Dear Dr. Martin Hebert,

I encountered a very interesting and innovative monetary system on a Allan Kardeck (scientist from Lyon - France) about the so-called "HOUR-BONUS".

Have you heard about it?

In a few lines, it´s a system of precification of an economy based on hours of labor. So, for instance, a house with 100 meters costs HB$30,000. and every citizen can by this house, since it works 30,000 hours, no matter if cleaning bathrooms, garbage collecting, lawyer or engeneering.

The system is very interesting.

Have you heard about it?

If you have any interest, let me know.

Best regards.

Prof. Aurelio Hess

I would look at the world of tabletop games, which are effectively fictional. Master of Economy and Container are immediate examples that spring to mind. Auction games such as Modern Art could be interesting also. These are not "alternate" economic system type of games, but they provide idealizations such that each game is an experiment with these idealizations, and thus could shed light on "non-fictional" economic systems.

These are great suggestions. Games would be indeed a good media to look at. As for Aurelio’s suggestion, it does remind me of hour barter systems in various contriescountries. The difference is that I know only of service exchange systems that work on this principle, not of systems that allow to buy goods. However, I seem to remember something similar in Robert Owen’s utopian writings, which would certainly make the connection with fictional experiments and simulations.

There are some interesting thoughts on this topic in Samuel Butler's utopian novel Erewhon (1872). There are, for example, the "musical banks," a special religious currency that every pays but seems to hold no real value. The most amusing and interesting is the system for penalizing children, who are fined for inconveniencing the parents by imposing on them simply for being born.

The movie In Time (2011) equates monetary value with life span. At the age of 25, everyone gets one more year of life. When they work, they get more life, and buying a cup of coffee, or anything else, costs you time on your own personal life clock: which ticks down on a display on your arm. The “wealthy” live forever, and when the poor run out of money/time, they drop dead on the spot.

Martin, I tend to look at the classic, and in the context of pre-revolution in Russia, I find an interesting character in Anna Karenina. Levin represents Tolstoy values and ideas. He is looking for a model that will take the peasants out of poverty. The were the only class that genuinely worked. Levin, was thinking of a model and writing a treaty that will made Russia a significant exporter of agricultural products.

He is an idealist that dreams of a non-violent revolution among the following lines. “This is not a matter of myself individually; the question of the public welfare comes into it. The whole system of culture, the chief element in the condition of the people, must be completely transformed. Instead of poverty, general prosperity, and content; instead of hostility, harmony and unity of interests. In short, a bloodless revolution, but a revolution of the greatest magnitude, beginning in the little circle of our district, then the province, then Russia, the whole world.”

Hope it helps.

Martin,

I tend to look at history and the lives of the trend setters. And rightfully they have an iconic effect on all of us. Take for example, the life of Siddhartha has many stories to tell us. Though many do not subscribe to the theory that Siddhartha abdicated his royal title after seeing the dead,sick and the poor, there is a hidden lesson in the story/ theory. Once you see those kind of people and incidents, the happiness or enjoyment vanishes quickly and even if it reappears,one can feel the long lasting impact. If an economy could be designed to give maximum happiness to all, needless to say what should be our priorities. Stimulating our sensitivities like Buddha's towards our economy may be an imaginative and inexpensive option.What if we could scientifically measure the bad impact of our current economy on our emotions and life span similar to the film In Time.

Gandhi teaches that it is not possible to embrace capitalism and become immune to its poisons, greed, corruption and deceit. The Venus Project in principle should be assessed as many as possible so that we may avoid the acquisitiveness that is the core of the economic system. Hess's Siddhartha, Thomas More's Utopia, Butler's Erewhon and almost every fictive text rates wealth with success and those that do not subscribe to communal cohabitation with varying degrees of success like the Shashamane community in Ethiopia or the dystopia of Orwell's 1984. Many of us publicly reject greed but privately support it and many others have died or are still paying dearly for seeking a semblance of egalitarianism. Henry George's Poverty and Progress (1879) goes to great lengths to show that labour ALONE creates wealth, yet we universalise capital and the violent manipulation of physical and human resources for the benefit of a few as carrots for the many to blindly trample on one another with still diminishing success.

