Sharing is Good - Beth Buczynski - Part 1

Sharing is Good - Beth Buczynski

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 125

  May 5, 2017 

Book 36 - Sharing is Good - How to Save Money, Time and Resources through Collaborative Consumption

Beth Buczynski (2013)
 Part 1 - pages vii-x; 1-20
Reading Time - 1 hour

Another book I picked up off the library shelf. This one introduces the idea of the Sharing Economy - which is a sustainable economy built around the sharing of both human and physical resources. I had come across different versions of this before. The idea of sharing the stuff that we have in our garages, rather than everyone in the neighbourhood buying a pressure washer (or whatever).

We are programmed to share, but as a society we have worked very hard to forget that. I would add, that the corporations have also worked very hard to make us forget it! We've moved from a society where trolleys were the main means of transportation (sharing) to a society in which everyone wanted their own car. Crazy, really.

We do still have some clear evidence of sharing though... libraries, laundromats, leasing an apartment or a car - all of these are shared resources. And nowadays, with technology, it is every easier to share things. Bartering is one of the earliest forms of sharing. I'll trade you a sheep for a sword. I'll trade you one baseball card for another. The problem with bartering is everyone needs to agree on a value. Is a sheep worth a sword? We also need to find someone who makes swords who needs a sheep. Or we then need to trade our sheep for a wheelbarrow of pottery which we can then trade for a sword. Sooo... that can get complicated pretty quickly. Which is where currency came into being. Everyone could agree that a sheep was worth 10 shekels and a sword was worth 10 shekels. I could "sell" my sheep to someone for 10 shekels and then turn around and use those to "buy" a sword. The thing with currency (as we learned in Ben Hewitt's book "Saved") is that it only has value because we say it does. Currency doesn't determine a thing's value... we determine the value of currency.

There have been cases around the world of using alternate currencies. For example, during the Depression for example, people bypassed the market system by issuing scrip. It had an agreed-upon value and was used so that trade could continue. Alternate currencies force money to bang around the local economy much longer than a dollar would. The central banks don't like alternate currencies however. Mostly because they can't control it...

The Sharing Economy is based on the idea that the world already has all the supplies and resources we need... most of them just sitting idle or being wasted. Think of the lawnmowers that sit idle most of the week - only being pulled out for 2 hours every 7 days. That means that they are used only... 1.2% of the time. Or 2.4% of daylight hours. If we could shift to a sharing economy, we could reduce poverty and resource consumption.

The Sharing Economy includes everything all sorts of things: traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting and swapping. When we realize that access, not ownership is essential to meeting our needs and wants... we can free ourselves up from a lot of things... debt being one of them. We don't need to "own" a lawnmower... we just need to be able to have access to one.

It would require a paradigm shift in how we produce, consume and govern... but we could turn out consumption-obsessed society into an economic democracy.