AUTHOR ENVISAGES A WORLD WITHOUT BILLS AND COINS

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V15 2012 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 15, Number 7, February 12, 2012, Article 27

Here's an interesting article on Money/Cash from the writer of upcoming book. David Wolman is the author of "The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers?And the Coming Cashless Society," out this week from Da Capo Press.

There are no atheists in the modern economy. You may not have God or Buddha in your life, but you very much have faith—in money. I don't mean that you worship money in the greed-is-good sense. No, you have faith in its value. Your trust in it depends on everyone else's, which means that our faith in money's value is really about trust in each other—a belief in shared purpose, or at least a shared hallucination.

Cash, as in banknotes and coins, helps us to maintain that magical thinking. It's real in the way that you can hold it, smell it, and want to wash your hands after handling it. Paper notes and metal coins are the treasures of our childhoods, tucked under pillows by tooth fairies, delivered in secret by doting grannies. Despite the dull textbook definition of money—a medium of exchange, unit of account, store of value—it is by way of using it in the form of cash that we first come to understand the civilization-powering technology that is money.

But do we still need cash? In an era when books, movies and music are transmuting from atoms to bits, the greenback and those increasingly costly metal rounds are looking more analog by the minute. Lately it seems like the only people who carry cash are aspiring terrorists, corrupt government officials, drug traffickers, bank robbers, tax evaders, counterfeiters and rich college kids buying little bags of marijuana.

The writer goes on to explore the pitfalls of hard cash and the possibilities of various next technologies. -Editor

Could we completely trash cash tomorrow, or even in five years? No. Too much economic activity and too many livelihoods still depend on it. Cash is useful if your baby sitter doesn't accept PayPal or if you want to eat at a cash-only Chinese restaurant. And as long as we still use cash and not Facebook Credits to tip waiters and bellhops, we can't get rid of paper money.

The idea isn't to make life harder for those whose lives depend on modest transactions; it is to scrutinize cash because it has skated by for ages with barely a whisper of criticism. A closer look at the long history of cash, its present-day costs and the flood of emerging technologies suggests that we may very well be on the brink of a monetary revolution.

To read the complete article (subscription required), see: Time for Cash to Cash Out? (online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204136404577209241595751130.html)

As it happens, I came across an interview with the author this week in an Australian publication. -Editor

Cash is an antiquated concept. It originated thousands of years ago as a banking receipt that bearers could exchange for stored grain or gold. Today it's little more than an abstract concept, its value tied to perception instead of goods.

Yet we still exchange these slips of paper, and redeem them for goods and services, just as the ancient Sumerians and Chinese did. David Wolman thinks it's time to end all that. His new book, The End of Money, looks at — and longs for — the emerging post-cash world.