South Korea is elminating coins and requiring shoppers to upload their cash receipts to a digital database; Indians are still reeling from a 2016 decision that turned 86% of the country's cash worthless in a matter of hours; migrants and refugees are being targeted for new schemes of financial inclusion, but not experiencing the promised benefits; US cities are retaliating against cash-only retailers eager to speed the flow of customers, increase spending, and surveil our every purchase while exluding undersirable demographics; and despite our technological proficiencies, fiction writers 500 years ago still had more creative solutions to our money woes.

It seems like a straight-forward topic and yet we still manage to ramble off script.

full transcript available

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Chapters

09:08 The Age of Cashless

16:30 Resisting

21:11 Ancient Wisdom

25:56 India Demonetization

35:32 Refugee Services

47:54 Migrants and Music Festivals

51:37 The High Cost of Banking

58:19 The Psychology of Cashless

1:06:01 Surveillance and Control

Listener Comments

At around 48 minutes ... you mentioned the Roma, "people from Romania" which isn't exactly accurate. The Roma are actually from northern India and got pushed into Romania. They're also known as Gypsies or Romani. They face a lot of discrimination in Europe in general I'm actually from Romania lol. People from Romania are just called Romanians They are such a heavily ignored people by basically ever nation they've tried to integrate into that some of the most interesting ethnographies from anthropology I've read are on them in different countries. The ways they figure out to survive around different nation states and legal systems is really representative of the extremes that modern capitalism pushes people The reason they are associated with Romania sometimes is simply because there's a large population of them in Romania. Many times in history, armies from the Steppes would push West and Romania is often where the wave washed up along with all the peoples and cultures that they displaced. The Romani people were one of those peoples Culi

Sources

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Published 11-07-2019 01:55