Grad Students Create Morrill Money, Follow Up Needed On This One

The CDAE grad students have decided to create a currency for the CDAE grad students. The currency, Morrill Money, will be issued to those grad students who opt-in to participate in this experiment on currency and locality. For no cost each participant will be given an amount of money that they can use to purchase goods or services brought into the grad office, posted on the Morrill Money whiteboard or listed on a group email list including other Morrill Money participants.

Starting with a certain amount of money one can spend their dollars to buy items produced by the community – food, services, tutoring, etc. Once the participant has run out of money however, they have to produce something of value to sell back to the community in order to regain dollars. This insists community interaction and many tangential benefits as well.

The small size of the community is key because all consumers and producers interact on a daily basis in and around Morrill Hall. This interaction capitalizes on social behavioral norms and institutes a high level of accountability, recourse and offers a great deal of consumer information. Additionally, this currency may act as a motivator for students to produce goods and services that they otherwise would not have created. Not knowing whether reciprocity would prevail, I may not choose to bake a pie and offer it to my community of grad students – but by using Morrill Money to sell my pie I make a value on my pie, discover and affirm my pie-making ability and also interact with my community by feeding them a nice healthy pie. These secondary benefits of a very local community currency are paramount because one of the most prominent determining factors of one’s happiness (subjective well-being) is one’s interaction and presence in a local community.

Naturally this currency is most relevant if used for products that may have dubious or little value to the producer or in USD. This also means that people will only offer items or services to be sold in Morrill Money if the producer’s marginal return for the item is below the speculative return of the Morrill Money they pose to generate from the sale. This means that the value of the money will be directly correlated to the speculative value of the goods in the market. If everyone produces very good products then the value will maintain a high value. There are many reasons why this project may fail – if people begin spending too much effort calculating how much USD they spend to make the products they offer to the market and decide not to participate or if people begin attempting to deceive their consumers through false advertising, theft or offensive bargaining that deteriorates the fabric of the community.

There are many speculative theories being discussed about this currency among the CDAE grad students but one of the most important underlying factors of this experiment is that a discussion has been started about local monetary valuation, the functioning local economies and the issues involving local community development. I look forward to seeing how this project goes and hope to have many updates for readers of this blog.

-Jeff

Source: http://cdaegrad.wordpress.com/…