My colleague, SIMPLICITY consortium co-director Dan Ariely, was recently giving a short talk to financial services people about one of his favorite topic: savings (aka "money"). He was saying how important the invention of money has been to society—about how today we wouldn't want to live in a society based upon barter. When he said, this, I imagined growing enough grapes in my yard to fill a gigantic bag to carry to an Apple store to trade for an iPod. I wondered, how many grapes would I need? I quickly got Dan's point.
On Sunday I was flipping through the newspaper and found a great little story on some comparisons between government investments in X versus Y. It was the investment in the National Science Foundation ($5.47 billion) versus the National Endowment for the Arts ($121 million) that caught my attention. I reworked my old system for counting people into a money counting system, and came up with a simple money comparator. Numbers don't do statistics justice.
We're starting the week off a little far from technonature, but it'll happen.
Dave Kliman noted, "I noticed your government spending comparison chart. unfortunately it does not tell the whole story just to say we spend x dollars on scientific research. here's an article I read the other day that made some disturbing observations. Due to changes in budget policy since 2001, funds for basic research have not only been cut, but so have various and sundry tax credits for corporations to encourage them to do such research. also cut is government money to assist corporations to utilize technology developed in government labs. Pity, eh?" Every story certainly has multiple sides.
Amos Bannister writes, "Consider how much fun it would be to fill your gigantic bag full of grapes, trudge down to the Apple store only to find that they didn't want any grapes but instead wanted bowling balls. Then you'd have to find someone with bowling balls who would be prepared to accept your grapes in trade. Or maybe not, maybe the bowling ball supplier wants marshmallows. Lots of marshmallows. Barter can be a good system when both parties have what the other wants, otherwise you end up having to do a series of roundabout trades so everyone is happy. Money sure simplifies that process. Of course, that's not to say that money simplifies _life_." Barter scares me.
Posted by maeda at April 11, 2005 12:25 PM