Lots of unmet needs will never be met in our lovely market economy because they don’t have any money attached.

E.g. good health care and child development resources for poor people.

Clean water.

I could go on.

Lots of ways to manage all that without direct barter.

I do expect money to persist for quite awhile, but it is certainly possible to imagine alternatives. Time banks, for example, exist today. And I don’t think that is the only possible alternative.

In order to be able to match underused resources with unmet needs we need a ‘unit of account’ to value the worth of the resources in question, and a means of exchanging this value so that it can be traded for something else of value.

I don’t know how else we can match the underused resources with unmet needs without resorting to barter but of course that relies on me having what you want, and you having what i want.

The exchange of goods and services for other goods and services underpins our market-based economy. We don’t want state socialism, and we don’t want corporate capitalism – what we want is something in between.

I love and agree with everything you wrote down to “converted into a means of exchange (a new kind of money)”.

Is that actually necessary? Or can we “match underused resources with unmet needs” in other ways?

Or to put it another way, is commodity exchange necessary?

Such a marketplace would require better information than the one we have now. Prices are a form of information but don’t value the things that we as humans deem valuable.

Once the things of value can be properly accounted for and converted into a means of exchange (a new kind of money) then we will all be able to see the world as one trading community where needs and wants and surplus capacity or waste can be valued, liquidated and posted for sale using this new kind of money.

such a currency would be backed by the community’s time and credit (willingness to accept it as settlement of a debt owed).

In short, what we need is a new kind of money and a new payments system that enables community members to trade with it.