He created incentives that 11-year-olds could relate to. (Somehow, "Come to school and you’ll be better off in 20 years," just wasn’t working.)
zzot / collective / tags / money
Tagged with “money”
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Why A Principal Created His Own Currency : Planet Money : NPR
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Episode 425: An FBI Hostage Negotiator Buys A Car : Planet Money : NPR
The fiscal cliff, for all its grand theater, really comes down to people in a room trying to come to an agreement. People doing whatever it takes to get what they want from the other side.
On today’s show, three professional negotiators walk us through techniques that members of Congress may be using right now. They explain these techniques not with textbooks, but with examples from their everyday lives.
Tagged with money psychology npr
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Nicholas Money: The Man Who Studies The Fungus Among Us : NPR
Botanist Nicholas Money’s book Mushroom takes readers inside the world of the fungal organisms that appear overnight on lawns, are occasionally poisonous and appear in everything from Alice in Wonderland to some lifesaving medications.
http://www.npr.org/2012/01/18/145339196/the-man-who-studies-the-fungus-among-us
Tagged with npr mushrooms nicholas money fungus
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The Island Of Stone Money
There’s a tiny island called Yap out in the Pacific Ocean. Economists love it because it helps answer this really basic question: What is money?
There’s no gold or silver on Yap. But hundreds of years ago, explorers from Yap found limestone deposits on an island hundreds of miles away. And they carved this limestone into huge stone discs, which they brought back across the sea on their small bamboo boats.
It’s unclear if these stones started as money. But at some point the people on Yap realized what most societies realize. They needed something that everyone agrees you can use to pay for stuff.
And like many societies, the people of Yap took the thing they had that was pretty — their version of gold — and decided that was money.
A piece of stone money was really valuable; you wouldn’t use it for some everyday purchase. You’d use it for something big — a daughter’s dowry, say.
"If somebody was in real dire straits, and something happened to their crop of food or they were running low on provisions and they had some stone money, they might trade," says Scott Fitzpatrick, an anthropologist at North Carolina State University who is an expert on Yap.
One key thing about this money: It was really heavy. A big piece could weigh more than a car.
As a result, this very concrete form of money quickly made the jump to being something very abstract.
"They often talk about the stones themselves not changing hands at all," Fitzpatrick says. "In fact, most of the time they wouldn’t."
So imagine there’s this great big stone disc sitting in a village. One person gives it to another person. But the stone doesn’t move. It’s just that everybody in the village knows the stone now has a new owner.
In fact, the stone doesn’t even need to be on the island to count as money.
One time, according to the island’s oral tradition, a work crew was bringing was bringing a giant stone coin back to yap on a boat. And just before they got back to the island, they hit a big storm. The stone wound up on the bottom of the ocean.
The crew made it back to the island and told everybody what happened. And everybody decided that the piece of stone money was still good — even though it was on the bottom of the ocean.
"So somebody today owns this piece of stone money, even though nobody’s seen it for over 100 years or more," Fitzgerald says.
This system, in the end, feels really familiar. If you go online to pay your electric bill, what’s really changing in the world?
Some digits in your bank account get shifted around, along with some digits in the power company’s bank account.
In other words, that stone money on the bottom of the ocean that you used to own now belongs to the power company.
For more:
Our headline has been used before. It’s the name both of a book about Yap, written a century ago, and a 1991 paper by the economist Milton Friedman, who compared Yap’s monetary system to the gold standard.
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The Friday Podcast: Why Do We Tip? : Planet Money : NPR
In the 16th century, coffee shops prominently displayed coin boxes with the phrase "to ensure prompt service" written on the side. If you wanted your coffee in a hurry, you dropped a little something extra in the box, and made sure the waitress saw you do it.
This, according to at least one version of history, is where tipping began.
But today, we tip after we get served, not before. And, according to one expert we talk to on today’s podcast, the quality of service we perceive makes a tiny difference in how much we tip. (The weather has a comparable influence on tip size.)
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When Cinnamon moved markets - Planet Money #148
Economist editor,Tom Standage, says if you want to get a good picture of world history, you should look at spices.
In his book, An Edible History of Humanity, Standage writes about how tall tales of carnivorous birds and flying snakes let Arab middleman charge Europeans inflated prices for cinnamon and pepper for years. Standage says it wasn’t until an Indian ship went adrift in the Red Sea that the Europeans realized there was an easier route to get all those spices they had been craving.
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Gold and the Periodic Table of the Elements : Planet Money : NPR
The periodic table lists 118 different chemical elements. And yet, for thousands of years, humans have really, really liked one of them in particular: gold. Gold has been used as money for millennia, and its price has been going through the roof.
Why gold? Why not osmium, lithium, or ruthenium?
We went to an expert to find out: Sanat Kumar, a chemical engineer at Columbia University. We asked him to take the periodic table, and start eliminating anything that wouldn’t work as money.
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How Fake Money Saved Brazil
This is a story about how an economist and his buddies tricked the people of Brazil into saving the country from rampant inflation. They had a crazy, unlikely plan, and it worked.
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The Next Generation of Microfinance
http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/the-next-generation-of-microfinance.html
Visionary Kushal Chakrabarti is providing a solution. design mind ON AIR’s Chris Sallquist spoke with Kushal, the founder and CEO of Vittana, a person-to-person micro-lending Web site that makes it possible for students, wanting to go to college in developing countries, to get loans.