Toluu : kashklash:: exchanging the future

kashklash:: exchanging the future

We talk about it

[Dave Birch] I’m a big fan of podcasts, and listen to quite a variety. One that I enjoy is Skepticality. I’ve just been listening to the recent episode about the American TV show “Numb3rs“. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it’s a not-terribly-interesting drama about an FBI agent who solves crimes with the help of his Mathematics Professor brother. Anyway, on the podcast a couple of the producers (?) of the show were discussing making the show and they made a comment in passing that I couldn’t help but note. They said that they had been researching a show about counterfeiting and during the course of the research they had copied a $20 bill on a photocopier to see how well it came out. Shortly thereafter they got a phone call from the US Treasury. The photocopier was online, and phones home when someone tries to copy money! And the Treasury guys weren’t very happy to hear about the proposed plotline, about the FBI investigating some counterfeiters because, as all money nerds know, it’s the Secret Service (a branch of the Treasury until 2002, when it was moved to Homeland Security) who take care of that.

I thought the people on the show might have been exaggerating, but it turns out that not only do photocopiers have this feature built in to them, the

Money mashed-upDecember 23 2008

[Dave Birch] One of the functions of banks that has been changed forever by the Internet is what economists call the information function. People used to rely on banks to provide certain kinds of information into the market (eg, credit ratings) but a combination of technology-enabled business change and vanishing delivery costs has meant that they are themselves consumers of exactly the same information as non-banks. This is hardly new thinking — I can remember discussions a decade ago pointing out that some kinds of information were out of bank’s hands and that (given all sorts of constraints to do with data protection, competition law and so on) the operators of payment networks could use the “data exhaust” from their transaction networks to create information to “turbocharge” other businesses (it was the 1990s, remember). Indeed, I worked on a project for SWIFT to look at his kind of thing in (if I remember correctly) the late 1980s. The advent of web 2.0 means that this turbocharging is both technically trivial and incredibly powerful, providing ways to create new kinds of information that would never have been generated by banks internally nor made available to the market as a whole. A favourite example of mine, that I originally found thanks to our friends at Payments News, is that courtesy of the New York Fed you can see U.S. bank card delinquency by county, and thus get yourself a real-time m

scientists and the klashDecember 17 2008

John Brockman’s Edge.org organized a round of reflection on the financial crisis with several scientists. Mike Brown, Stuart Kauffman, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose and Lee Smolin ask: Can science help to solve the economic crisis? Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Douglas Rushkoff, Larry Sanger, Mike Brown, George Dyson, Emanuel Derman, Michael Shermer, Paul Romer, Tor Nørretranders, Eric Weinstein and Brian Knutson respond.

Several interesting questions pervade the discussion: In which way did science/scientism help create the problem in the first place? Would we be better off leaving the redesign of a new financial system (not a model) to entrepreneurs with a proven track-record of success? Can economics be linked to the systems of the natural world? Would an economic Manhattan project make sense? Could complexity science help shed more light on emergent economic dynamics? … and many more.

seeing, believing, actingDecember 17 2008

At the outbreak of any major crisis, there is always the question of ‘why didn’t we see this coming?’. The financial crisis? Oh, many saw it coming alright … yet few managed to make others believe a meltdown was not only possible, but most likely, and none managed to mobilize believers-decision-makers to act upon their belief to an extent that would have prevented the crisis from happening (or the latter proved insufficiently equipped/organized to do so).

Adam Gordon of FutureStudio reflects upon the relationships between belief & action in foresight contexts in his most recent post over at The Future Savvy Journal. He refers to a letter from Peter Schwartz explaining the added value of scenario thinking in assessing and acting upon future challenges. They help to keep various options open, alternatives about what the future might be like, hence serve as a tool-to-think-through & to learn, and pave the way for action. According to Peter Schwartz:

Technology is progressive, finance is cyclicalDecember 16 2008

[Dave Birch] You might be familiar with the demise of Northern Rock (or Northern Crock as it is now known the length and breadth of the UK), the collapse that marked the start of the current financial crisis so far as the British were concerned. But you may be less familiar with the story of Benjamin and Abraham Goldsmid who formed a partnership in London at the turn of the nineteenth century. They started off as brokers and as foreign exchange dealers but, as told in E. Victor Morgan’s splendid “A History of Money” (Penguin, revised edition 1969), they moved on and began trading on their own account.

Aaron, the second son of Benedict Goldsmid, of Hamburg, settled in Leman Street, Goodman’s Fields, near Whitechapel Church, as a merchant… His son George was the father of two sons, Abraham and Benjamin Goldsmid, who, by their splendid capacities for business, strict integrity, and singular good fortune, succeeded in raising their firm from competitive obscurity to be the head and front of Change Alley.

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