Simulating a Wellbeing Economy

Offers & Needs
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To introduce myself: I’m Bianca, originally from Brazil and now living in the Netherlands.

I work in finance and have experience across Brazil, India, Hungary, and the Netherlands, including roles at General Electric, Booking.com and Cargill. My background is in controllership and process design, but my deeper interest is in how economic systems can truly serve people and the planet.

Right now, I’m working on a concept for an economic system where consumption actually promotes life — not just profit.

The idea is to redesign incentives so that every transaction can boost wellbeing, regeneration, and sustainability at its core — creating development that nurtures rather than depletes.

I’m really intrigued by this conversation around simulating a wellbeing economy.

It feels urgent to find tangible ways to show people that alternative economic models are not only possible, but necessary. I’m especially curious about:

  • How simulations could integrate financial processes and metrics aligned with wellbeing
  • Ways to model “life-boosting” consumption behavior
  • How collective intelligence and participatory design can support systemic transitions

Happy to connect and contribute.

If anyone is experimenting with simulations, systems mapping, or financial flows within wellbeing frameworks, I’d love to exchange ideas — and I’m happy to share insights from my accounting/process background too.

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Hi @WeShift , that sounds fascinating - you’re definitely welcome to join us with trying to see what can be made of the ideas here. I see such alignment with what so many people are trying to express, but so often the conversation ends up being about subtle differences people give to the words being used. I’m very interested to hear you speak about this, and myself have lots of ideas that are difficult to write down!

Also, I have literally just become aware of another board game, but can’t find any way of actually getting hold of it - does anyone have any suggestions? https://weall.org/less-is-max-probably-the-best-educational-game-in-the-world-for-the-wellbeing-of-society-and-the-planet

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I’m sharing a game concept for real life. It was written with the idea that it would be fun to both create a simulation but also a protocol so that in playing the simulation, one can continue the “game” in real life. Building and educating worker bees to cooperate in a decentralized manner.

An outline is here, and if you want to know more we can discuss. The game is called - “the local loop.” It’s aim is to create a local economy and social accounting system.

Let me know if you think this is relevant to this thread.

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Wow, that’s a really detailed vision, It would be fascinating to hear you speak about it. This is the first I’ve heard about demurrage currency, I think it would be really interesting to use a game to familiarise people with the concept.

Specifically regarding the discussions here, it is absolutely of interest. I will tentatively suggest that your concept feels considerably more developed than I was planning on starting from! :slight_smile: Maybe we can all join a call for an open discussion and see where we end up?

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Are there others here in the doughnut world who would like to discuss local currencies, token economics, and gamification of the real world with a point system? This might be an interesting angle on creating a simulation. I think a simulation is another approach. Whether it is experiential or an agent-based model, I would be happy to participate. I have only just joined the WEAll community. Leanne

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A game/simulation/exploration of the various theories behind money sounds really interesting. Options for playing with interest rates, trust, wealth hoarding, consumerist tendencies of the populace, demurrage, incorporation of local currencies… I’m well outside of my area of knowledge but that makes the concept of a game in which I can start to understand them even more appealing.

Is anyone able to outline how any of these ideas could work, in a way that I can grasp! :slight_smile: What would the mechanics look like for such a game?

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I am an economist (academic), farmer. My area of research was/is in monetary theory. In other words, I have a lot of experience in this particular area. I’ve worked with 2 different platforms sarafu.network and localscale.org which introduce users to Local currencies on blockchains. The idea of a local currency for post capitalist grassroots activism is an old one, and part of the original toolkit of the transition town folk https://transitionnetwork.org/ which I imagine as a similar movement as the WEAll group. Like frequent flyer points they can be serious or non-serious. The only person I know of, who is interested in local currencies (although not necessarily games and simulations) is maybe @Michael, at least that is what Thobile Chittenden told me in my membership introduction a week or so ago. I don’t want to divert this thread towards local currencies. However I do feel that a game might be the best way to introduce them. Hence my participation in this thread. The best books on this topic is anything by Bernard Lietaer.

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This game is one of the best out there for understanding how money can be created privately. But it is still far far far away from the types of cooperative money games that one could create for a well being society. https://moneymaker.games/

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Hi Leanne. I was close to local currencies in my past professional life with the New Economics Foundation - they supported the creation of the Brixton Pound. However, these local currencies have struggled to replicate and become mainstream, despite the benefits of them. I haven’t looked deeply into why this has not happened, but I suspect the digitisation of money has meant the barriers to start up for these currencies (in digital form) are fairly hefty. Best, Michael

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I recently read this article about negative interest economies - The Negative Interest Economy: A Monetary Paradigm for a Post-Growth System | by Post Growth Institute | Post Growth Perspectives | Medium an interesting exercise. Be interested to hear your views if you have come across this in your finance academic life. Michael

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Hi @Michael, I read the article. I was quite critical of the first half. It seemed that in the beginning of the article there was a conflation between the accumulation of money vs the accumulation of capital. In the big picture I think capital accumulation and profit is the obsession within capitalism rather than money accumulation. Most capitalists keep their monetary balances relatively low. I do think the negative interest rate on monetary circulation is promising, but it won’t remove a positive interest rate on capital.

When the discussion got into the banking sector (and even prior to this on savings), I think it missed the endogeneity of money - where M1 and broader money is created by banks and shadow banks. The focus on reserves, while interesting, was a stretch - but that is not to say that I rule out that discussion as trivial - it just didn’t have enough information for me to formulate an opinion.

Overall there were a lot of ideas thrown into the mix that didn’t exactly hold together - however they might all be robustly connected in the text -“Sacred Economics”- that was presented as backing up these statements. I am not familiar with this book or the author, so I hesitate to critique these ideas further until I read that book.

