mobile money

Money, Real Quick: The Story of M-PESA
by Tonny K. Omwansa , Nicholas P. Sullivan and The Guardian
Published 28 Feb 2012

To top it off, the volume of cash that goes through a busy shop on any given day can easily top $2-$3,000, so security measures are mandatory. In the Philippines, where the mobile money concept was pioneered (see Chapter 8), the huge discrepancy between airtime commissions (12%) and mobile money commissions (1%) is a big reason why mobile money has not permeated society as deeply and broadly as it has in Kenya, despite the fact that Smart Communications and Globe Telecom have been offering mobile money services since 2003. To encourage aggressive marketing by Agents and prime the business with new subscribers, Safaricom pays $1 for each new subscriber—80 cents to the Agent and 20 cents to the network manager/trainer.

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If the competition to Safaricom weakens or evaporates (in 2011 there were rumors that Essar was ready to sell its Yu business) prices are likely to remain where they are—far cheaper than money-transfer costs five years ago, but still a significant barrier to the creation of a cashless society and the promise of greater financial inclusion. Unless someone can provide competition on the mobile money and moneytransfer front, there’s no incentive for Safaricom to reduce transaction fees. There are two main policy questions driving debate today. For mobile operators, the issue is interoperability between mobile money providers. For banks, the issue is leveling the playing field with regulations for cash merchants and bank agents. Interoperability between mobile money services Most mobile money operators seek to establish themselves on a standalone basis and see interconnecting with other operators as a longer-term issue.

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“Surely this can and must be replicated in other similar countries, many of which have better starting conditions than we had in Kenya,” says Michael Joseph, who since his retirement as CEO has become a global mobile money booster for the World Bank and later Vodafone. True, but so far, false. Disappointment in the scale and impact of mobile money is real. Part of ******ebook converter DEMO Watermarks******* the problem has been caused by the expectation that mobile money would automatically and effectively “bank the unbanked.” But unlike microfinance, which was also over-hyped as a way to end poverty, mobile money must scale quickly if it is to actually take hold, let alone deliver results. Thus, in looking forward, the focus should be first on the business implementation to scale and profit, rather than the notion of financial inclusion.

Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms
by David S. Evans and Richard Schmalensee
Published 23 May 2016

This program allowed users to access loans of between KShs 50 and KShs 1 million ($0.565–$11,300), due in one to six months, at interest rates between 4 percent and 12 percent. M-PESA and the other mobile money schemes replace many of the services that traditional banks would provide. People can use mobile money as they would a depository account. They can obtain access to that account through CICO agents instead of bank branches. And they can get various financial services through their mobile money account. Although the mobile money schemes collaborate with banks for some things, they make banks irrelevant for many other things. M-PESA, on its own, introduced a payments system in mid-2013.

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Less than ten years later, in 2014, more than 84 percent of Kenyan mobile phone users, including many of the very poor, were able to use their mobile phones to transfer money to each other, to pay their bills, and to pay at stores.7 People can now also use new financial services available through their mobile money accounts to save money and take out loans, and many do.8 Increasingly, stores are accepting mobile money for payment. The way this happened in Kenya is a remarkable story of how a company figured out how to ignite a multisided platform in trying circumstances, to massively reduce important market frictions, and to provide financial services to millions of impoverished people. And it is a story of how multisided platforms—M-PESA and other mobile money schemes that have started in Kenya and elsewhere—are leapfrogging traditional industries.

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Since smartphones weren’t available in Kenya at the time, Vodafone developed a mobile money platform that would enable people to use their feature phones to send and receive “e-money.” The e-money reflected debits to the sender’s account and credits to the receiver’s account. The system puts account details onto the phone subscriber’s SIM card and uses SMS to transmit the details of the transactions between phones. Safaricom adopted this mobile money platform for Kenya. Using the Swahili word for money, pesa, it called the mobile money platform M-PESA and set it up as a subsidiary of Safaricom. M-PESA needed more than this technology, though.

The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers--And the Coming Cashless Society
by David Wolman
Published 14 Feb 2012

nl. 5 Bharti Airtel’s Pallab Mitra, from interview notes; The Economist, September 26, 2009, special report on mobile money, p. 4; and Associated Press, “More Cell Phones than Loos in India,” (Portland) Oregonian, October 31, 2010. 6 Andrew Steckl, Cincinnati University nanotechnology researcher, personal interview, December 2010. 7 “The Apparatgeist Calls,” The Economist, January 2, 2010. 8 “Calling Freedom,” The Economist, December 19, 2009. 9 GSMA, “Mobile Money for the Unbanked,” annual report (pdf sent by D. Lowther of GSMA); and http://mmublog.org/global/gsma-publish-2010-mobile-money-for-the-unbanked-annual-report-2/. 10 http://www.npr.org/2011/01/05/132679772/mobile-money-revolution-aids-kenyas-poor-economy. 11 Ignacio Mas, personal interview. 12 http://dailycaller.com/2010/04/10/kenya-owes-monetary-advances-to-imf-world-bank/; and http://allafrica.com/stories/201010240045.html. 13 http://technology.cgap.org/technologyblog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/fsd_june2009_caroline_pulver.pdf (p. 27). 14 “South Korea Ready to Hang up Cash,” BBC News, February 13, 2009. 15 “Mercy Corps Mobile Wallet Innovation Brings Purchasing Power to Haitians’ Cell Phones,” (Portland) Oregonian, December 27, 2010. 16 “Sweden Weighs Benefits of Ditching Cash,” BBC News, July 17, 2010; also “Central Bank Wants Cashless Society,” nationmultimedia.com, October 27, 2009. 17 Hitachi group, personal interview, June 2010. 18 https://www.paypal-media.com/documentdisplay.cfm?

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Others are paying for goods with airtime minutes, bypassing use of government-issued currency altogether. The mobile money revolution underway in developing countries is something that technologists refer to as a leapfrog scenario. Two of them, actually. Less-developed economies never had good landline telephone service, if at all, which meant there were minimal obstacles preventing the implementation and adoption of a superior system. Now cellphones are everywhere. That same thing is happening with mobile money and mobile banking. As one expert I spoke with likes to put it: the leading edge of this technology isn’t in Silicon Valley; it’s the African Rift Valley, West Delhi, and rural villages in Brazil.

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Any hiccup or true screw-up—in your phone, at a cellular tower, on Eko’s servers, or at the bank—can’t result in lost money or interrupted transactions. If there is even the slightest hint that mobile money might be less safe than cash in a tea canister, people will reject it. The risks are too severe, especially for people already on the margins. But keep in mind that these are matters of perceived risk weighed against benefits, not absolute security. Credit and debit cards make for an interesting comparison. Although modern-day plastic is hardly impervious to hackers or identity thieves, the security failures are infrequent enough that customers keep coming back. Mobile money, given enough time, should be able to achieve at least that level of robustness.

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance
by Eswar S. Prasad
Published 27 Sep 2021

For additional perspectives, see Tom Wilson, “Pioneering Kenya Eyes Next Stage of Mobile Money,” Financial Times, April 24, 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/130fe0cc-4b36-11e9-bde6-79eaea5acb64. See Suri and Jack (2016) for an analysis of the effects of mobile money on poverty. This is also the source for the figure on the usage of M-PESA among Kenyan households. The Bottom Line on Mobile Money One example of mobile money allegedly fueling illicit activities comes from Zimbabwe. In May 2020, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe accused mobile money operator EcoCash of running a Ponzi scheme that was devaluing the Zimbabwean dollar by facilitating overdraft facilities that were, in effect, creating counterfeit money.

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The survey found that mobile money is also used for domestic transfers of incoming international remittances, a key source of the country’s income, reflecting the links between mobile network operators and global money transfer companies. Users of mobile money in Somalia, however, face “staggering risks” according to the World Bank. These include unreliable service, lack of customer guarantees and transparency, and inadequate government oversight. Thus, as in the case of Kenya, mobile money is by itself hardly an adequate substitute for a well-functioning and inclusive financial system. While mobile money takes existing technologies and puts them to transformative uses, the latest wave of Fintech is more often characterized by new technologies, some of which are in themselves transformative.

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The phone number connected to a specific M-PESA account, for example, uniquely identifies an individual for the purpose of conducting a broad range of financial transactions. Third, mobile money provides a channel for the easy transfer of social payments to households as well as household payments for government services with less exposure to corruption. M-PESA kiosk in Nairobi, Kenya Mobile money has also provided a route for cross-border remittances and payments for commercial transactions. This is typically a costly operation, as it involves not just exchanging one currency for another but also moving money across borders. As will be discussed later in this chapter, linkages between mobile money and cross-border payment systems give households and small-scale businesses easier and cheaper ways to make such payments.

