ability to assure givers' about the strength of their projects? You get a sort of foreign exchange market, wherein any individual project initiator functions as sovereign state, producing what they can (online and on the ground) in order to get the reserves they need (in any currency that has strong value in their world) to accomplish the improvements they have projected. Even if the US economy were to fail, organizers here could appeal to wealthy and compassionate patrons holding rupees, yuan, euros or any other world currency for assistance. The social safety net becomes bigger than an one of the world's central banks, including the Fed.

Money Supply

What happens when these programs, endowment funds and foreign exchange processes create a money supply for small changes in the direction of better world and better life for all? We end up with a new money supply that is inherently bounded by the necessarily finite ability of individuals to fund and organize projects for the common good AND that is inherently responsive and inflatable in moments of real crisis when individuals rally to give more than they otherwise might or could. This new money supply gives us the grounded stability of the gold-backed currency we had until 1933 -- AND -- the critical responsiveness and inflatability that a fiat-based currency, backed by the "full faith and credit of the United States government and managed by the Federal Reserve, has given us in so many financial crises since then. This new sort of money supply makes every individual giver and project organizer part of the central banking (money expansion, crisis response) process and makes them the new gold that ultimately bounds (grounds and stabilizes) our ability to finance commerce and consumption. It's not that this process expands the Money Supply, as only the Fed and banking system can do, but it does expand Liquidity in the system. In times of great need, a call for giving would invite people to shift money from M3 (low liquidity) to M1 (highly liquid cash and checking deposits), to move money into circulation. This is exactly the dynamic at work when people were urged to keep shopping after 9/11, but how much more effective it would have been if people had been urged to go to the GivingMarket instead the Shopping Mall? We could have literally responded to the "bad guys" with a nationwide wave of "doing good."

Life on Earth

What could a new money supply, one that perfectly matches and includes both the limits and resiliency of human existence, do in the next many decades? As the last 70 years in which our ability to finance things became totally disconnected from gold, earth and human limits, it is not unreasonable to wonder if regrounding the money supply in the new gold of individuals who give and work for a better, healthier, more sustainable and humane world isn't the ultimate and only thing that could heal the damage already done.

As noted above, these changes may well happen -- but be almost impossible to distinguish and measure. It just won't be as simple as centralization.