Now, three features of exchange are germane to the business of community visioning . The first is that exchange is the thing that knits many individuals into a community . As Aristotle pointed out in the Politics, there is no community without exchange. Nor can there be exchange without a community. The second is that exchange creates value and wealth .
Exchange is how communities climb the ladder of culture.
Exchange allows ideas and objects to be added to each other or recombined in such a way that they form new and useful things - or sometimes, we must admit, useless or dangerous things, but over the course of human history useful things have generally predominated. Because exchange creates value, people throughout history have tended to settle in agglomerations called towns and cities, where, thanks to human proximity, variety and sheer numbers, exchange can happen more readily than in the countryside. The third is that exchange can't create value if all we have to exchange with each other are twenty-dollar bills. Some of us need to have twenty singles, and others need to have a ten and two fives, and so on. There's no point in exchanging things with each other if we don't all bring different goods to the marketplace.