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives)
by David Birch
Published 14 Jun 2017

It’s exactly the situation in, for example, Zimbabwe today, and it looks as if private industry is going to have a go! There are several mobile money schemes there, with many banks connecting to the ‘ZimSwitch’ mobile banking platform. (As an aside, in his splendid book Good Money George Selgin asks why the private mints put so much effort and invention into creating such high-quality tokens and suggests that marketing was one of the key reasons: because high-quality tokens were good publicity – adverts for the skills of the companies involved. I wonder if mobile money services will similarly serve to advertise the competencies of mobile operators?) These tokens gained rapid acceptance and by 1795 the problem of small change was almost solved with the official (or ‘Tower’) coins trading at a discount against the private alternatives.

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The non-rational, non-calculative approach helps to explain the dynamic in Kenya, where mobile money is replacing cash but cards are not. Central Bank of Kenya statistics show a decline in the use of credit and debit cards, despite the fact that an increasing number of Kenyans hold them. There are more than ten million debit cards in Kenya (and around 160,000 credit cards) but only 4 per cent of Kenyans use credit and debit cards for shopping. The study referred to above talks about the embedding of ‘financial devices’ in social structures, remarking that ‘how cash, payment cards and mobile money are used and what they stand for are entwined issues’, using the case study of chama gatherings, where people want to be seen pooling money in a public act.

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The fact that it isn’t part of M0 is a potential problem, however, from the government’s point of view. If M-Pesa keeps growing and M0 keeps shrinking, this deprives the state of seigniorage revenue. This has indeed happened, and the Kenyan government decided to compensate with a special tax on mobile money operators (a 10 per cent duty on transaction fees for all mobile money transfer services provided by cellular phone providers, banks, money transfer agencies and other financial service providers was introduced in a 2012 Finance Act there). The predictable impact of this was that Safaricom (Kenya’s largest taxpayer) put up its M-Pesa fees by 10 per cent.

Digital Bank: Strategies for Launching or Becoming a Digital Bank
by Chris Skinner
Published 27 Aug 2013

We will launch in the markets where we think it’s a good fit and that’s a combination of the market themselves saying that the timing is right to offer the product, and the regulatory environment enabling us to do so. On a general point, our view is that if you fast forward five years you will see every local mobile operator in the developing world offer a mobile money product, where it’s allowed by regulation. If you look back, you had Smart and Globe telecom in the Philippines offering mobile money products for nearly a decade, and there have been other schemes in Korea for example, but M-Pesa really re-energised interest in mobile money systems. What we were able to show with the success in Kenya is that it was possible to reach out far beyond the existing financial systems and bank structures, by leveraging the scale of the mobile airtime distribution networks.

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By 2010, M-PESA had attracted 9.5 million customers increasing to 17 million by 2013, of which over 10 million make at least one transaction per month. Add on the other mobile money operators in Kenya and a large part of the country’s GDP is now transacted over the mobile network. For example, 142 billion Kenyan Shillings (ksh) were transacted in the month of April 2013, or $1.6 billion, which would translate into around $20 billion a year processed via the Kenyan mobile payments network in 2013. Kenya’s GDP was $37.23 billion in 2012, and so you can see how significant a proportion of the economy is now dependent upon mobile money. In addition, M-PESA converted many unbanked into banked users, with around 2.5 million bank customers in Kenya when the system launched in 2007 increasing to over ten million today.

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You only need to look at mobile densities by continent to realise how ubiquitous these devices have become. According to a 2012 survey by the Gates Foundation, the World Bank and Gallup, more than 10% of adults said they had used mobile money in the last year and, of the 20 countries surveyed, 15 were in Africa. This is illustrated particularly well by Somalia, a country which lacks a functioning government but 34% of adults use mobile money (often to receive remittances from family members abroad). The fact is anyone, anywhere can now send and receive money anywhere, anytime. In Kenya it has created financial inclusion, where 2.5 million people had bank accounts in a country of over 40 million people in 2007 increasing to over ten million today thanks to mobile payments creating credit history and credit worthiness.

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives
by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
Published 22 Apr 2013

This could mean targeting specific populations, such as wealthier subclans or influential religious leaders, with more precision and virtually no accountability. If the online data (say, transfer records for a mobile money platform) showed that a particular extended family received a comparatively large sum of money from relatives in the diaspora, local thugs could stop by and demand tribute—paid, probably, over a mobile money system as well. Today’s warlords grow rich by acting as the requisite pass-through for all sorts of valuable resources, and in the future, while drugs, minerals and money will all still matter, so too will valuable personal data.

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“We had people sleeping in the network centers”: Vittorio Colao in discussion with the authors, August 2011. Roshan, is also the country’s biggest investor and taxpayer: “Western Union and Roshan to Introduce International Mobile Money Transfer Service in Afghanistan,” Roshan, News, February 27, 2012, http://www.roshan.af/Roshan/Media_Relations/News/News_Details/12-02-27/Western_Union_and_Roshan_to_Introduce_International_Mobile_Money_Transfer_service_in_Afghanistan.aspx. Roshan employs thousands: Ibid. 8 percent stake in The New York Times: Russell Adams, “Carlos Slim Boosts Stake in New York Times Again,” Wall Street Journal, October 6, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203388804576615123528159748.html.

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Bureaucratic obstacles that prevent this level of decentralized operation today, like visa restrictions and regulations around money transfers, will become either irrelevant or be circumvented as digital solutions are discovered. Perhaps a human-rights organization with staff living in a country under heavy diplomatic sanctions will pay its employees in mobile money credits, or in an entirely digital currency. As fewer jobs require a physical presence, talented individuals will have more options available to them. Skilled young adults in Uruguay will find themselves competing for certain types of jobs against their counterparts in Orange County. Of course, just as not all jobs can or will be automated in the future, not every job can be conducted from a distance—but more can than you might think.

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do
by Brett King
Published 26 Dec 2012

Groupon, Amazon and eBay all have offerings that fit into the mobile commerce world. Mobile Money is a term that was driven by the success of financial-inclusion initiatives in many African nations, where entire financial ecosystems were built that enabled bank-like services to be delivered over a mobile device. In these ecosystems, the primary role of the service is to create a market-optimised banking network that replaces cash while enabling nations with poor infrastructure to leap forward in adoption cycles. The main difference between mobile money and other vehicles is that in this case mobile is both the transactional and customer acquisition channel, and often the mobile is the only way to interact with the business.

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US consumers’ use of cash is predicted to decline by 17 per cent between 2010 and 2015.30 In the UK, cash was seen in 73 per cent of retail transactions in 2000, but will be a fraction of that by 2018.31 Figure 1.4: Decline in Cash Use—US Forecast (Source: Aité Group) There are the great unbanked who don’t yet have a bank account and who currently rely heavily on cash and prepaid debit cards, but as we will see with M-Pesa and G-Cash (Chapter 6), this is hardly a hurdle for mobile cash and payments. The success of the Octopus card in Hong Kong, T-money in Korea, Edy and Suica in Japan, and other emerging technologies already prove the concept. What would quickly kill the need for cash in its entirety is a technical standard for mobile money that could be adopted globally by network operators and device manufacturers. Even if only 50 per cent of cash transactions are replaced by electronic stored value cards, debit cards and mobile wallets in the next five to ten years, the current ATM and branch infrastructure that supports cash becomes untenable from a cost-burden perspective.

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The main difference between mobile money and other vehicles is that in this case mobile is both the transactional and customer acquisition channel, and often the mobile is the only way to interact with the business. M-Pesa, G-Cash, WING and MTN Mobile Money are prominent examples. Mobile Banking refers to the adding of mobile as a channel for existing bank customers. In the majority of cases the features and functions of mobile banking are not dissimilar to those of Internet banking, only optimised for a smaller screen. In some cases, banks have elected to add services such as a location-based directory of branches and ATMs, and loyalty discounts. With the recent news that Barclays’ PingIt had 120,000 downloads in its first five days, that Square already has more than two million merchants on its payments platform (around a quarter of all US card merchants/retailers), that Starbucks is doing 25 per cent of its North American payments via a cardless app13—it seems like mobile payments are taking off phenomenally.

Your Computer Is on Fire
by Thomas S. Mullaney , Benjamin Peters , Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip
Published 9 Mar 2021

Jake Kendall et al., “An Emerging Platform: From Money Transfer System to Mobile Money Ecosystem,” Innovations 6, no. 4 (2012): 51. 35. Eric Wainaina, “42% of Kenya GDP Transacted on M-Pesa and 9 Takeaways from Safaricom Results,” Techweez: Technology News & Reviews (May 7, 2015), http://www.techweez.com/2015/05/07/ten-takeaways-safaricom-2015-results/. 36. Nick Hughes and Susie Lonie, “M-Pesa: Mobile Money for the ‘Unbanked,’” Innovations 2 (2007); Sibel Kusimba, Gabriel Kunyu, and Elizabeth Gross, “Social Networks of Mobile Money in Kenya,” in Money at the Margins: Global Perspectives on Technology, Financial Inclusion, and Design, ed.

