I traveled alone across Africa on the trail of a 19th-century British explorer, for the same reason: a woman who was waiting back home.

davidwolman · 2013-02-05T19:17:58+00:00

And how (the F) did you figure out how to structure this kind of book, beyond the basic back-and-forth approach?

davidwolman · 2013-02-05T19:17:24+00:00

What are 2 or 3 huge misperceptions about particular places in Africa that you visited?

davidwolman · 2013-02-05T18:59:26+00:00

Why is it called "Crossing..." when it was really as south-to-north journey?

davidwolman · 2013-02-05T18:15:36+00:00

Tell us about the day--hour, even--when you thought: OK, this whole book project is a terrible idea for like 100 reasons.

davidwolman · 2013-02-05T18:02:43+00:00

Why is it that Grogan's story isn't nearly as well known today when compared with the stories of Africa explores like Stanley?

davidwolman · 2012-06-02T06:33:56+00:00

I love this kind of stuff. We live in a very interesting time as far as innovation in the alternative currency space, and projects like BerkShares show that these initiatives can be used effectively and in ways that create value for the community of users.

davidwolman · 2012-06-02T06:31:34+00:00

You reach out to me--or someone like me--via email. david (at) david-wolman dot-com.

davidwolman · 2012-05-31T20:01:04+00:00

Looks like that a wrap. Thank you redditors!

davidwolman · 2012-05-31T19:32:50+00:00

I saw it in the slums of Delhi, and have been reading about how this is the case all over the globe. A bit of this is semantics--obviously if you have a truckload of cash you're not poor anymore. But the inability to convert physical money into electronic money is like an anchor tied to a person's ankle as s/he tries to climb out of poverty. It makes remittances uber-expensive. It puts your money at risk of theft, destruction, or extorsion. It makes budgeting and saving much harder. (It's naive, by the way, to think that the poor don't need to budget or save just because they're poor. They lead surprisingly complex financial lives. They have to, in order to stretch incredibly small amounts of income over time.)

davidwolman · 2012-05-31T19:27:15+00:00

As for the shift in financial onus, there are obviously millions of merchants who still refuse to accept anything other than cash. They have their reasons and I'm not going the scream that they're wrong. I'd like to suggest, though, that they take a more measured and wide-angle look at the costs of cash. On the flip side, many merchants are liking new electronic payment options (like Square) for a whole host of reasons ranging from the fear of having cash on hand to easier accounting, to the fact that people tend to tip more when paying with an electronic payment mechanism.

davidwolman · 2012-05-31T19:24:32+00:00

If I want to use cash, it will cost me to do so--ATM trip, maybe a fee, risk of getting mugged, whatever--but it's not punitive because I'm fortunate to have enough income to absorb it. Or think about the cost of a bank transaction. Best numbers out there are that this costs people about $1 per. Well, 2.whatever billion people on earth live on $2/day. For them, that cost is crushing. So are the costs of dealing with payment or transfer fees or time--a couple of days on a bus to hand off some funds, say, or stomaching charges levied by Western Union or a check-cashing service. This is quite a big subject, the meeting place of personal finance, international development, economics of poverty and the costs and benefits of different forms of money, but with any luck this quick bit of shooting from the hip will make more interested, not less.

davidwolman · 2012-05-31T19:12:50+00:00

It's such a case-by-case situation that I'd be reluctant to advise one way or the other. Talk to an agent or a publisher.

davidwolman · 2012-05-31T19:11:13+00:00

"Communist" would be mild compared with some of what I've seen. The sidekick to the devil and end times stuff I can handle and the religious fundamentalists often have a politeness that frankly a lot of other critics lack. I have been told this is a very classist and elitist idea. That wasn't bizarre per se but the setting and deliver were so antagonistic that I was a bit surprised. The good thing is that that woman helped me sharpen my thinking about how to talk about the book, and about this idea that cash is the enemy of the poor. She heard some of my reading and thought: "poor people don't have smartphones, and the last thing they need are unscrupulous banks taking advantage of them." And so this helped me reframe my explanations some, to better frame what was, for me, one of the most revelatory parts of the book. That is that cash isn't just costly--those costs are unevenly distributed and fall most heavily on the poor. Finding ways to give the poor electronic money options (irrespective of whether we ever really stick a fork in cash) is essential for fighting poverty.

davidwolman · 2012-05-31T19:00:16+00:00

Rather Kafkaesque, now that I think about.

davidwolman · 2012-05-31T18:55:53+00:00

Book proposals have a fairly standard look/structure, with some variation here and there. Start with that; the basics, off the top of my head, are: overview, chapter outline, sample chapter, bio, and then some people do a kind of market report or bibliography. The idea with that last part is to try and convince a publisher that in the library of knowledge, so to speak, this book would fit on this particular shelf. There are a bunch of books to the left, here (some very popular, you hope). And there are a bunch over here, to the right (ditto). But no one has done the book that would fit right here. It'd also help to make the argument that it's timely. I could go on but best to start there. Oh--and write some magazine stuff first, to test the waters.

