Making a gift. Gifts of money are often overlooked in economic discourse. We give money to our kids by paying for their education, or to a charity. We do not expect a monetary return, but the gift enables others to actualize their potential. Gift money plays an important regenerative role in an economic system that is still not well understood
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A gift enables the recipient to invest in the future without being limited by short-term profitability, the greatest degree of freedom. Contrary to conventional wisdom, gift money often generates the highest productivity over the long term because it allows recipients to radically sense and actualize the emerging future, rather than satisfying the expectations of funders or other stakeholders who tend to driven by viewpoints and indicators of the past.
The deeper structural problem of our financial crisis today falls into two categories. One, there is too much activity on level 1 money: the speculative sphere of fictitious value creation. And, two, there is too little activity on level 4 money: in the gift economy that could enable a new breed of entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs to regenerate an economy with a social mission that works for all. In short: We need to move money from level 1 (the ego-sphere of speculation) to level 4 (the eco-sphere of societal renewal).
Economic theory rightly emphasizes the importance of investments and the structural importance of loans for innovation and entrepreneurship. But what is less well understood by economists today is the even higher productivity of the gift economy, as well as the toxic impact of an oversized casino economy that is driven by speculation instead of serving the development of the real economy.
This is what we call the co-creative eco-system economy; it includes continuous reinvestment of money from the financial sector into nonfinancial forms of capital formation, that is, natural, human, social, and cultural-creative capital. A better balance among these spheres of monetary activity lies at the heart of the 4.0 financial system.
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a healthier balance among the four spheres of money-related actions, achieved by eliminating level 1 (the casino economy) and strengthening level 4 (the gift economy) in order to allow more people to tap and realize their full entrepreneurial potential.
~~ Otto Scharmer & Katrin Kaufer, "Leading from the Emerging Future"