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Other developers built better interfaces between the core and the complementary components, leading to M-Pesa-based financial services such as pension schemes, medical savings plans, and insurance offerings. This “mobile money ecosystem” is a kind of parallel universe to traditional banking.38 Indeed, today a Google search on M-Pesa categorizes it simply as a “bank.” Is the short-cycle temporality of platforms and second-order systems the future of infrastructure? M-Pesa went from drawing board to multibillion-dollar business in less than ten years. More importantly for my argument, M-Pesa rapidly acquired the status of fundamental infrastructure for the majority of Kenyan adults, serving as a de facto national banking system. According to one specialist in mobile money, “Africa is the Silicon Valley of banking.

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Killian Fox, “Africa’s Mobile Economic Revolution,” Guardian (July 24, 2011), https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jul/24/mobile-phones-africa-microfinance-farming. 40. Tawneet Suri and William Jack, “The Long-Run Poverty and Gender Impacts of Mobile Money,” Science 354, no. 6317 (2016). 41. Milford Bateman, Maren Duvendack, and Nicholas Loubere, “Is Fin-Tech the New Panacea for Poverty Alleviation and Local Development? Contesting Suri and Jack’s M-Pesa Findings Published in Science,” Review of African Political Economy (2019); Kusimba, Kunyu, and Gross, “Social Networks of Mobile Money in Kenya.” 42. Anne Helmond, “The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready,” Social Media + Society 1, no. 2 (2015). 43.

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Feb 2018

In yet another project from MIT Media Lab: Details on various projects from MIT’s Media Lab come from Michael Casey’s work with these groups; additional information can be found on the lab’s Web site: https://www.media.mit.edu/. there are now ninety-three countries with some form of mobile-money service: GSMA’s Mobile Money Deployment Tracker: http://www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/m4d-tracker/mobile-money-deployment-tracker. “Between 60 percent and 90 percent of [mobile] accounts…”: Carol Realini, “Unbanked Consumers Strive for Better Banking Services,” www.carolrealini.com, February 7, 2015, http://www.carolrealini.com/unbanked-consumers-better-banking-services/.

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Money Everyone Can Use Much of the hope that the development community has recently invested in the prospect for financial inclusion stems from the rapid expansion of mobile phone usage in the developing world and—with that—of mobile money systems. Following the trailblazing launch of M-Pesa in Kenya in 2007, there are now ninety-three countries with some form of mobile-money services, with 271 “live” deployments, and 101 more planned. But many are still only scratching the surface of the potential market. In fact, the statistics belie a deeper problem. “Between 60 percent and 90 percent of [mobile] accounts opened by new banking customers fall dormant almost immediately without a single transaction,” writes mobile payments expert Carol Realini.

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Banks, too often, are actually the problem—or at least the regulatory and risk-management model in which they operate is the problem. Maybe getting people into them shouldn’t be the goal at all. Mobile credit, in particular, has been hard to expand. And here too the banking paradigm is a hindrance. Once credit is involved, mobile money platforms like M-Pesa, which must be backed in aggregate by each country’s financial system, fall back on the classic loan approval models of the traditional banking world. As such, inferior proofs of identity and subjective, poorly defined measures of creditworthiness become barriers to entry, especially once the dominant telecom providers use their privileged position as gatekeepers of these new e-monetary systems to charge exorbitant fees.

The Social Life of Money
by Nigel Dodd
Published 14 May 2014

Google Wallet and Wave and Pay are forms of “mobile money” that have been developing alongside the growth of alternative monies. Mobile monies appeal to users because they remove from the act of payment the inconveniences and impositions associated with traditional banking. Some forms of mobile money do this explicitly. Take the M-Pesa system, which mainly operates in Kenya, Tanzania, Afghanistan, South Africa, and India. M-Pesa48 uses mobile phones to transfer money, advertising itself as a cheap and easy way to move money without needing banks (or, in many cases, not visiting bank branches). Other forms of mobile money, such as Square Wallet, still use banks but eliminate most of the aggravation that usually come with banks.49 With Square, once a merchant and a customer have both registered for the service, the merchant needs only the customer’s name; the customer’s photograph appears on the merchant’s terminal while the system manages the details, sending the customer a text message to confirm.

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What this slice amounts to, essentially, is a significant “grab” for a major part of money’s infrastructure, the global payment networks, by private capital. There is an important irony here because although the emergence of mobile money appeals to money’s users for a mixture of reasons—speed and convenience are two—a significant part of their selling point is the appearance that mobile money is loosening the grip of the state over money, primarily by undermining its capacity to exploit its formal rights over money’s creation for financial advantage—otherwise known as tax. From this point of view, cash is the enemy of human freedom (Wolman 2012): never mind that it is corporations such as Visa who are in the vanguard of the “struggle” against this “enemy.”

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., Routledge. Balibar, E. (2004). We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press. Baptiste, E., H. A. Horst, and E. B. Taylor (2010). “Mobile Money in Haiti: Potentials and Challenges.” Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion Report, April 2011. www.imtfi.uci.edu/files/imtfi/docs/2012/taylor_baptiste_horst_haiti_mobile_money.pdf, accessed March 3, 2014. Barbalet, J. (2008). Weber, Passion and Profits: “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” in Context, Cambridge, U.K., Cambridge University Press. Barber, B. (1995).

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane
by Brett King
Published 5 May 2016

That is more than double what the top five banks have in terms of the number of individual customers with bank accounts. If you include M-Pesa, MTN Mobile Money, bKash, GCash and other mobile money services, you can easily add another 300 million account holders. Figure 9.2: Growth in mobile money users globally (Source: Various) That means quite simply that mobile bank accounts, mobile value stores or mobile wallets already outnumber traditional bank accounts two to one. Yes, you read that correctly. Yet the growth in mobile money accounts is set to surge further in the next few years, and most of this growth will be fuelled by people using their phone as their primary or sole means of payment.

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If you look at Kenya with less than 50 branches per 1 million people and financial inclusion4 of 20 per cent through the traditional bank system, the obvious conclusion would be that this country needs more branches. That is, until you learn that since 2006 Kenya’s financial inclusion has grown to a whopping 85 per cent thanks to the M-Pesa mobile phone or mobile money account. It’s pretty simple. If you allow someone who has no banking services access to basic banking via a mobile money account on a smartphone or feature phone, this will change his or her life dramatically. In the case of M-Pesa, it means that mobile money users are likely to save 25 per cent more annually5 than their unbanked contemporaries. If you insist that someone has to have a driving licence or identity document and then needs to get to a physical branch to fill out an application form in order to open a bank account, you are actually increasing the likelihood of financial exclusion.

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up
by Philip N. Howard
Published 27 Apr 2015

Lita Person, Mobile Wallet (NFC, Digital Wallet) Market (Applications, Mode of Payment, Stakeholders, and Geography)—Global Share, Size, Industry Analysis, Trends, Opportunities, Growth, and Forecast, 2012–2020 (Portland, OR: Allied Market Research, November 2013), accessed September 30, 2014, http://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/mobile-wallet-market; Marion Williams, “The Regulatory Tension over Mobile Money,” Australian Banking and Finance, February 17, 2014, accessed September 30, 2014, http://www.australianbankingfinance.com/banking/the-regulatory-tension-over-mobile-money/. 30. “University of Cumbria Becomes First in World to Accept Tuition Fees in Bitcoin,” India Today, January 22, 2014, accessed September 30, 2014, http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/british-university-to-accept-tuition-fees-in-bitcoin/1/339087.html. 31.

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The financial services sector expects government investment in the internet, and when countries invest in information infrastructure, many industries benefit. The perception of technical innovation, the size of the information economy, and the reach of high-tech industries are all important to the evaluation of modern economic wealth. This new sense of valuation is what drives the startling rise of virtual currencies, mobile money, and other digital exchanges. Such virtual currencies are designed to free money, or more abstractly “value,” from the control of a particular country’s central bank. The World Bank estimates that by 2020, the economy of mobile-phone money exchanges might top $5 trillion and include the two billion people who otherwise have no access to banks.29 Some of the oldest institutions around—universities—have started accepting virtual currencies like Bitcoins for tuition.30 It was easier for governments to hoard and guard their gold than it is data, information infrastructure, and intellectual property.

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In many countries, the government is also the largest employer. And payroll is a big target for corrupt officials. So any system that helps the government pay its employees properly makes the entire economy a little more transparent and efficient. In Afghanistan, when the government started paying its police officers using “mobile money” through mobile phones, many officers were surprised at the size of their paychecks. Some thought they had been given a raise, but it turns out that the new system simply cut out the middlemen who had long been taking their cut.69 Local bureaucrats could no longer carve out their portion, and funds were suddenly flowing right from the public purse to the public employees.

Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter
by Dr. Dan Ariely and Jeff Kreisler
Published 7 Nov 2017

SCRATCH AND WIN Since today’s electronic wallets make us less aware of the pain of paying in an effort to increase spending, we could raise our spending awareness, which would increase the pain of paying, which would then reduce spending and increase savings. We don’t think about saving money very often. When we finally do think about it, our thoughts rarely lead us to save more. To test the extent that the design of digital wallets could influence behavior, Dan and his colleagues conducted a large-scale experiment with thousands of customers of a mobile money-saving system in Kenya. Some participants received two text messages every week: one at the start of the week to remind them to save and another one at the end of the week with a summary of their savings. Other participants got slightly different text reminders: It was framed like it came from their kid, asking them to save for “our future.”

