Why Throwing Money at Problems Won't Always Solve Them

In the Food Security Summit of the Asian Development Bank, the minister of Palau bashed the financial community for having a mentality to simply throw money at problems and expecting them to be solved.

We agree with this perspective and will explain why.

Money merely represents the command of the work of other people. If you want the baker to bake you bread, you give him money.

But that money is to pay for the baking labor that already exists. If you give him money to bake bread that is made from rice flour and expect it to be as delicious as traditional bread, then you will probably be disappointed.

This is because such a delicious rice bread does not exist yet. It would need the labour for research and development.

This research labor is best done by people who are interested in rice bread.

The problem is the baker probably does not have any interest, experience, or dharma in making rice bread. So if you give him money to develop rice bread, he will not be able to produce any that you would like.

This principle is the same for failed research projects – they are done by people that are not supremely interested in whatever they are researching on. Most of the time, their minds just generate the research topic from a brainstorming process when pressed by their superiors or some call for prosposals. It is not their inherent dharma or goal.

This is the same for solutions to food security and global warming. Because of greed, humans destroy the environment and pump CO2 into the air to produce money. Then they offer that same money to other humans to solve the problems regarding the environment and global warming.

The best solutions are not technological, but moral. It is the same lack of high morals that caused the people to pump CO2 in the atmosphere and pursue the covnersion of forests into profitable real estate projects.

So both the wealth of the finance community and their habit of throwing money at the problems that they themselves cause are the effects of the lack of high morals.

The Solution

Morals are detected by the heart and not the brain. And so the development of the heart is the underlying step for any real solution to food security and global warming, just as will truly solve war and crime.

The educational system should push for heart and morals instead of just intellect and cognitive skills. Rather, moral sense should be added as a cognitive skill.

To deter the systemic amassment of money, we propose a moneyless economic system that focuses on economic social contracts, denominated in points, that also builds morality between parties:

• being on time for the meetup
• bringing the goods or rendering the service on time
• having the diligence to note down the transaction and bringing your point cards