Under communism, it’s just the opposite. The immeasurable was excluded from science — “consign it to the flames,” Hume said — and from economics as well. Worse, these ostensible rewards have been a delusion: money, its purchases, and its accumulation substituting for connection, love, beauty, play, meaning, and purpose. Ratings and points don’t meet our deep need for the personal ties, gratitude, and multidimensional stories that circulate in gift culture. Posts about sacred geometry written by mcmarciemar. But even with a degrowth currency, the deeper problem remains that money by nature can operate only in the realm of the quantifiable. Both of these views come from the paradigm of separation that holds that “more for you is less for me.” More for the group is less for the individual. Such innovations are the wave of the future. –John Kenneth Galbraith. “You need a potato masher? But rather than obviating the need for money, they are recreating it, albeit as something much closer to its original essence as a token of gratitude. Just as they will eliminate the profiting from passive ownership of money, land, and the commons generally, so will they discourage profiting from passive ownership in corporations, which today are a vehicle of the control of said assets. When the qualitative is matched with the quantitative, the infinite to the finite, then the former is debased. Not only can users rate and review products, they can also rate each others’ ratings, creating a self-policing system. Newer systems such as Giftflow, Neighborgoods, Shareable, GIFTegrity, and many others recognize and remedy this flaw. In the capitalist world in which individual accumulation has been permitted, we have experienced not the exuberant expression of our gifts, but their suppression, their enslavement, and their perversion toward the purpose of taking and controlling, for these activities are what the present money system compels and rewards. These are a kind of substructure for a circles-of-circles gift economy of the future. Nonetheless, they still assume that we can and should quantify the good, and that in order to do so, we must convert everything into a standard unit of measure. Help is always a phone call away. “I’ve given you twenty years of loyal service; how can you let me go?” As one insurance executive explained to an employee, “If you want loyalty, get a dog.” Of course, most employers aren’t so hard-hearted, but market discipline hardens a soft heart. The ratings in GIFTegrity and similar systems are money. Employees commonly receive rewards for their success in office politics rather than authentic contributions, while recognizing “team spirit” as the internal PR that it often is. Without personal familiarity with what is being given and received, some means of standardization becomes necessary. Money was inhabited, as it were, by two spirits from the very beginning. On a small scale, though, merely witnessing the flow of gifts, whether directly or via the medium of stories, suffices. Money substitutes for this awareness: in theory, at least, it confers the benefits of social recognition onto the people who contribute. The noncapitalist world fared us no better. Doubtless many new forms of collaboration will arise as we digest the lessons of past and current attempts. I am not calling for such a shift though — I am observing it, bearing witness to it, and, I like to think, contributing to it. We face the question of how to facilitate the flow of the nonquantifiable across the vast social distances of mass society. Ownership therefore accords to those who contribute and gradually fades away when one stops contributing. Whether or not money is involved, the fundamental issues of economy — what people make and do for each other-are these: (1) how to connect the provider of a gift with the person who needs that gift; (2) how to acknowledge and honor those who give generously of their gifts; and (3) how to coordinate the gifts of many people across space and time in order to create things transcending the needs or gifts of any individual.