Steiner's proposal that every note carry its year of issue and lose organising power as it ages, ending as gift money before being reissued young.
The Aging of Money in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's proposal that currency should carry its year of issue and grow old, so that its power to be used for organising an enterprise falls steadily while its purchasing power stays the same until the end. Steiner set it out in the sixth seminar discussion of the Political Economy Seminar (GA 341), held at Dornach on 5 August 1922 beside the world economy lectures of GA 340. Money, he argued, should take on the character of a bill of exchange, carrying an expiry date rather than an indefinite claim on the future. Young money can be sunk into production for long periods; old money cannot, and so passes over into gift money that carries free spiritual life, schooling and research, after which it returns as young money through the economic associations rather than through a state bank. The Old Testament jubilee year, with its remission of all debts, is the precedent Steiner named.
The aging of money answers a question economics rarely asks: how old is this banknote, and should its age matter? Steiner held that money which never ages lets capital pile up out of reach of the work that made it. Giving each note a birth year turns money into something that passes through a life and is then handed on.
In Steiner's Own Words
It follows directly from this that money must become old. The only question is how this can be done technically. And you would not be able to gradually wear out the money in any other way than by attaching coupons to the notes that have to be torn off at certain times, and by an official authority. This would result in a very complicated bureaucratic apparatus. But it is really never a matter of bringing about the erosion through such external signs, but rather that the real course of things brings about this value by itself. This happens when you simply give money, all kinds of money, more or less the character of a bill of exchange, that is, I mean the character of a bill of exchange in that there is an expiry date.
What it Means Today
Steiner never got a currency with a birth year printed on it, but the part of the proposal that governs where old money goes has been operating as a bank since 1974. In that year Wilhelm Ernst Barkhoff and Gisela Reuther founded the GLS Gemeinschaftsbank in Bochum, Germany, out of the lawyers' circle that had been financing Waldorf schools through a charitable trust since the early 1960s. The initials stand for Gemeinschaftsbank für Leihen und Schenken, the community bank for lending and giving, and those two verbs are Steiner's two later ages of money: Leihgeld, the loan money that can still be sunk into an enterprise, and Schenkungsgeld, the gift money that carries schools, seminars and research which will never repay a loan. GLS names the projects each deposit finances, which is the associative transparency the 1922 seminar asked for.
Set that beside Silvio Gesell's stamped scrip, tried at Wörgl in Tyrol from 1932, and the difference is exact. Gesell taxed the note itself, so its purchasing power fell month by month and holders spent it to escape the charge. Steiner left purchasing power untouched to the end and let only the power to organise capital decay, which means his money is not punished into circulation but retired from command. Thalira synthesis: aging money gives currency a biography rather than a yield, so that a note passes through youth, maturity and old age as a human being does, and the economy is obliged to hand it on instead of letting it compound without limit.
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