Tuesday, October 28, 2003
The Future of Money -- Summit and Valleys
Anywhere Dan Gillmor goes is bound to be interesting. When he blogged that he would be at "The Future of Money Summit" today, I looked it up. Hmmm . . . Cory Doctorow, John Gage and Porter Stansberry will be there too, and Tim O'Reilly is on the advisory board.
Here's a piece of interesting trivia from the conference website: The Top 10 Inventions in Money Technology:
The agenda is interesting, but with glaring holes where the problems of the world are. For example, take the first session, "Digital Pearl Harbor: A Modern Disaster Scenario." I infer that this deals with what happens when the money system comes under attack.
Well, the money system already is under attack for anybody in the class formerly known as "Middle" who has children, according to The Two Income Trap, a jaw-dropping empirical study of 2200 U.S. families that went bankrupt. Here's an excerpt from the book:
Here's a piece of interesting trivia from the conference website: The Top 10 Inventions in Money Technology:
1.) The Electronic Cash Register - 1906Runner-up technologies include micropayment technologies, prepaid credit cards, mobile payment systems, and biometrics.
2.) Electronic Money - 1918
3.) The First Armored Car - 1920
4.) Credit Bureaus - 1937
5.) The Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) - 1939
6.) The Credit Card - 1950
7.) Barcodes - 1952
8.) The Smart Card - 1974
9.) The Spreadsheet - 1978
10.) RSA Encryption - 1983
The agenda is interesting, but with glaring holes where the problems of the world are. For example, take the first session, "Digital Pearl Harbor: A Modern Disaster Scenario." I infer that this deals with what happens when the money system comes under attack.
Well, the money system already is under attack for anybody in the class formerly known as "Middle" who has children, according to The Two Income Trap, a jaw-dropping empirical study of 2200 U.S. families that went bankrupt. Here's an excerpt from the book:
The families in the worst financial trouble are not the usual suspects. They are not the very young, tempted by the freedom of their first credit cards. They are not the elderly, trapped by failing bodies and declining savings accounts. And they are not a random assortment of Americans who lack the self-control to keep their spending in check. Rather, the people who consistently rank in the worst financial trouble are united by one surprising characteristic. They are parents with children at home . . . Our study showed that married couples with children are more than twice as likely to file for bankruptcy as their childless counterparts. A divorced woman raising a youngster is nearly three times more likely to file for bankruptcy than her single friend who never had children.These are the bedrock citizens who play by the rules in the wealthy United States. Then there's the undeveloped world, but the Future of Money Summit ain't goin' there either.
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