image by Derek Farr ( DetroitDerek )

Today is Labor Day in the United States, a day of celebration and rest for the workers on whom our economy depends. Some of us labor for love, but most of us work for a paycheck, so we thought it a fitting day to start our inquiry into money and how it both enables and inhibits our lives.

When I think back to the economics classes I took in high school and college, all I can hear is the droning wah-wah of Charlie Brown’s teacher. Supply and demand, macro and micro, interest and capitalization: words like this cure insomnia for me and I’m sure for many others. And this is part of the problem—the rules that form our economic system are inscrutable to most of us, and so we tune them out in favor of sound-bites and code-words.

Rest assured that our economic discussion will not put you to sleep. Our goal is to bring the topic of money alive, analyzing it and drawing distinctions it in ways that are personal and relevant to us as individuals and as members of a global community that is suffering.

We will be looking deeply into the idea of money, what it represents, how it’s evolved, and why it runs so much of our lives on the individual and collective levels. We’ll also look at how money can be transformed to serve humanity instead of itself.

Money is so fundamental to everything we do that it’s almost impossible to see it clearly. My friend, the great self-taught economic thinker Richard Kotlarz, likens our relationship to money to fishes’ relationship to the water that they swim in, unaware that it both keeps them alive and limits their movements.

We are just beginning to wake up to the reality of what money is and the limitations it imposes on us in its current form. Recognizing these limits is the first step to transcending them.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s piece on real value, economic value, and why the two so often have very little to do with each other.