In our present times a lot of people all over the world, and in every aspect of life is suffering from our failed economic model. As many might know this is mainly due to its rather biased mechanics. Plenty of sources out there to relate the nature of modern economics and its history. I will jump straight to the topic of the title, and assume the reader is an informed reader.

To create a novel model of economy it has to be a model that solves basic problems. To avoid the pitfalls of overproduction and availability of the monetary units, they have to be backed by something “tangible”. OFC this is to avoid the pitfall of fiat currency. Going back to a gold or silver backed model, would in my opinion not change that much, since positioning in this and access and control of this will be “too biased” towards existing power distributions and manipulation schemes. So what is the alternative?

What I suggest is creating a new monetary credit that is global and based on a resource conversion index. The exact composition and balance of this unit would be governed by a yearly meeting of international leaders in political and economical fields. The composition of the currency would be easy to explain to the population and reasoning for changes would be based on global political and economic needs. This part of the currency is important to note early, since it will be at the core of reasoning for the elements of the composite.

The composition:

To make this currency lastable and sustainable it has to be a balance of the resources of the planet. At the core nothing in human economy can exist outside this tetrahedral composite.

Manhours:

First composite is human labour and global man hour index. Currrently a lot of this is seen in current models as the underlying values of GDP per capita. Renormalize for global wealth distribution and calculate an average. Thus on the monetary unit the value of man hours would become the same globally.

Power:

The second component should be based on direct energy units. This part is important because even more then manhours this can be directly impacted by new effeciencies globally, and technological advances.

Water:

The water cycle is among the most important aspects of the planet when it comes to biological systems. Having the expenditure of water in processes and an indicator of the value of this on our common currency is vital in the most litteral sense. If we disregard the importance and value of water we will not change our destructive pattern of consumption.

Commodities:

This is a bit more complex. This has to be a calculation of all the scarce resources available for production or consumption. Among these the most important ones being gold, silver, aluminium etc. Do note that energy creating resources are not in this index, since they are indirectly calculated in the power aspect.

The result of a composite currency using the above components is that every time one aspect is going up another would essentially go down. Lowering population would reduce the value of other three. Improving efficiency in any aspect would improve the efficiency of all. Since this would also be the day to day buying unit then saving money would save resources, and saving resources would again save money for everyone.

In practical terms it would be a sort of carbon credit trading from a personal level. The credits would be distributed evenly and the impact of populations would be directly noticeable and beneficial.