Ideas for Debate: Elementary monetary concepts and storylines (Part 1: Remember the game!)
Jens Martignoni
Abstract
IJCCR accepts short pieces of writing of no more than 2000 words concerning an idea or reflection that a scholar wants to share with the IJCCR community and the world while they have not yet done any thorough research about it or have no systematic field experience related to that idea that would allow them to write a proper research paper. We aspire that Ideas for debate will help scholars and practitioners to share their ideas with the community at an early stage and receive precious feedback that might allow them to proceed with submitting a full paper at some point in the future. (from website, maybe not to publish or maybe link?)
The Ideas for Debates section has been announced in this journal for a long time but has been sparsely filled with content. As a new editor, I would like to change this and take the opportunity to reopen this section, even if I start with some personal contributions and hopefully inspire others to join later. However, this requires a different understanding of the position of this section within a scientific, academic journal:
One of the primary tasks of today’s academics seems to be writing scientific articles and getting them published in preferably well-ranked journals. In doing so, it is particularly important to always take existing works as a starting point, to cite them and, if possible, to always stay within the framework of the prevailing topics of discussion. Free ideas and thoughts are difficult to accommodate. The compulsion to back up everything meticulously and to support every argument solidly means that important freedom is lost. Ideas may be declared as sole opinions and rejected, and non-saying studies that only focus on details, but are supported by a flood of quotations, may be praised as formally excellent articles. There is much to criticize here, especially in the social sciences and economics. This trend is particularly disturbing in our field of new currencies and monetary systems. Most existing scientific ideas and concepts from mainstream are still awfully insufficient or based on sheer dogmas and invalid beliefs, so why to cite them again and again? Better ideas and concepts are needed on how to understand what money is about and why we, as humans got involved in this overrunning money-story at all. We need to change the prevailing mindset of dull “money is what money does” definitions quite urgently and look for fresh and more appropriate concepts and ideas for money that are suitable for the recovery of our stumbling economy. As our journal does this for more than twenty years now the aim of this section, then, is to present more outstanding, more philosophical and more socio-technical thoughts and ideas that can provide impetus, perhaps provoke, or simply suggest new ways of thinking about the issue of money and currencies in human society. In this sense, this section is meant to be complementary to the many excellent research papers published in the main body of the journal.
To cite this article: Martignoni (2022) ‘Ideas for debate: elementary monetary concepts and storylines. Part 1: remember the game!’ INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY CURRENCY RESEARCH – VOLUME 26 (2, 2022); www.ijccr.net; ISSN 1325-9547; DOI – http://dx.doi.org/10.15133/j.ijccr.2022.008
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