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See also opportunity costs Amazon.com, 76, 84 Amir, On, 141 anchoring, 93–109 overview, 100–102, 108, 109, 218–19 anchor price influence, 95–99, 200 arbitrary coherence, 106–8, 200, 202 and confirmation bias, 100 effect of knowledge vs. ignorance, 103–6 herding and self-herding, 99–100 listing price example, 93–95, 98, 103 reservation price, 96–97 and susceptibility to suggestion, 95–96, 97–98 anticipation period and expectations, 170, 171–72 AOL, 78–79 apps (applications) expectations and pricing of, 87–88, 102–3, 144 “I Am Rich” iPhone app, 200 overcoming temptations, 196 too much information from, 241–42 for tracking opportunity costs, 241 arbitrary coherence, 106–8, 200, 202 Ariely, Dan anchoring/pricing research, 104–5 arbitrary coherence experiments, 106–8, 200 on arousal, 191–92 coffee condiments experiment, 178 creating expectations experiment, 175–76 data recovery value research, 141 endowment effect experiments, 117 hepatitis C treatment, 235 high price as high value research, 199 Ikea effect experiments, 116 on intelligence and decision making, 34–36 mobile money-saving system experiment in Kenya, 242–44 opportunity cost research at Toyota dealership, 11–12 on ritualistic benefit of Airborne, 180 sofa for torturing visitors, 197–98 sports conference, 194–95 sunk cost game, 127–28 Arkes, Hal, 129 arms race opportunity costs, 11 arousal and self-control, 191–92 artists, 142–43, 205 Ashraf, Nava, 232 Assael, Salvador, 28 Aydinli, Aylin, 33 Belsky, Gary, 46 Benartzi, Shlomo, 123–25 benchmarking executive pay, 101–2 Bertini, Marco, 33, 178 Betsy the dairy cow, 155–56 black pearls’ value, 28, 102 Blumer, Catherine, 129 Boggs, Wade, 180, 180n Boston pothole repair website, 145 Bradley, Tom and Rachel, 111–13, 114, 116–17, 120, 130 branding and expectations, 174–76 Broadway show ticket analogy, 43–44 budgets overview, 217 example of, 41–42 irrational basis for, 47 and mental accounting, 43, 44–46, 52–53 simplifying the decision making process, 48–49 See also financial decision-making bundled products, 36–38 car dealerships, 11–12, 222–23 Carmon, Ziv, 117, 175–76, 199 cell phone purchase comparisons, 37–38, 202–3 child development accounts (CDAs), 247 chocolate industry, 155 Coca-Cola Company, 137 coffee industry, 155 college savings accounts, effects of, 246 colonoscopy experience, 66, 67 commercial interests car dealerships, 222–23 self-awareness as barrier to, 257–58 strategic planning of, 36, 196 technology working against saving money, 239–41 See also advertising common good, money as a, 8 compartmentalizing, 48, 217.

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., 47–48 responses to perceived unfairness, 131–34, 135–39 Ten Financial Sins, 52 tunnel vision, 11–12 See also feelings and emotions human resources (HR) office, 228–29 Ikea effect, 116 illusion of wealth, 249–51 I’m Telling You for the Last Time (Seinfeld), 68–69 infomercials, 126 integrative creative accounting, 55–56 internal vs. external anchors, 106 investments bonds, 125 dilution of pain of paying management fees, 83 ignoring your portfolio, 249 and loss aversion, 123–25 stock market, 123–25, 169 sunk costs, 126–30 wine as investment, 57–58 iPad pricing, 104 irrational valuations, 16–18 Ivester, Douglas, 137 JC Penney “sales” on high priced items, 21–24 Jobs, Steve, 104 Johnson, Ron, 22–23 Jones, George, 3–6, 84 Karlan, Dean, 232 Kayak.com, 145 Kenya, mobile money-saving system experiments in, 242–44 King, Cheryl, 149–52 Kreisler, Jeff and artisanal moonshine, 159–60 benefits of Princeton education, 176 campaign speech for fifth-grade student council, 256 and consumption vocabulary, 157–58 Dr. Seuss derivative, 15 family asking “What does it pay?

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet
by Varun Sivaram
Published 2 Mar 2018

The combination of supportive public policies and vibrant business-model innovation could provide hope—and a pathway toward modern energy access—for Grace’s family and countless others like it. Notes 1.  “Off-Grid Electric: Overview.” Crunchbase, Inc. 2017, https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/off-grid-electric#/entity. 2.  Varun Mehra, “Mobile Money: The Answer to Sustaining Revenue for Off-Grid Energy Service Providers?” The Energy Collective, November 20, 2015, http://www.theenergycollective.com/vmehra813/2286309/mobile-money-answer-sustaining-revenue-grid-energy-service-providers. 3.  “Off-Grid and Mini-Grid: Q1 2017 Market Outlook,” Bloomberg New Energy Finance, January 5, 2017, https://about.bnef.com/blog/off-grid-mini-grid-q1-2017-market-outlook/. 4.  

…

Around this time, Patrick tends to discover that his cell phone battery is out of charge and treks into town to a communal charging kiosk. His small farming business demands that he stay in close contact with vendors in the neighboring village. Aside from coordinating logistics with them at odd hours, he constantly checks market prices and executes transactions via mobile money payments through his cell phone. To keep his phone charged, Patrick forks over around $4 per month. When one day a salesman knocks on the door, advertising a compact solar-powered system that will run three LED lightbulbs and charge a phone, Grace is understandably skeptical. But the man, a sales agent sent by the aptly named Off-Grid Electric, offers to immediately slash the family’s monthly energy spending from $12 to $5 per month.

…

On top of replacing the noxious kerosene fumes and inconvenient charging trips, the solar system—a 12-watt panel hooked up to a battery and a charge controller, plus three light-emitting diode (LED) lights—comes with free maintenance and service for as long as the family uses the system. It goes without saying that payments are made by mobile money. If they are not made on time, the system will shut down remotely. Six months later, Grace and her family are hooked. They plan to upgrade to the $15 per month plan to supersize their solar system and outfit a new room they are building with two more LED lights, a radio, and a television. And Grace is eyeing a brand new offering—an electric sewing machine with which she can start her own small tailoring business.

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge
by Matt Ridley

What Caused the Financial Crisis. University of Pennsylvania Press. Wallison, Peter 2011. The true story of the financial crisis. American Spectator May 2011. And Booth, Philip (ed.) 2009. Verdict on the Crash. IEA. On the Cantillon Effect, Frisby, Dominic 2013. Life After the State. Unbound. On mobile money, Why does Kenya lead the world in mobile money?. economist.com 27 May 2013. On the Federal Reserve, Selgin, G., Lastrapes, W.D. and White, L.H. 2010. Has the Fed been a Failure? Cato Working Paper, Cato.org. Hsieh, Chang-Tai and Romer, Christina D. 2006. Was the Federal Reserve Constrained by the Gold Standard During the Great Depression?

…

Peter Wallison, a member of the government’s Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, said something similar: ‘The financial crisis was not caused by weak or ineffective regulation. On the contrary, the financial crisis of 2008 was caused by government housing policies.’ The sub-prime crisis was a creationist, not an evolutionary phenomenon. The evolution of mobile money The government monopoly of money leads not just to the suppression of innovation and experiment, not just to inflation and debasement, not just to financial crises, but to inequality too. As Dominic Frisby points out in his book Life After the State, opportunities in finance ripple outwards from the Treasury.

…

Far more Kenyans have access to financial saving and payment systems through their mobile phones than through conventional bank accounts. A key ingredient in the success of the system in Kenya was that the regulator was kept out of the way, allowing the system to evolve. Not for want of trying: the banks have lobbied politicians to subject M-Pesa to more regulation. Elsewhere in the world, heavy-handed regulation stifled mobile money at birth. During Kenya’s post-election violence in 2008, mobile-phone balances seemed a lot safer than cash, so the system gained further popularity. Soon it reached the critical mass where enough people were using M-Pesa that it made sense to join them, so as to be able to transact business with them.

The Great Firewall of China
by James Griffiths;
Published 15 Jan 2018

Most pernicious, however, was the financial effect the four-day ban had on many Ugandans. Election day was a bank holiday, and so many Ugandans had topped up their mobile money accounts in order to keep making payments. Millions of Ugandans used mobile money to pay for everything from utilities and school fees to groceries. When the internet shutdown kicked in, it also blocked mobile payments, cutting off many Ugandans from their money and leaving them unable to pay for basic services for several days.41 Even worse off were small business owners, who relied on mobile money to receive payments and operated on whisper-thin margins. “It’s like shutting down a banking system,” one observer said at the time.

