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Understanding Money as Debt

Friday Dec 11 2009

There are innumerable expert opinions available these days about solutions to our current economic crisis. But are those solutions just band-aid solutions? How did we get here? What is money at its root? What are the problems with interest? Money As Debt offers a different perspective on

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Written by eldering at Personal Empowerment

Tagged with: economic_crisis money

Give or Take a Trillion

Tuesday Jul 28 2009

By Jim Selman | Bio

I confess to be among those who have some difficulty getting my head around how much a trillion dollars is. I can remember a book I read to my daughter called How Much is a Billion that was filled with mind-boggling examples, including things like the number of seconds that have passed since Jesus was born. The Huffington Post has a fun video clip showing the same kinds of illuminating examples, such as a trillion dollars is enough to buy a Starbucks Latte every day for the next 900 million years. The only problem with these kinds of illustrations is that I can’t get my head around 900 million years either, let alone roughly 3 billion lattes.[Read More]

Written by eldering at The Great Turning

Tagged with: bailout bankruptcy keynesian_philosophy money trillion values

Bag Lady

Wednesday Jan 14 2009

By Jim Selman | Bio

I was recording a podcast recently in response to the question of how ‘elders’ should be dealing with money these days given the current and projected economic mess. The woman I was speaking to was clearly ‘worried’ about her financial future. I started my response by sharing that over many years of coaching I sometimes chuckle when speaking with women because they all seem to have a generic fear of becoming a ‘bag lady’. There was an interesting article in the Toronto Globe and Mail in December titled, “Why women look in the mirror and a bag lady looks back”. It seems this archetype pervades a lot of women’s deepest fears of failure and becoming destitute.[Read More]

Written by eldering at Fearless Aging
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Tagged with: acceptance bag_lady choice elder fear money resistance sufficiency

Mirrors

Wednesday Jan 16 2008

I was having a conversation today with the Board of a not-for-profit organization and one of the participants noted that they “needed to have more younger people” on the Board. I asked “Why?” Her response was that she was at an age (which I judged to be around 60) when she had a lot of commitments, she needed to keep earning money and just didn’t have as much time and energy to give. She went on to say that younger people had more time, less need for money, and lots more energy for the kinds of projects that needed doing. Now I don’t know who she was thinking about but almost all of the younger people I know are very busy, don’t have enough time and money and little extra energy for other projects.[Read More]

Written by eldering at Wisdom in Action
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Tagged with: age commitment energy money time

Philanthropy Day

Friday Nov 16 2007

Yesterday was Philanthropy Day. I went to a luncheon for 1,300 people in San Francisco hosted by one of my favorite ‘causes’, the Pachamama Alliance. The organization was founded 12 years ago by Bill and Lynne Twist as a partnership between the indigenous peoples of the Rainforest and the modern world. They prefer to say the Alliance found them. The purpose of the Alliance is to create a world that is “environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling and socially just”. It would seem to be a bit too grandiose an undertaking but for the fact that a large and growing number of extraordinary people are very committed to it. After all, as Margaret Meade said, “Never doubt the power of an individual or small group of people to change the world—that is the way it always happens”.[Read More]

Written by eldering at Wisdom in Action
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Tagged with: alliance elder money pachamama partnership philanthropy