Why this series?
For more than two centuries, monetary debates have pitted schools of thought against each other over the same questions: should money be public or private? A central bank or competing currencies? Debt-money or debt-free money? Inflation or deflation? The gold standard, Bitcoin, free currencies, local currencies, helicopter money, Modern Monetary Theory…
Yet these debates often share a common assumption: they discuss the mechanics of money before asking what it is for. But money is not merely a technical tool. It is an institution that organizes exchange, shapes the allocation of resources, and determines the economic trajectories a society can take.
The 21st century confronts us with an unprecedented situation. Humanity is no longer facing only financial or monetary crises; it is facing the physical limits of the planet. In this context, one question becomes unavoidable:
What should money serve in the 21st century?
This question will be the thread running through this series.
The aim is not to declare winners or losers, nor to caricature the various monetary schools. To avoid comparing monetary systems against different criteria, each architecture will be assessed against the same reference framework: the Cadre d'Évaluation des Architectures Monétaires (CEAM) — the Monetary Architecture Assessment Framework.
The CEAM is an analytical framework designed to compare monetary architectures of very different kinds using a shared set of economic, institutional and ecological criteria — rather than the conventional criteria of inflation, growth or financial stability alone. It rests on six questions:
- What historical problem does it try to solve?
- What conception of society and freedom does it carry?
- What does it make solvent?
- What does it structurally leave insolvent?
- Is it compatible with planetary boundaries?
- What problems does it leave unresolved?
This approach therefore does not consist of comparing ideological preferences, but of evaluating monetary architectures against an unprecedented challenge: making the economy compatible with the biophysical conditions that allow civilization to endure.
The following episodes will examine, in turn, monetary architectures of very different natures. Among the systems already identified at this stage:
- Bitcoin and decentralized protocols (Ethereum, DeFi)
- Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and Voluntary Money
- the Ğ1 free currency and the Relative Theory of Money
- historical demurrage currencies (Gesell, Wörgl) and mutual-credit networks (WIR Bank, LETS)
- the gold standard and central bank digital currencies (CBDC)
- other regenerative architectures such as VECTOR or UBiC
This list is neither final nor fixed: it will grow as new proposals worth examining through this same lens are identified.
Articles will be published progressively. Each can be read on its own, but together they will form a coherent inquiry in which every episode adds a piece to the understanding of contemporary monetary architectures.
Money is arguably one of the most consequential institutions any society has. Before debating which money is best, we first need to know what we expect from it. That is the question this series is devoted to.
Jean-Christophe Duval