Beyond Money

Ecosystem Services Go Beyond Money and Markets: Reply to Silvertown.

Silvertown [1] provides an outspoken critique on the concept of ecosystem services (ES), feeding a longstanding debate about how to express and conserve the value of nature for humans [2–4]. The paper raises valid concerns about ES monetization, its failure to ‘capture the multifaceted sense in which people value nature’, and market shortcomings in halting biodiversity loss. However, it also po...

Beyond Money: Toward an Economy of Well-Being.

Policy decisions at the organizational, corporate, and governmental levels should be more heavily influenced by issues related to well-being-people's evaluations and feelings about their lives. Domestic policy currently focuses heavily on economic outcomes, although economic indicators omit, and even mislead about, much of what society values. We show that economic indicators have many shortcom...

Reengineering Money: The Mondex Stored Value Card and Beyond

Electronic cash systems, such as Mondex, seek to re-engineer cash payments. While the use of cash imposes numerous invisible costs on the economy, numerous security and consumer acceptance issues prevent its immediate replacement. After analyzing the economics of the proposed Mondex electronic cash system, including suggesting sources of gain for multiple channel members, we conclude that the m...

Managing the Public’s Money: From Outputs to Outcomes – and Beyond

Placing Workplace Wellness in Proper Context: Value Beyond Money

Employer surveys (eg, the 2011 Automatic Data Processing Survey) suggest that the most often-cited reasons for offering these programs include improved employee health, health care cost control, increased productivity, and absenteeism reduction. Each of these reasons is quantifiable, and their value can be monetized, allowing for a calculation of savings and an estimation of a return on investm...