coinage upon the gold basis, but in notes good for so many thousands
or millions of units of energy at one or other of the generating
stations.

Now the problems of economic theory will have undergone an enormous
clarification if, instead of measuring in fluctuating money values,
the same scale of energy units can be extended to their discussion,
if, in fact, the idea of trading could be entirely eliminated. In my
Utopia, at any rate, this has been done, the production and
distribution of common commodities have been expressed as a problem
in the conversion of energy, and the scheme that Utopia was now
discussing was the application of this idea of energy as the
standard of value to the entire Utopian coinage. Every one of those
giant local authorities was to be free to issue energy notes against
the security of its surplus of saleable available energy, and to
make all its contracts for payment in those notes up to a certain
maximum defined by the amount of energy produced and disposed of in
that locality in the previous year. This power of issue was to be
renewed just as rapidly as the notes came in for redemption. In a
world without boundaries, with a population largely migratory and
emancipated from locality, the price of the energy notes of these
various local bodies would constantly tend to be uniform, because
employment would constantly shift into the areas where energy was
cheap. Accordingly, the price of so many millions of units of energy
at any particular moment in coins of the gold currency would be
approximately the same throughout the world. It was proposed to
select some particular day when the economic atmosphere was
distinctly equable, and to declare a fixed ratio between the gold
coinage and the energy notes; each gold Lion and each Lion of credit
representing exactly the number of energy units it could buy on that