Until truth, honesty and goodwill become operational, political objectives no system will work. Thirty pieces of silver has ruined many nations.

Orwell's book Animal Farm is a case in point here as far as the representation of monetary/economic systems in fictional space is concerned. In fact, in the text, the farm animals take over the farm in a typical 'Thesis vs Antithesis' struggle but the new system which is created, degenerates into a dictatorial system which is Stalinist in nature. When opinions, suggestions or objections are raised by some of the freedom-loving animals, the questioners are silenced ruthlessly by execution.

This is reminiscent of the the Stalinist era in the Soviet Union.

Probably the synthesis of capitalism and communism in Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. It comes close to what we see today in Russia and China.

There are several passages dealing with monetary system in Gulliver's Travel.

Brave New WORLD by Aldous Huxley and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand come to mind. Their views do not necessarily represent those of this writer. :)

I would like to comment on the suggestions made here and offer some of my own.

Samuel Butler's "Erewhon" is very clever and like the title - "nowhere," sort of backwards, everything is reversed - crime becomes disease and disease becomes crime. It's a satire, not a proposal for an alternative society. Important nuance there.

As for Eric Blair, known as George Orwell, "Animal Farm," which he cribbed from a story read on the BBC by Ignazio Silone (pen name of Secondino Tranquilli from my Abruzzo) is totally a satire of the Soviet system and in no way a serious proposal for an alternative society, much less an economic system. How about reading the question instead of just spouting off? The same goes for most of the answers here. Gandhi did do some serious thinking about capitalism and his "homespun" movement undermined Britain's wool industry, but again that is not what the question is about; neither Thomas More's "Utopia," another satire of his times and not a proposal for an alternative society. Someone mentioned Orwell's "1984" and "Brave New World," both cheerfully ripped off of Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We," by far the most original and disturbing of totalitarian dystopias, reflecting his disgruntlement with the Soviet Union. Again, not a proposal, but a biting satire.

While most utopias and dystopias are critiques of the authors' contemporaneous worlds or their presumed extensions, some of these utopias do propose another world, including an economic system. Tommaso Camponella's "The City of the Sun" is one such society and economic system. It reflects one of the oldest outlines for a different or better society, Plato's "Republic." Do these count as serious proposals for an economic alternative? Tough judgment - there are not enough details to really decide, I believe, in spite of some general parameters.

Most of the time, all authors are reacting to their times, whether satirically or constructively. Although I think Ayn Rand was a poor and tiresome writer, again reacting against the Soviet Union and its Communist philosophy with her political pulp fiction in "Anthem," "Atlas Shrugged," and "The Fountainhead," she inspired with her salon in California people like Alan Greenspan who become Chairman of the US Federal Reserve and in this sense, she strongly influenced the direction of US and world capitalism.

Vincenzo Di Nicola

University of Montreal &

The George Washington University

The question reads "innovative," which can apply to both utopias and dystopias.

Roser's comment raises an interesting question about dystopias: some are indeed deliberately planned systems, based on principles that the reader condemns. For example, Metropolis and its rigid and purpusefully exploitative class society. Other dystopias are rather the unintended consequence of well-meaning social experiments. I agree that the first are innovations (albeit ones we dislike), and I believe that some authors have taken to calling them "anti-utopias". They use the term to distinguish them from the second, unintentional, kind of dystopias, which seem more like innovation gone wrong. In these, the only "winners" would be the opportunists who can take advantage of a social catastrophe. Here, the innovation is more about scheming and hustling within the chaos of dystopia, as perhaps one can find in William Gibson's Bigend trilogy.

Indeed, Martin. To your second category belong such classics as Plato's Republic and Moore's Utopia, at least in some respects. One could argue that, in fact, we only have dystopias.

I would suggest : Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse.

As I said above about both utopias and dystopias (call them anti-utopias), the economic systems they describe are incidental aspects of their critique or satire of the author's society, not planned economic systems and philosophies which is genuinely rare. Plato's "Republic" could implicitly describe such a system based on a class system that included slaves. Tommaso Campanella consciously imagined a different society much like Plato and the economics of "The City of the Sun" were rudimentary, just sketched out.

Vincenzo DI Nicola

University of Montreal &

The George Washington University