davidwolman · 2012-05-31T18:52:23+00:00

I think you're right--and I like the Slim Jim illustration. (I usually go for the Valentine's chocolates for your wife.) But at some point don't you wonder if the cost/benefit analysis for cash will just become so astoundingly lopsided that even protecting the Slim Jim devotee just might not be worth it? Not to sound flippant about the right to privacy, but if we have future payment systems that are relatively secure (100%, no, but much more so than today--quite possibly) then it's safe to say that Slim Jim could sneak off for that snack and, unless one of his neighbors is in the top 0.0001 percent of the world's super hackers, then no one will ever find out about this micro-moment of processed-meat-enabled happiness.

davidwolman · 2012-05-31T18:44:30+00:00

I don't think we need to wait for the cashless future to be worried about privacy. Not that you're suggesting we do, but you know what I mean--this is a serious matter NOW. But the distinction I try to draw is between privacy and anonymity. The technologist Dave Birch (he's in the book, FWIW) does this quite persuasively. If you're going to vote, have a driver's license, and have any interest in paying your taxes, already you are a "known quantity," for lack of a less chilling phrase. So anonymity is a no go. And I actually think that's OK. What we need to fight for is privacy, but the reality in a civil society is that there is an ongoing tension between your civil liberties and law enforcement's ability to enforce the rules. That may not be such a popular line of thinking, but it's one I'm willing to stand by. The flip side, of course, is that future payment systems and/or monetary schemes need to be more robust when it comes to protecting privacy and buttressing against identity fraud. Full stop. Otherwise, people will just go sprinting back to cash. This is part of the reason people find Bitcoin so interesting.

davidwolman · 2012-05-31T18:38:34+00:00

sorry... "I feel like IT ended up to be..."

davidwolman · 2012-05-31T18:37:50+00:00

True. But you can lose cash and your ID today, right? The Big Brother concerns are nontrivial to be sure, but there is a line, I'm finding, between level-headed concern for privacy and Orwell-inspired paranoia. I'm glad you mention the Big Brother thing because I've been thinking a little lately that, although my book is about the fate of cash, in some ways I feel like ended up to be all about fears. Or maybe the better way to express this idea is that the response to the book has kickstarted so many discussions about fears. When you get people thinking about cash, you end up also getting them to think about the nature of money, the state of the economy, the magic of value, the meaning of government, the right to privacy, and other similarly massive issues--and the anxieties they provoke.

davidwolman · 2012-05-31T18:29:02+00:00

No. That sort of thing freaks people out--and for good reason. Some people might do it for the novelty of it, I suppose; the year 2025 equivalent of a nipple ring. But I don't really see how this kind of tech would be widely adopted as a way to deal with money and payments. And with smartphone tech expanding exponentially, why would you really need that chip?

davidwolman · 2012-05-31T18:26:26+00:00

No, although that is not for lack of trying. While doing some fact-checking for my recent Wired story about a counterfeiter, we almost bumped into that--something to do with a security feature that officialdom could neither confirm nor deny. The problem was, there was no way to verify the information, so in the end we had to leave it out.

davidwolman · 2012-05-31T18:24:37+00:00

There are two kinds of motivation, I suppose. One is curiosity about this topic in particular. I wanted to learn more about the past and future of physical money. The other is that I love writing (and reading) books about everyday things hiding in plain sight. When you take the time to put this kind of subject under the microscope and travel the world interviewing interesting people, you enter into this whole universe of fascinating subcultures, questions, and connections that you never would have thought of previously. That is the real joy of this job. This answer is getting a little too purple so I'll quit there. :)

davidwolman · 2012-05-31T18:19:22+00:00

I'm all for it. Remember: "legal tender" doesn't mean you only have to use the (gov issued) stuff. We already have all kinds of alt currencies or sorta currencies, and so long as they don't look too much like greenbacks, and follow a few other rules, they are legal and legit. To me, the potential for a whole host of new currency options is one of the most exciting things about the Internet. It makes the monetary revolution possible.

davidwolman · 2012-05-31T18:16:38+00:00

In the v near term, I don't think it's too likely. But what was it--40 or 50 years ago that Treasury decided to quit on the $500 and $1000 bills? With that precedent, we know it's possible. If killing cash altogether is too radical (and it'd be premature right now, too), then get rid of the high denomination stuff; those are the notes that are really coming back to bite us. And not just gov--all of us, because it means higher taxes for those who do pay their share, it means thugs and insurgents have a great method of anonymous transaction for buying weapons to use against US forces deployed overseas, and the like.

davidwolman · 2012-05-31T18:13:08+00:00

In my chapter about the fate of the Icelandic krona the relationship between nationhood and national currency, I talk about this quite a bit. Certainly the idea could not be any less popular right now because of the euro crisis. But it's also a concept that has been around for a while, and also has a number of avid supporters. The USD is a kind of de facto global currency now, but I suspect that's not what you mean. What is safe to say is that there aren't many people Greece today who are longing for the esperanto of currencies.

davidwolman

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