…

Atuhaire, ‘How Ugandans overturned an election day social media blackout’, Motherboard, 24 February 2016, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nz7zv8/uganda-election-day-social-media-blackout-backlash-mobile-payments 40Hopper, ‘“Tweeting from Canada, voting in Uganda”’. 41C. Bold and R. Pillai, ‘The impact of shutting down mobile money in Uganda’, Consultative Group to Assist the Poor, 7 March 2016, http://www.cgap.org/blog/impact-shutting-down-mobile-money-uganda 42Phillips and Atuhaire, ‘How Ugandans overturned an election day social media blackout’. 43F. Karimi, S. Ntale and G. Botelho, ‘Uganda leader Museveni declared winner – despite issues, tensions’, CNN, 21 February 2016, https://edition.cnn.com/2016/02/20/africa/uganda-election/ 44‘Tension in Kampala after Ugandan opposition leader Kizza Besigye swore himself in as the president’ [video], KTN News Kenya, 11 May 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down
by Tom Standage
Published 27 Nov 2018

A current problem Sources: IEA; GSMA Mobile phones have transformed the lives of hundreds of millions for whom they were the first, and often the only, way to connect with the outside world. They have made it possible for poor countries to leapfrog much more than landline telephony. Mobile-money services, which enable people to send cash straight from their phones, have in effect created personal bank accounts that people can carry in their pockets. By one estimate, the M-Pesa mobile-money system alone lifted about 2% of Kenyan households out of poverty between 2008 and 2014. Technology cannot solve all of Africa’s problems, but it can help with some of them. Why self-driving cars will mostly be shared, not owned When will you be able to buy a driverless car that will work anywhere?

