The key ideas

The Best That Money Can't Buy: Beyond Politics, Poverty, & War

Jacque Fresco, 2002

During the war, the United States found the resources for tens of thousands of planes a year. So why, in peacetime, is there “no money” to feed everyone? Jacque Fresco, founder of The Venus Project, proposes a world without money, where resources are managed by data and machines do the work. We retell his utopia and show honestly where economists push back.

Who it is for

For anyone who has ever wondered why, with the technology we have today, the world still has poverty, and who wants to take apart a bold answer along with its weak spots.

Either we learn to live together in full cooperation or we will cause our own extinction.

What the book is about

Many astronauts who have seen the Earth from space describe something similar: from up there you can't see any borders, and the planet looks like one shared home. Jacque Fresco opens his book with this image and with an awkward observation: not one of them, once back, proposed abolishing borders. Why not?

Fresco (1916–2017) was an American industrial designer and futurist, and the founder of The Venus Project. His book is not a study but a design for a different society: one without money, where the planet's resources are a common heritage, machines do the work, and decisions rest on data rather than politics. As reviewers note, it has almost no references to sources, and it is best read as one author's utopian proposal.

Ahead are 90,000 planes, gold on a deserted island and two dogs from the same litter. And at the end, you'll see where economists push back on Fresco and why his main experiment was never carried out.

Idea 1. Six hundred planes and not a dollar to spare

Fresco recalls the Second World War. According to him, at its start the United States had about six hundred first-class combat planes, and soon production grew to 90,000 a year. Was there enough money or gold for that? Fresco's answer is no. But there were enough resources, factories and people.

From this he draws the book's main conclusion: what limits us is not money but resources and knowledge. Society, as he sees it, forgets about money and acts together only in war or disaster. What if we tackled poverty the same way?

A note from Livria: the war economy also ran on taxes and loans. The example shows that mobilization is possible, but it doesn't prove that a society can do without money.

A family “can't afford” repairs for years, but when the flat floods, the money, the workers and the time turn up within a week.

A crisis can reveal how much a society is really capable of. Fresco's question, whether that capability can be used in peacetime too, remains open.

Read in Livria

About the author

Jacque Fresco (1916–2017) was an American industrial designer and futurist, and the founder of The Venus Project in Florida. He spent his life promoting the idea of a resource-based economy and designing circular cities of the future.

All books by this author: Jacque Fresco

Terms from the book

  • Resource-based economy
  • Economic calculation problem
  • Planned obsolescence: The practice of designing things so that they break sooner or go out of fashion, and have to be replaced.
  • Cybernation: In Fresco's book, building computers and sensors into production and into the running of society, so that decisions rest on data about resources and the environment.
  • Experimental city: A city proposed by The Venus Project as a laboratory for testing Fresco's ideas in practice. It was not built in the author's lifetime.

All terms

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