New currency?

[hanelyp]

Found some data relevant to alternate currency bases, inflation adjusted prices of some commodities.

Electricity is looking fairly good over the period graphed, with gentle price adjustments and not much overall trend, http://inflationdata.com/articles/infla ... tion-rate/

Oil, gasoline, and gold, on the other hand, have spiky price histories:
http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Infl ... lation.asp
http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Infl ... _Chart.asp
http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Infl ... lation.asp

[djolds1]

The idea that money IS energy is old -- dating back at least to the Technocrats of the 1930s.

Beat me to it.

In effect, a nation's wealth can be measured in terms of energy per capita. This reflects in a very literal sense the more a person purchases (whether food or automobiles) the more energy it took. Food calories have a precise equivalent in fossil fuel calories (including natural gas and petroleum as feedstocks to make fertilizer and insecticide, and all the costs of transport and refrigeration and food processing) but so does everything else. Taking metals out of the ground and turning them into ipods (or into anything) has a direct equivalent in energy.

In a sense, the current banking crisis reflects the short-fall in energy per capita. Banks loan out the same dollar many times -- which would be a fraud unless when the loan is due the country's wealth has expanded to match.

Our current monetary system is premised on perpetual expansion -- which unforunately the earth cannot sustain (as Professor emeritus Albert A. Bartlett has been explaining for decades). Impliciity a steady-state economy (one not premised on perpetual growth) would require a different monetary system.

The technocrats wanted to make that equivalency -- between $1 and the energy it represents -- to be made explicit. Among other things it would theoretically encourage energy conservation.

For more information -- see below or Google

Technocracy "energy unit" monetary

- Charles

==========================
http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/ ... 057784.pdf.

Resource not found.

"Since energy is the one commodity present in all processes and since there is no substitute for it, using energy as the physical measure of environmental and social impacts, of material, capital, and manpower requirements, and of reserve quantities reduces the need to compare or add 'apples and oranges. "'3

Moreover, the energy unit is potentially much more stable than the dollar, for the energy involved in work is an unambiguous and unchanging measure of what has been accomplished.

Another, more political take on the weaknesses of neo-currencies:

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspo ... -dies.html

[quixote]

Resource not found.

Take the period off the end.
http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/2023/SWP-1353-09057784.pdf

[djolds1]

Resource not found.

Take the period off the end.
http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/2023/SWP-1353-09057784.pdf

In the immortal words of Homer... "DOH!"