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For more explainers and charts from The Economist, visit economist.com Index A Africa child marriage 84 democracy 40 gay and lesbian rights 73, 74 Guinea 32 mobile phones 175–6 see also individual countries agriculture 121–2 Aguiar, Mark 169 air pollution 143–4 air travel and drones 187–8 flight delays 38–9 Akitu (festival) 233 alcohol beer consumption 105–6 consumption in Britain 48, 101–2 craft breweries 97–8 drink-driving 179–80 wine glasses 101–2 Alexa (voice assistant) 225 Algeria food subsidies 31 gay and lesbian rights 73 All I Want for Christmas Is You (Carey) 243 alphabet 217–18 Alternative for Germany (AfD) 223, 224 Alzheimer’s disease 140 Amazon (company) 225 America see United States and 227–8 Angola 73, 74 animals blood transfusions 139–40 dog meat 91–2 gene drives 153–4 size and velocity 163–4 and water pollution 149–50 wolves 161–2 Arctic 147–8 Argentina gay and lesbian rights 73 lemons 95–6 lithium 17–18 Ariel, Barak 191 Arizona 85 arms trade 19–20 Asia belt and road initiative 117–18 high-net-worth individuals 53 wheat consumption 109–10 see also individual countries Assange, Julian 81–3 asteroids 185–6 augmented reality (AR) 181–2 August 239–40 Australia avocados 89 forests 145 inheritance tax 119 lithium 17, 18 shark attacks 201–2 autonomous vehicles (AVs) 177–8 Autor, David 79 avocados 89–90 B Babylonians 233 Baltimore 99 Bangladesh 156 bank notes 133–4 Bateman, Tim 48 beer consumption 105–6 craft breweries 97–8 Beijing air pollution 143–4 dogs 92 belt and road initiative 117–18 betting 209–10 Bier, Ethan 153 Bils, Mark 169 birds and aircraft 187 guinea fowl 32–3 birth rates Europe 81–3 United States 79–80 black money 133–4 Black Power 34, 35 Blade Runner 208 blood transfusions 139–40 board games 199–200 body cameras 191–2 Boko Haram 5, 15–16 Bolivia 17–18 Bollettieri, Nick 197 bookmakers 209–10 Borra, Cristina 75 Bosnia 221–2 brain computers 167–8 Brazil beer consumption 105, 106 Christmas music 243, 244 end-of-life care 141–2 gay and lesbian rights 73 murder rate 45, 46 shark attacks 202 breweries 97–8 Brexit, and car colours 49–50 brides bride price 5 diamonds 13–14 Britain alcohol consumption 101–2 car colours 49–50 Christmas music 244 cigarette sales 23–4 craft breweries 98 crime 47–8 Easter 238 gay population 70–72 housing material 8 inheritance tax 119 Irish immigration 235 life expectancy 125 manufacturing jobs 131 national identity 223–4 new-year resolutions 234 police body cameras 191 sexual harassment 67, 68, 69 sperm donation 61 see also Scotland Brookings Institution 21 Browning, Martin 75 bubonic plague 157–8 Bush, George W. 119 C cables, undersea 193–4 California and Argentine lemons 95, 96 avocados 90 cameras 191–2 Canada diamonds 13 drones 188 lithium 17 national identity 223–4 capitalism, and birth rates 81–2 Carey, Mariah 243 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 21 cars colours 49–50 self-driving 177–8 Caruana, Fabiano 206 Charles, Kerwin 169 cheetahs 163, 164 chess 205–6 Chetty, Raj 113 Chicago 100 children birth rates 79–80, 81–3 child marriage 84–5 in China 56–7 crime 47–8 and gender pay gap 115–16, 135–6 obesity 93–4 Chile gay and lesbian rights 73 lithium 17–18 China air pollution 143–5 arms sales 19–20 avocados 89 beer consumption 105 belt and road initiative 117–18 childhood obesity 93 construction 7 dog meat 91–2 dragon children 56–7 flight delays 38–9 foreign waste 159–60 lithium 17 rice consumption 109–10 Choi, Roy 99 Christian, Cornelius 26 Christianity Easter 237–8 new year 233–4 Christmas 246–7 music 243–5 cigarettes affordability 151–2 black market 23–4 cities, murder rates 44–6 Citizen Kane 207 citrus wars 95–6 civil wars 5 Clarke, Arthur C. 183 Coase, Ronald 127, 128 cocaine 44 cochlear implants 167 Cohen, Jake 203 Colen, Liesbeth 106 colleges, US 113–14 Colombia 45 colours, cars 49–50 commodities 123–4 companies 127–8 computers augmented reality 181–2 brain computers 167–8 emojis 215–16 and languages 225–6 spam e-mail 189–90 Connecticut 85 Connors, Jimmy 197 contracts 127–8 Costa Rica 89 couples career and family perception gap 77–8 housework 75–6 see also marriage cows 149–50 craft breweries 97–8 crime and avocados 89–90 and dog meat 91–2 murder rates 44–6 young Britons 47–8 CRISPR-Cas9 153 Croatia 222 Croato-Serbian 221–2 D Daily-Diamond, Christopher 9–10 Davis, Mark 216 De Beers 13–14 death 141–2 death taxes 119–20 democracy 40–41 Deng Xiaoping 117 Denmark career and family perception gap 78 gender pay gap 135–6 sex reassignment 65 Denver 99 Devon 72 diamonds 13–14, 124 digitally remastering 207–8 Discovery Channel 163–4 diseases 157–8 dog meat 91–2 Dorn, David 79 Dr Strangelove 207 dragon children 56–7 drink see alcohol drink-driving 179–80 driverless cars 177–8 drones and aircraft 187–8 and sharks 201 drugs cocaine trafficking 44 young Britons 48 D’Souza, Kiran 187 E e-mail 189–90 earnings, gender pay gap 115–16, 135–6 Easter 237–8 economy and birth rates 79–80, 81–2 and car colours 49–50 and witch-hunting 25–6 education and American rich 113–14 dragon children 56–7 Egal, Muhammad Haji Ibrahim 40–41 Egypt gay and lesbian rights 73 marriage 5 new-year resolutions 233 El Paso 100 El Salvador 44, 45 emojis 215–16 employment gender pay gap 115–16, 135–6 and gender perception gap 77–8 job tenure 129–30 in manufacturing 131–2 video games and unemployment 169–70 English language letter names 217–18 Papua New Guinea 219 environment air pollution 143–4 Arctic sea ice 147–8 and food packaging 103–4 waste 159–60 water pollution 149–50 Equatorial Guinea 32 Eritrea 40 Ethiopia 40 Europe craft breweries 97–8 summer holidays 239–40 see also individual countries Everson, Michael 216 exorcism 36–7 F Facebook augmented reality 182 undersea cables 193 FANUC 171, 172 Federer, Roger 197 feminism, and birth rates 81–2 fertility rates see birth rates festivals Christmas 246–7 Christmas music 243–5 new-year 233–4 Feuillet, Catherine 108 films 207–8 firms 127–8 5G 173–4 flight delays 38–9 Florida and Argentine lemons 95 child marriage 85 Foley, William 220 food avocados and crime 89–90 dog meat 91–2 lemons 95–6 wheat consumption 109–10 wheat genome 107–8 food packaging 103–4 food trucks 99–100 football clubs 211–12 football transfers 203–4 forests 145–6, 162 Fountains of Paradise, The (Clarke) 183 fracking 79–80 France career and family perception gap 78 Christmas music 244 exorcism 36–7 gender-inclusive language 229–30 job tenure 130 sex reassignment 66 sexual harassment 68–9 witch-hunting 26, 27 wolves 161–2 G gambling 209–10 games, and unemployment 169–70 Gandhi, Mahatma 155 gang members 34–5 Gantz, Valentino 153 gas 124 gay population 70–72 gay rights, attitudes to 73–4 gender sex reassignment 65–6 see also men; women gender equality and birth rates 81–2 in language 229–30 gender pay gap 115–16, 135–6 gene drives 153–4 Genghis Khan 42 genome, wheat 107–8 ger districts 42–3 Germany beer consumption 105 job tenure 130 national identity 223–4 sexual harassment 68, 69 vocational training 132 witch-hunting 26, 27 Ghana 73 gig economy 128, 130 glasses, wine glasses 101–2 Goddard, Ceri 72 Google 193 Graduate, The 207 Greece forests 145 national identity 223–4 sex reassignment 65 smoking ban 152 Gregg, Christine 9–10 grunting 197–8 Guatemala 45 Guinea 32 guinea fowl 32–3 guinea pig 32 Guinea-Bissau 32 Guo Peng 91–2 Guyana 32 H Haiti 5 Hale, Sarah Josepha 242 Hanson, Gordon 79 Hawaii ’Oumuamua 185 porn consumption 63–4 health child obesity 93–4 life expectancy 125–6 plague 157–8 and sanitation 155 high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) 53 Hiri Motu 219 holidays Easter 237–8 St Patrick’s Day 235–6 summer holidays 239–40 Thanksgiving 241–2 HoloLens 181–2 homicide 44–6 homosexuality attitudes to 73–4 UK 70–72 Honduras 44, 45 Hong Kong 56 housework 75–6, 77–8 Hudson, Valerie 5 Hungary 223–4 Hurst, Erik 169 I ice 147–8 Ikolo, Prince Anthony 199 India bank notes 133–4 inheritance tax 119 languages 219 rice consumption 109 sand mafia 7 sanitation problems 155–6 Indonesia polygamy and civil war 5 rice consumption 109–10 inheritance taxes 119–20 interest rates 51–2 interpunct 229–30 Ireland aitch 218 forests 145 St Patrick’s Day 235–6 same-sex marriage 73 sex reassignment 65 Italy birth rate 82 end of life care 141–2 forests 145 job tenure 130 life expectancy 126 J Jacob, Nitya 156 Jamaica 45 Japan 141–2 Jighere, Wellington 199 job tenure 129–30 jobs see employment Johnson, Bryan 168 junk mail 189 K Kazakhstan 6 Kearney, Melissa 79–80 Kennedy, John F. 12 Kenya democracy 40 mobile-money systems 176 Kiribati 7 Kleven, Henrik 135–6 knots 9–10 Kohler, Timothy 121 Kyrgyzstan 6 L laces 9–10 Lagos 199 Landais, Camille 135–6 languages and computers 225–6 gender-inclusive 229–30 letter names 217–18 and national identity 223–4 Papua New Guinea 219–20 Serbo-Croatian 221–2 Unicode 215 World Bank writing style 227–8 Latimer, Hugh 246 Leeson, Peter 26 leisure board games in Nigeria 199–200 chess 205–6 gambling 209–10 video games and unemployment 169–70 see also festivals; holidays lemons 95–6 letter names 217–18 Libya 31 life expectancy 125–6 Lincoln, Abraham 242 lithium 17–18 London 71, 72 longevity 125–6 Lozère 161–2 Lucas, George 208 M McEnroe, John 197 McGregor, Andrew 204 machine learning 225–6 Macri, Mauricio 95, 96 Macron, Emmanuel 143 Madagascar 158 Madison, James 242 MagicLeap 182 Maine 216 Malaysia 56 Maldives 7 Mali 31 Malta 65 Manchester United 211–12 manufacturing jobs 131–2 robots 171–2 summer holidays 239 Maori 34–5 marriage child marriage 84–5 polygamy 5–6 same-sex relationships 73–4 see also couples Marteau, Theresa 101–2 Marx, Karl 123 Maryland 85 Massachusetts child marriage 85 Christmas 246 Matfess, Hilary 5, 15 meat dog meat 91–2 packaging 103–4 mega-rich 53 men career and family 77–8 housework 75–6 job tenure 129–30 life expectancy 125 polygamy 5–6 sexual harassment by 67–9 video games and unemployment 169 Mexico avocados 89, 90 gay and lesbian rights 73 murder rate 44, 45 microbreweries 97–8 Microsoft HoloLens 181–2 undersea cables 193 migration, and birth rates 81–3 mining diamonds 13–14 sand 7–8 mobile phones Africa 175–6 5G 173–4 Mocan, Naci 56–7 Mongolia 42–3 Mongrel Mob 34 Monopoly (board game) 199, 200 Monty Python and the Holy Grail 25 Moore, Clement Clarke 247 Moretti, Franco 228 Morocco 7 Moscato, Philippe 36 movies 207–8 Mozambique 73 murder rates 44–6 music, Christmas 243–5 Musk, Elon 168 Myanmar 118 N Nadal, Rafael 197 national identity 223–4 natural gas 124 Netherlands gender 66 national identity 223–4 neurostimulators 167 New Jersey 85 New Mexico 157–8 New York (state), child marriage 85 New York City drink-driving 179–80 food trucks 99–100 New Zealand avocados 89 gang members 34–5 gene drives 154 water pollution 149–50 new-year resolutions 233–4 Neymar 203, 204 Nigeria board games 199–200 Boko Haram 5, 15–16 population 54–5 Nissenbaum, Stephen 247 Northern Ireland 218 Norway Christmas music 243 inheritance tax 119 life expectancy 125, 126 sex reassignment 65 Nucci, Alessandra 36 O obesity 93–4 oceans see seas Odimegwu, Festus 54 O’Reilly, Oliver 9–10 Ortiz de Retez, Yñigo 32 Oster, Emily 25–6 ostriches 163, 164 ’Oumuamua 185–6 P packaging 103–4 Pakistan 5 Palombi, Francis 161 Papua New Guinea languages 219–20 name 32 Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) 203 Passover 237 pasta 31 pay, gender pay gap 115–16, 135–6 Peck, Jessica Lynn 179–80 Pennsylvania 85 Peru 90 Pestre, Dominique 228 Pew Research Centre 22 Phelps, Michael 163–4 Philippe, Édouard 230 phishing 189 Phoenix, Arizona 177 Pilgrims 241 plague 157–8 Plastic China 159 police, body cameras 191–2 pollution air pollution 143–4 water pollution 149–50 polygamy 5–6 pornography and Britain’s gay population 70–72 and Hawaii missile alert 63–4 Portugal 145 Puerto Rico 45 punctuation marks 229–30 Q Qatar 19 R ransomware 190 Ravenscroft, George 101 Real Madrid 211 religious observance and birth rates 81–2 and Christmas music 244 remastering 207–8 Reynolds, Andrew 70 Rhodes, Cecil 13 rice 109–10 rich high-net-worth individuals 53 US 113–14 ride-hailing apps and drink-driving 179–80 see also Uber RIWI 73–4 robotaxis 177–8 robots 171–2 Rogers, Dan 240 Romania birth rate 81 life expectancy 125 Romans 233 Romer, Paul 227–8 Ross, Hana 23 Royal United Services Institute 21 Russ, Jacob 26 Russia arms sales 20 beer consumption 105, 106 fertility rate 81 Rwanda 40 S Sahara 31 St Louis 205–6 St Patrick’s Day 235–6 salt, in seas 11–12 same-sex relationships 73–4 San Antonio 100 sand 7–8 sanitation 155–6 Saudi Arabia 19 Scotland, witch-hunting 25–6, 27 Scott, Keith Lamont 191 Scrabble (board game) 199 seas Arctic sea ice 147–8 salty 11–12 undersea cables 193–4 secularism, and birth rates 81–2 Seles, Monica 197 self-driving cars 177–8 Serbia 222 Serbo-Croatian 221–2 Sevilla, Almudena 75 sex reassignment 65–6 sexual harassment 67–9, 230 Sharapova, Maria 197 sharks deterring attacks 201–2 racing humans 163–4 shipping 148 shoelaces 9–10 Silk Road 117–18 Singapore dragon children 56 land reclamation 7, 8 rice consumption 110 single people, housework 75–6 Sinquefeld, Rex 205 smart glasses 181–2 Smith, Adam 127 smoking black market for cigarettes 23–4 efforts to curb 151–2 smuggling 31 Sogaard, Jakob 135–6 Somalia 40 Somaliland 40–41 South Africa childhood obesity 93 diamonds 13 gay and lesbian rights 73 murder rate 45, 46 South Korea arms sales 20 rice consumption 110 South Sudan failed state 40 polygamy 5 space elevators 183–4 spaghetti 31 Spain forests 145 gay and lesbian rights 73 job tenure 130 spam e-mail 189–90 sperm banks 61–2 sport football clubs 211–12 football transfers 203–4 grunting in tennis 197–8 Sri Lanka 118 Star Wars 208 sterilisation 65–6 Strasbourg 26 submarine cables 193–4 Sudan 40 suicide-bombers 15–16 summer holidays 239–40 Sutton Trust 22 Sweden Christmas music 243, 244 gay and lesbian rights 73 homophobia 70 inheritance tax 119 overpayment of taxes 51–2 sex reassignment 65 sexual harassment 67–8 Swinnen, Johan 106 Switzerland sex reassignment 65 witch-hunting 26, 27 T Taiwan dog meat 91 dragon children 56 Tamil Tigers 15 Tanzania 40 taxes death taxes 119–20 Sweden 51–2 taxis robotaxis 177–8 see also ride-hailing apps tennis players, grunting 197–8 terrorism 15–16 Texas 85 Thailand 110 Thanksgiving 241–2 think-tanks 21–2 Tianjin 143–4 toilets 155–6 Tok Pisin 219, 220 transgender people 65–6 Trump, Donald 223 Argentine lemons 95, 96 estate tax 119 and gender pay gap 115 and manufacturing jobs 131, 132 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin 183 Turkey 151 turkeys 33 Turkmenistan 6 U Uber 128 and drink-driving 179–80 Uganda 40 Ulaanbaatar 42–3 Uljarevic, Daliborka 221 undersea cables 193–4 unemployment 169–70 Unicode 215–16 United Arab Emirates and Somaliland 41 weapons purchases 19 United Kingdom see Britain United States and Argentine lemons 95–6 arms sales 19 beer consumption 105 chess 205–6 child marriage 84–5 Christmas 246–7 Christmas music 243, 244 drink-driving 179–80 drones 187–8 end of life care 141–2 estate tax 119 fertility rates 79–80 food trucks 99–100 forests 145 gay and lesbian rights 73 getting rich 113–14 Hawaiian porn consumption 63–4 job tenure 129–30 letter names 218 lithium 17 manufacturing jobs 131–2 murder rate 45, 46 national identity 223–4 new-year resolutions 234 plague 157–8 police body cameras 191–2 polygamy 6 robotaxis 177 robots 171–2 St Patrick’s Day 235–6 sexual harassment 67, 68 sperm banks 61–2 Thanksgiving 241–2 video games and unemployment 169–70 wealth inequality 121 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) see drones V video games 169–70 Vietnam weapons purchases 19 wheat consumption 110 Virginia 85 virtual reality (VR) 181, 182 Visit from St Nicholas, A (Moore) 247 W Wang Yi 117 Warner, Jason 15 wars 5 Washington, George 242 Washington DC, food trucks 99 waste 159–60 water pollution 149–50 wealth getting rich in America 113–14 high-net-worth individuals 53 inequality 120, 121–2 weather, and Christmas music 243–5 Weinstein, Harvey 67, 69 Weryk, Rob 185 wheat consumption 109–10 genome 107–8 Wilson, Riley 79–80 wine glasses 101–2 Winslow, Edward 241 wireless technology 173–4 witch-hunting 25–7 wolves 161–2 women birth rates 79–80, 81–3 bride price 5 career and family 77–8 child marriage 84–5 housework 75–6 job tenure 129–30 life expectancy 125 pay gap 115–16 sexual harassment of 67–9 suicide-bombers 15–16 World Bank 227–8 World Health Organisation (WHO) and smoking 151–2 transsexualism 65 X Xi Jinping 117–18 Y young people crime 47–8 job tenure 129–30 video games and unemployment 169–70 Yu, Han 56–7 Yulin 91 yurts 42–3 Z Zubelli, Rita 239

