voluntaryXchange

Where's George? The Memory in Money

I got my change from Del Taco at lunch and noticed brilliant pink writing on the back of a dollar bill. It said:

Please enter my serial number at www.wheresgeorge.com. Follow my journey through the ockets and cash registers of America.

So, having actual work to do, the first thing I did when I went home was follow the directions.

What I found was a site that does allow you to track where your currency has been. It's actually kind of a cute idea, and potentially fascinating, in a way that only goofy stuff on the internet can be.

Entering the serial number on my bill popped up a screen containing the following (dated April 4):

My dad's money. He'll probably spend it tomorrow on lunch somewhere in downtown Salt Lake City. Thanks for finding and entering this bill.

It also told me that this bill had traveled 220 miles in 148 days.

Unfortunately, that is where the paper trail for my bill ended. I tried the other bills in my pocket, and none of them had been tracked before.

This actually intersects with some pretty serious economic theory. Naryana Kocherlakota, a monetary theorist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, has pushed the idea that money is memory. Money is intrinsically useless (you can't do anything useful with it, like say, eat it). Money is only useful in that it can be used to buy other things that are intrinsically useful (like lunch from Del Taco). So, why should we use something intrinsically uselss to buy things that are not intrinsically useless, when there are a whole raft of other intrinsically useful things we could use as money? Kocherlakota's take on this is that money is a form of memory (another intrinsically uselss thing). More specifically, we acquire money as a reward for work that we do. It is nice to have a memory of that work, but it is hard to buy food by telling people that you remember working hard in that past, and therefore deserve to be fed. But, if you augment that memory with money you end up with a full belly. In some sense, wheresgeorge.com is documenting the memories inherent in specific bills.

I touched on the money is memory idea in a post about a month ago called "(Money Is) Memory Is Sex".

Oil Shocks

A good analysis of the effects of oil price changes on the economies of oil importers is made in the post entitled "Of Scalloped Potatoes and Coconut Cream Pie" by Paul McCulley, chief economist at PIMCO Bonds.

He makes the case that oil price increases are like tax hikes with inflationary pressure thrown in:

In this sense, the oil price shock is similar to a tax hike, as the cliché goes. Indeed it is. Tax hikes are negative for economy-wide aggregate demand for non-oil expenditures, particularly tax hikes of a regressive nature, as an oil price shock is. Concurrently, inflation arithmetically goes up, as the weighted average increase in oil prices swamps any weight-averaged softening in non-oil prices associated with weakened demand. So, an oil price shock is a tax hike with stagflationary consequences. Nasty stuff.

Tip of the hat to CurryBlog for the post entitled "Negative Terms of Trade Shock".

Ego Boost

Like I need an ego boost.

But, one of this week's hot items in the blogosphers is The Estimation Quiz. It's sort of a test of your knowledge of inexact trivia - you may not know how high the Eiffel Tower is, but perhaps you can come up with a more reasonable answer than others.

I got a 62!

I feel good because Chis Betram (author of Crooked Timber and the post with comments entitled Estimation) got a 39, and Daniel Drezner got a 40 (see his post entitled "I'm 1% certain that I'm 1% smarter than Chris Bertram").

So, what was I wildly off on? The height of the Eiffel Tower, the number of stars in the galaxy, the number of gas stations in Britain, the number of plastic shopping bags used in Australia every year, the stipend an asylum seeker gets from the British government, and the takeoff weight of a 747 (that one hurt the hardest because my point estimate nailed it, but my confidence interval was very wide).

No one has ever said I don't have a head full of useless trivia. Now I just gotta get on Jeopardy.

Dragonfly

When I was younger I read some fantasy - more than TLOTR, but not too much more.

One of the best things that I read was Ursula Le Guin's The Earthsea Cycle. To me, the prose was just ... hmmm ... fluid. It was warm and hearty and expansive and pleasant all at the same time.

But, I could never figure out why it was classified as young adult fiction. The only things that merited this was that the books were short (novellas actually), and that they concerned a child/adolescent in the first book. The writing didn't seem non-adult to me. It still doesn't.

