image by greefus groinks

Several weeks ago on Worldchanging I read about a project called Hero Reports, which captures data about people performing acts of heroism—whether it’s an everyday favor like giving a subway seat to an elderly woman, or something more dramatic like helping someone in medical trouble. Captured stories are plotted on neighborhood maps with the help of Google.

I had the pleasure of meeting the creator of Hero Reports, Alyssa Wright, not too long after reading about her project, and we hit it off immediately. In our conversation she told me about the goals of her project: to counterbalance the culture of fear we live in, to foster a sense of neighborliness, and even to possibly create economic value for acts of kindness.

For instance, someone looking to move into a new home might check her new address on Hero Reports and see that several heroic acts have been reported nearby, thereby increasing her desire to live there. This makes great sense to me: if high crime rates can decrease property values, shouldn’t a strong sense of community fellowship increase them?

Economic value vs. real value

I love Alyssa’s idea of creating economic value for heroic acts, which already have real value.

On the flip side, I’ve often wondered why so many awful things that humans do to each other actually contribute to the Gross National Product. If a company pollutes a river, and a child gets sick from playing in it, many different parties profit: hospitals, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, plastics manufacturers, and, of course, the company that dumped the toxins in the first place.

This is just one example; we could come up with thousands of others—from cigarette companies to weapons dealers, there’s apparently a lot of money to be made from misery. But this begs the question—why do we allow an economic system that allows monetary value to be extracted from a situation that has no *intrinsic* value? Why did we set things up so that suffering can create profit?

The placeholder is running the place

In school we all learned that economies started with bartering—I’ll trade you my red stones for your black ones. But past a certain level of complexity, simple trading didn’t work well enough. So we invented placeholders—money—to make it a little easier to get what we needed.

We created money to serve our needs, but as our civilizations got bigger, so did the economic system, to the point where many of us now spend our lives serving economic needs rather than human ones. We work and buy stuff we don’t need rather than spend time with our loved ones. Instead of serving each other, we service our many debts. The placeholder is now running the place, and has become more important to us—as individuals, families, communities, and organizations—than anything else.

Let me be clear—I am not saying that money is evil. Nor do I advocate a return to swapping red rocks for black ones. What I am saying is that, at this point, money has taken on a life of its own, playing by arbitrary rules that have nothing to do with the laws of nature. We must rethink and retool these rules in order to create the kind of future we want.

Externalized costs

An example: Gas is $4.00 a gallon (give or take). But what if you factored in all the hidden costs? The polluted air, the asthmatic children, the military presence required to protect our supplies, the services no longer provided by landscapes devastated in the search for oil—factor all these in and suddenly $4.00 a gallon is looking like a real bargain.

Another example: Plastic bags are typically free with any purchase. But what if you factored in all the wildlife lost to plastic bags, and the Texas-sized island of plastic garbage in the North Pacific, and all of the costs of the petroleum used to make the bags listed above? It becomes clear that in real, tangible terms—not economic terms, but in the stark, coldly rational terms of nature—plastic is anything but free.

Again, I could go on listing examples of externalized costs all day. In every case, the true cost of a product is hidden behind its economic cost. If an item’s price tag says $1 or $1,000 or $1,000,000, then we think we know something about how much it is worth. But really all we know is what value has been assigned to it by our arbitrary and arcane economic rules. And the externalized gap between the economic value and the real value of anything is always absorbed by the commonwealth we share—air, water, land, our bodies, the biosphere, and even the future itself.

Refactoring the system

As any good programmer knows, every system has to be analyzed and rethought after it’s been in use for a while. Things change, and changed circumstances must be accounted for. In programming, this is called refactoring, and it’s vital to the long-term success of any system.

At this point in history, we desperately need to refactor our economic system to get with the times. In the past maybe we didn’t see how this system rewards waste and pollution and corruption, but we can see it now. So it’s time to question how it all works, and how we can improve it to encourage folks to engage in valuable activities rather than merely expedient ones.

What has real value? What has negative value? Perhaps participating in democracy should earn you a few bucks, while being a jerk in traffic should cost you. Perhaps neighborhoods where folks actively look out for each other should see their property values appreciate faster than those where people drive straight into their garages without interacting.

Perhaps the company that pollutes the river that sickens the child should pay dearly for having caused misery. And by the same token, if that same company builds a plant that sends water out cleaner than it was when it came in, it should be monetarily rewarded.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post on ideas for tying economic value to real value and thereby transforming our economic system into an engine that creates health and happiness…