Bitcoin: The Future of Money?
by Dominic Frisby
Published 1 Nov 2014

People can deposit and withdraw money, transfer money (even to non-users), pay bills, buy airtime and, in some cases, actually transfer money to a bank account. They can even obtain credit. This is precisely how Szabo envisages Bitcoin changing the world. Mobile phones are replacing banks. ‘Financial inclusion is reported to be at 80% in Kenya’, says Sitoyo Lopokoiyit of Safaricom. ‘When you remove mobile money, it drops to 23%. So you can see what mobile money does for financial inclusion in Kenya.’193 The M-Pesa has been launched in Tanzania, South Africa, India, Afghanistan and Eastern Europe. It has had some success in Afghanistan and Tanzania, rather less in South Africa – but nowhere has it worked as well as in Kenya. Steps are currently being taken to launch it in India.

…

It’s very easy to get all excited and imagine something similar with developing Third World nations by-passing banks and banking infrastructure altogether and going straight to Bitcoin. In fact, something similar is already happening – but it doesn’t involve Bitcoin. It is most apparent in Kenya with the M-Pesa. M stands for mobile. Pesa is Swahili for money – so you have ‘mobile money’. It began quite organically in the early 2000s in various parts of Africa. People started transferring their mobile phone minutes – their airtime credits – to friends or family. This airtime, of course, has a definite value. Based on a ‘real thing’ it would become a modern day commodity currency.

Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made
by Gaia Vince
Published 19 Oct 2014

Further into the Anthropocene, some researchers believe, we will increasingly think of our smartphone as a partner – even in emotional terms.1 In East Africa, I saw how mobile money services, such as M-Pesa, are enabling phone users to transfer cash and pay for goods with the speed and convenience of an SMS text message.2 A customer pays cash to his local corner-shop agent, who then tops up his mobile money account using a special kind of secure SMS. He can then transfer money to another person or pay for something by sending a text to the recipient’s mobile phone account, which transfers the money straightaway. Even people without mobile money accounts can receive payments in the form of a text code, which can be exchanged for cash by their local corner-shop agent.

…

Even people without mobile money accounts can receive payments in the form of a text code, which can be exchanged for cash by their local corner-shop agent. For the millions of Africans who don’t meet the criteria for a bank account, or who live too far from a branch, mobile money presents an opportunity to save securely for the first time. Kenya’s M-Pesa is now used by over two-thirds of the adult population (more than 17 million people) to pay for everything from school fees to grocery and utility bills, taxi fares to airline tickets. It allows people in remote, rural areas to trade their wares in markets thousands of kilometres away, urban migrants to send money rapidly to their families in their home village, and for the government and aid agencies to distribute timely emergency cash to starving people living in slums.

…

The village belongs to the smallest tribe in Kenya, the El Moro, who number about fifty, although so many have intermarried with Samburu, it’s hard to know whether there are any ‘true’ El Moro left. This is one of the only traditional fishing tribes in Kenya – the men take log rafts out and pull in Nile perch and tilapia weighing as much as 100 kg. Like the widows of Loiyangalani, they dry and salt the fish for sale in Lake Victoria. All the transactions can be made using the M-Pesa mobile money service. Mass is conducted with much beautiful, harmonious singing, wafting of incense and plenty of curious glances my way. The children and adults have deformed bones and teeth. Fabio thinks it is because they are drinking water straight from the lake. It could be that the minerals dissolved in the water are preventing them from absorbing calcium.

The Smartphone Society
by Nicole Aschoff

Steve Jobs’s team at Apple figured out how to refine and combine these technologies into one device, creating the iPhone.21 Many software concepts also predate the smartphone. For example, mobile payment systems spread widely in poor countries through cell phones. Kenyans developed the popular M-pesa mobile money transfer system, which lets users lacking bank accounts send cash to friends and family; in early versions senders deposited cash at an agent’s shop, then used a text message to send the funds. American adults may remember the buzz around former president Barack Obama and his Blackberry. Obama used his Blackberry to keep up with emails and refused to part with it upon taking office, a new development for a security-obsessed White House.

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The phones streamline and improve the collection of TB data, making it faster and easier for policymakers and health managers to improve care. Google Translate can translate “Where is the bathroom?” into thirty-two pairs of utterances and into displayed text in over a hundred languages. Hundreds of millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa rely on mobile money accounts, which allow people lacking bank accounts to easily and securely send money to relatives far away. Business-to-business apps help small businesses survive, while farmers rely on smartphones to give them accurate crop prices, reducing abuse by dishonest middlemen. More broadly, smartphones connect billions of people to the internet.