My own critique (bias) of the “de-growth” movement is that it should limit itself to the de-materialization of growth and the equitable distribution of wealth, rather than growth itself. There is so much economic transition and ‘progress’ that we need across our globe, I can’t imagine how we do it without ‘growth’ (or demand) to make that happen.

The second half of the article seemed much more convincing as it moved into the realm of real application rather than theory. Indeed this is the point I want to bring to this thread: the value of creating a game or simulation to help us in our design of a “New Economy”. While the theoretical arguments are great (and lots of fun), it is hard to know what will really happen until the experiment actually happens and we witness the outcomes. How do we enter that experimental phase is a question. Implementing it on the ground is great - but you need to have a lot of passionate and trusting people willing to put their economic livelihood on the line. I’ve tried many times to do precisely this - and the beginning is usually the easiest, it’s the longevity that is often the problem, often because of poor design. We need to design or find those virtuous spirals of positive feedback, and avoid the negative spirals. If you implement a new economy into our real economy it can go bad and if designed poorly, then the loss often lands disproportionately on the very people who committed the most. An alternative is to use an experiential game. This can have low stakes for participants while still keeping some of that real world feedback.

Whatever the Ekhilur Project is doing, if it is working, then synthesizing and understanding the design features that make their economy work and putting them into a theoretical model, an artificial simulation model, an experiential game model or a real world action experiment sounds productive and allows for replication. The experiential game model is just one way to approach the design phase for a new economy.

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Hi @Michael, I’m not of the belief that their transitory nature is due to the digitisation of money. Indeed, the digitisation of money makes things so much easier to create a local currency. If you look at the proliferation of crypto and digital currencies from the left and right of the political spectrum there is a pretty healthy cambrian period happening in money over the past 10 years.

I think we often don’t see how many “local currency” or purpose specific, company specific, or economic platform specific systems there are out there. They are often so seamlessly integrated into our world view that we think they are even currencies. (Warning: my definition of a currency is any accounting device that creates a unit of account. I don’t believe that currencies must have all the “3 functions of money” to be considered money, nor do I think there are only 3 functions).

There are so many corporate currencies, or in other words loyalty programs, that it is hard to keep up with them. I’m not just talking about frequent flyer miles, but even more orthodox programs like my chase credit card which has a point system where I can spend in an online market that is separate from my chase checking account uses. Sodexo is my favorite corporate currency issuer. Also in the world’s top fifty employers. But the obvious is Amazon and its lending and financing platform. So the model of a ‘local currency’ or a loyalty program, to help consolidate market power and build resilience against external competitors is an obvious tool to manage an internal economy. It is after all why we live in a world of numerous national currencies rather than one world currency.

But your point was more about why when local currencies pop up in local communities, they don’t last, or at least they appear to struggle to last. I think first one should ask if they ever caused harm. If something new comes in, works to some extent, and then disappears, we shouldn’t just give up on it. Local currencies can be temporary, and can achieve outcomes that would have otherwise been hard to achieve. For example, they can be used to plan and organize a town festival where people want to utilize spare capacity in their town as much as possible rather than bring in resources and laborers from outside. Costs and Benefits should be assessed during the period that a currency is in operation. I don’t know enough about the Brixton Pound, but wikipedia seems to think there were some achievements. The critique would be in the costs, and who bore those costs. These is where the design of the local currency needs to forecast what to do when the currency stops. In a game however, I think it might be fun to have winners and losers just to experience how bad that can be, and to think about the design of the game to make everyone a winner even when the game comes to an end.

The transience problem is not just a problem endemic to a local currency, it is a problem with any project that is decentralized and depends on coordination. Democracy is also a big problem. Once it is instituted, i.e. there are institutions to facilitate its continuance, then we think of it as solid, but it can unravel. Plus there are so many countries in the world that are still not considered democratic. It takes time to get there. The tragedy of the commons, or the prisoner’s dilemma are similar problems. They suffer from coordination failure. The solution is often a firm or a government. Grassroots solutions are difficult, and don’t often stick.

By the looks of things, WEAll is a decentralized grassroots system. Maybe more could be achieved if it was more top down, or organized. But then again, if nature is anything to go by, the most viral and organic transitions are often those that are decentralized.

I would rather think of local currencies as a tool for decentralized coordination. Such a tool can be poorly designed, lack coherence, and not gain traction. But I also have faith (by looking at the many examples of them in history) that they can be a powerful tool for coordination. They are just one tool in our tool kit for designing our new economic order. One of many.

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There are so many things in this thread that are outside of my experience or capability to visualise. It is a familiar feeling to me to read through a well-structured explanation by someone that clearly knows what they are talking about, but I just can’t get the ideas to stick together in my head - there are too many concepts of which I am just not secure enough in my understanding.

And THAT is what I think I want the game thing to address. Give me some interactive pictures that are sufficiently engaging for me to want to play with them, and then let me learn how the various parts interact. Ideally, it would leave me with an intuitive understanding of an important concept - but even if it just left me with a familiarity of something I was not aware of before, this is a worthy outcome.

How about a series of short/fun/simple games that introduce concepts that are important to WEAll? Money, wealth inequality, capitalism, degrowth, GDP alternatives… pick a concept, decide on the basic principle we want to illustrate, generate some simple formulaic relationships of inputs and outputs, add some quirky graphics and narrative devices, host it online and raise awareness.

For example:
Concept - Capitalism
Principle - Unrestrained market forces lead to climate crisis and enormous wealth inequality
Formula - inputs are market regulation, society’s worship of money, all-pervasive advertising, environmental costs of goods not being paid by consumers… outputs are climate crisis, poverty, migration, war…

Our privilege is that we don’t have to be accurate (or even realistic) with our modelling, we’re just trying to illustrate a point in a way people will engage with.

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