and the way we spend it has changed a lot over the past ten years.
Colors magazine has dedicated their latest issue on money. They took a 100 dollar bill and sent it to a lab to see what they could find on it. Among others, they found cocaine, feces, ash and ink, and there’s an article devoted to each substance they found.
While this seems like an unabashed plug for a (ridiculously well designed) magazine, every time I look at a bill, or a payslip, it’s becoming harder and harder for me to visualise what I owe / am paid as anything physical. The Internet has changed the way money moves – paying your bills in your pyjamas at 3 in the morning in the comfort of your home being one of my faves – and certainly what it means to people. It’s hard to part with a $50 note, but when you swipe your card it doesn’t seem that heavy anymore – until your bank slaps you a $30 fine for over-withdrawing your account.
A few of the sites we’ve done lately have pointed out how easy it is for data to disappear electronically. If you saw someone physically breaking into your piggy bank, you’d probably be able to act on it quite quickly with a baseball bat (or other spontaneous weapon) and get the jerk arrested. While we now invest more money in physical security – alarm systems, gated communities, tasers – your money is still oh-so vulnerable. A friend of a friend had about $10,000 swiped out of her credit card, but by the time she found out it was too late to reach for a baseball bat.
(Moral of the story: set your credit limit to something not ridiculous.)
I don’t know about you, but if I could see the bottom of my bank account, I’d probably spend my money more wisely. Perhaps banks could introduce a service, where if you’re approaching a particular account balance (that you can set, say $50), it sends you an SMS reminding you that 1) you’ve reached your limit, and 2) you should probably hold back on the card swiping. I’ll save that for when I decide to also pitch my plug-in perculator idea.
Colors is an affordable magazine, but for the cash-strapped, the electronic edition is here: http://www.colorsmagazine.com/money/
* Appendix 1: Here’s a great quote that I couldn’t find yesterday:
If you look at the growth of the economy over the last 25 years it’s an astonishing, escalating upward curve, much of it driven by the Internet. And it’s going to continue to accelerate because virtual worlds are becoming more practical, as if we are sitting in a bar in Berlin.
In a globalized virtual workplace, you don’t need to worry about visas and green cards and such. Google, Microsoft and IBM all do teleconferencing through virtual worlds. We are almost at the point at which you can create an avatar that looks and moves exactly like the real you – allowing you to enter a virtual world and try on a sweater.
It is so overwhelming that I don’t think most people have come to grips with the change that is upon us, leading us to seeing money more as a representation of value rather than the physical item itself. Modern economics emerged around thinking over what money really is, and the free market economy has expanded the nature of money in ways we never thought of. But perhaps it has freed us in ways we are unprepared to be free.
Patrick Cox // economist and financial analyst