Anyway, while taking the kids to the library a month of so ago, I saw a book of collected novellas on display (Legends: Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy, 1998, Robert Silverberg, Tom Doherty Associates, NY.). One of them was a new addition to the Earthsea Cycle entitled Dragonfly. Here's a snipett:

...a low, light, bare room with a small-paned window looking out on the kitchen gardens of the Great House - handsome, well-kept gardens, long rows and beds of vegetables, greens, and herbs, with berry canes and fruit trees beyond. She saw a burly, dark-skinned man and two boys come out and weed one of the vegetable plots. It eased her mind to watch their careful work. She wished she could help them at it. The waiting and the strangeness were very difficult. Once the Doorkeeper came in, bringing her a plate with cold meat and bread and scallions, and she ate because he told her to eat, but chewing and swallowing was hard work. The gardeners went away and there was nothing to watch out the window but the cabbages growing and the sparrows hopping, and now and then a hawk far up in the sky, and the wind moving softly in the tops of tall trees, on beyond the gardens.

I don't have any idea why this writing gets to me so much, but it does. Rereading a book never evokes the same feeling that it did the first time. And, I thought that the feeling that I got from the first time I read Earthsea was just one of my many fading memories of the 1970's. But, it returned with this novella. I feel like I was given a 40th birthday present.

Note that the book also contains another edition to Stephen King's Dark Tower series entitled "The Little Sisiters of Eluria". I read it, because I've never read any of King's fantasy, but I've always liked his horror stuff (especially The Stand, The Dead Zone, Pet Semetary, and Gerald's Game). I was not very impressed with this novella - but not enough to be dissuade from reading the rest of the Dark Tower stuff in the future.

Carnival of the Capitalists

This weeks Carnival of the Capitalists is up and running at New Dog Old Trick. I stepped into it badly by not noting the combination of my byline and the topic of my post.

The most interesting piece I saw was from Catallarchy and entitled "Hope vs. Belief, Part II: Voting is Bad, Choice is Good". It discusses how our political system has a problem in that voting is so low cost that people can't be bothered to get informed about facts.

Smart After the Fact

Craig Newmark informed me through e-mail that Reuters updated their headline that I posted about Friday in "Stunning Economic Idiocy". Sure enough, the title now reads "Now It's Official: U.S. Growth Slowed" rather than "Now It's Official: Economy Shrunk".

To Reuters credit, they did correct this within an hour after the original post. But, you have to wonder how many people read this article before it went out on the newswire ... and every single one of them missed it. It boggles the mind.

Anxiety Pimps

I really like this as the new epithet for members of the mass media. That can be my new word for the week!

Stunning Economic Idiocy

I am not making this up. Reuters sent out a newswire story claiming that the economy shrunk because growth was revised downward (to a still positive rate).

Here's the facts:
1) The title of the article is "Now It's Official: Economy Shrunk"
2) Here's a quote: "U.S. gross domestic product ... expanded at a 2.8 percent annual rate in the second quarter"

Last time I checked something that is growing can't be shrinking (even if it isn't growing as fast as you thought it was).

This is either really first class innumeracy (for which the reporter ought to be reassigned), or a blatant attempt to smear U.S. economic performance prior to the election (for which the reporter ought to be fired).

What Did James Michener Know That We Don't?

Hmmm. John Kerry has been - shall we say - adequate as a Senator. John Kerry runs for President with a lackluster campaign and gets nowhere. John Kerry changes part of his staff and his tone, and starts appearing on stage with war comrades. Electoral successes follows.

Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, but here it just matches up really well.

The John Kerry story sounds like the story of Norman Grant from James Michener's novel Space.

Grant has integrity but not much else. He is recruited to run for office, and his campaign is failing. A flashy new manager convinces him to invite his war buddies on stage with him. Electoral successes follow.

It gets better! Norman Grant has a goofy wife who gets involved in bizarre issues that threaten his political career.

By the end of the novel Norman Grant is marginalized. I dont' think it matter what you think about Kerry, if he doesn't win this year he will be marginalized like Gore, Dukakis, Mondale before him.

Rain Gods

I am contemplating the idea that my parents may be rain gods.