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., 97 King, Rodney, 19 Klein, Naomi, 104 Knight First Amendment Institute, 93, 175n14 Knoll, Jessica, 108 Kreditech, 78–79 Kristol, Bill, 45 Kurzweil, Ray, 123 Lanier, Jaron, 67, 70, 135 Lantern, 95 law enforcement, surveillance by, 96–97, 137–38, 176n28 “leaners,” 29 Lean In (Sandberg), 107 Lehman Brothers, 98 Levandowski, Anthony, 123 LGBTQ community, 10, 64 “lifestyle politics,” 133 “like” button, 66 Lind, William, 105 “listening tour,” 56 Liu Hu, 94 live chats, 5 livestreaming of police violence, 20–21 lobbying, 55, 56 location data, 71 logistics workers, 31 Loon, 41 Loop Transportation, 147 Losse, Katherine, 124 love, 23–27, 35 low-income households, access to high-speed internet by, 29 low-paying jobs, 146–49, 153–54 Luxy, 23 Lyft 30, 31, 33, 146, 153 Lynd, Helen, 2, 3 Lynd, Robert, 2, 3 Lynn, Barry, 56 machine learning, 76, 121–22, 174n52 “machine zone,” 8 Macron, Emmanuel, 93 mainstream media, bypassing of, 91 Ma, Jack, 42 Makani, 41 mamasphere, 64 March for Our Lives, 104 March of the Margaridas, 108 Marjorie Stoneman Douglas (MSD) High School, 90 marketification, 161 Markey, Ed, 152, 179n22 marriage, expectations and norms about, 24–25 Marshall, James, 17–19 Marshall, Tanya, 17–19 Martin, Trayvon, 22, 100 Marx, Karl, 67 mass shootings, 90, 91, 110, 111 Match.com, 23, 24 Match Group, 24 Matsuhisa, Nobu, 62 Maven, 147–48 McDonald, Laquan, 18 McInnes, Gavin, 106, 107, 111 McSpadden, Lezley, 101 meaning, sense of, 64–65, 162 Medbase200, 77 men’s work, 75 mental health of children, 8 meritocracy, 121 Messenger: data collection from, 72 Messenger Kids, 84 metadata, 72 #MeToo movement, 108 microcelebrities, 60 microchoices, 69 Microsoft: and City of the Future, 124; data collection from, 81; employees organizing at, 148; in Europe, 150; immoral projects at, 154; as new titan, 42, 43, 55, 56 Middleton, Daniel, 60 “Middletown,” 2–3 Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (Lynd and Lynd), 2–3 military, 80–81, 95 mind-body divide, 67–68 miners, 28 Minutiae, 84 misogyny, 25 Mobile Devices Branch of CIA, 81, 95 Mobile Justice MI app, 21, 169n13 Modi, Narendra, 93 Mondragon, Elena, 22–23 monetization, 59, 79 money accounts, mobile, 10 monopolies, 43–46, 52–53, 150 Morgan, J. P., 37, 39, 41, 44, 54 Mori, 61–62 MoveOn.org, 91 M-pesa mobile money transfer system, 6 MSD (Marjorie Stoneman Douglas) High School, 90 mSpy, 25 Mubarak, Hosni, 92, 94, 97 Muflahi, Abdullah, 20 multitier subcontracting, 31 Munro, Alice, 62–63 Musk, Elon, 126 Myanmar, 42, 50, 94 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 157 National Hispanic Media Coalition, 55 National Justice Project (Australia), 21 National Labor Relations Board, 153 National Policy Institute, 105–6 National Security Agency (NSA), 80, 81, 95 NationBuilder, 93–94 neoliberalism: and capitalism, 69, 102, 112–13, 117–18, 144–45; and economic crisis, 99–100, 176n30; and feminism, 107; and new titans, 54 Nepal, 94 network(s), 61, 143 “network effects,” 44 “network society,” 121 #NeverAgain movement, 90, 110 New America, 56 New Center, 45–46 “New Economy,” 121 news: fake, 50–51, 56 news cycle, 89 newspapers, 50–52 news sources, 50–52 New York Taxi Workers Alliance, 146, 153, 178–79n5 Nichols, Synead, 89–90 Nigeria, politics in, 97 Nixon, Richard, 88 Noah, Trevor, 110 Noble, Dylan, 19–20 Nobu Malibu, 62 #NotOkay, 108 NSA (National Security Agency), 80, 81, 95 Obama, Barack, 6, 44, 55, 92, 106 obsolescence, built-in, 82 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 104, 112, 152, 179n22 Occupy movement, 102–3, 104 Oculus, 41 OKCupid, 23, 24 O’Neill, Caitlin, 56 online dating, 23–27, 35 online search, 52 Open Markets Institute, 150 Open Sesame, 10 Operation Haymaker, 95–96 O’Reilly, Holly Figueroa, 93 O’Rourke, Beto, 92 outrage politics, 109 outsourcing, 146 ownership of our own data, 135–36, 156 Oxford, Kelly, 60, 108 Pacific Railroad Act (1862), 80 Page, Larry, 38, 39, 41, 54, 119–20, 124 PageRank, 52 Palantir, 81 para-social interactions with celebrities, 65 parental limitation, 8 Parkland, Florida, 90 Patriot Act, 81 payment systems, mobile, 4, 5, 6, 10 PayPal, 44 peer-to-peer networks, 120 Pelosi, Nancy, 56 performance: politics as, 109, 111; social media as, 63, 64, 68 permatemps, 46, 47 personal information: ownership of, 135–36, 156; sharing on social media of, 60– 61 personalization, 53 personal narratives, 115–16 philanthropy, 56–57 Philippines, 90–91 “phone boss,” 69 Physician Women for Democratic Principles, 89 “pickers,” 33, 46 Pickersgill, Eric, 7 Pinterest, 60, 64, 69 PlentyOfFish, 24 polarization, in politics, 111 police: surveillance by, 96–97, 137–38, 176n28; violence against blacks by, 17–23, 35, 89–90, 100–102, 111, 169n6, 169n13 political advertising, 149 political movements, 97, 102, 111–12 political organizing, 91 political parties, 93–94 politics, 87–113; algorithms and filter bubbles in, 109–10; Black Lives Matter in, 89–90, 100–102, 111; bots in, 109; censorship in, 95; Dakota Access Pipeline Protests in, 103–4, 110; decentralization in, 101–2; digital-analog model in, 104, 110–12, 162; economic crisis in, 98–100; feminist movement in, 107–8; finding our voice in, 108–13; geo-, 95–96, 144; government tracking in, 94– 95; gun violence in, 90, 91, 110, 111; modern-day revolt in, 100–108; neoliberal, 99–100, 112–13; Occupy movement in, 102–3; outrage, 109; outside of US, 93–94; as performance, 109, 111; as personal, 88–100; polarization in, 111; political movements in, 97, 102; political parties in, 93– 94; protests in, 89–90, 92, 95, 100–104; slacktivism in, 111; social media use by candidates in, 103–5; social media use by people in power in, 87–88, 92– 93; Sunrise Movement in, 103–4; surveillance by law enforcement in, 96–97, 176n28; Syrian War in, 90; virality in, 81; voter outreach in, 89; white supremacy in, 35, 105–7 poor communities, internet access for, 149–50 Posner, Eric A., 135 poverty, 12–13 power, in cognitive mapping, 145 power inequalities, 137–38 predictive modeling, 77 print magazines, 172n40 PRISM program, 81 privacy, 69–72, 137–38, 150–51, 156 “privacy tools,” 71 private sphere, commodification of, 144 producers vs. consumers, 28–29 profit, frontiers of, 72–79, 85–86 proponents, 9–12 ProPublica, 48, 106, 149, 153 protests, 89–90, 92, 95, 100–104 Proud Boys movement, 106 public opinion, molding of, 55 Pulitzer, Joseph, 50 “push” notifications, 84 racism, 17–23, 35, 169n6, 169n13 RAM (Rise Above Movement), 106–7 rare metals, 82, 83 Reagan, Ronald, 43 real estate market, effect of high-tech company location in, 48–49 “real life,” digital life vs., 68 recommender algorithm, 67 Reddit, 24 redlining, digital, 29 regulation of monopolies, 43–46 reinforcement learning, 157 Rekognition software, 149 relationships, expectations and norms about, 24–25 religious beliefs, tech-based, 123 remote medicine, 10 rents, 48 research funding, 55 retreat from technology, 132–35 Reynolds, Diamond “Lavish,” 20, 35 Rice, Tamir, 18 “right to repair,” 155 right-wing movements, 105–7 Rise Above Movement (RAM), 106–7 rituals, on social media, 61 Robbin, Jonathan, 77 robots, 128, 131 Rockefeller, Jay, 77 Rockefeller, John D., 37, 54, 57 Rongwen, Zhuang, 94 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 88 Rousseff, Dilma, 97 Rudder, Christian, 23 rural areas: internet access for, 29, 149–50 Salesforce: employees organizing at, 148; immoral projects at, 154 Sandberg, Sheryl, 107 Sanders, Bernie, 103–5, 110 Santana, Feidin, 19, 20 Santelli, Rick, 105 Saudi Arabia, censorship in, 95 Scavino, Dan, 88 Schifter, Doug, 127 Schillinger, Klemens, 8 Schneier, Bruce, 135 Schrems, Max, 151 science fiction, 126 Scott, Walter, 19, 20 scraping, 71 Seamless, 30 search algorithms, 51–52, 53 Seasteading Institute, 124 Seinfeld, Jerry, 110 self-esteem, 65 selfies, 59–60 selfish behavior, 138–39, 154–56 self-monitoring tools, 69 service jobs, 33–34 Seth, Jodi, 56 sexism, 23–27, 35 sexting, 25–27, 35 sexual division of labor, 74–75 sexual harassment, 25, 27, 126–27 sexuality, 23–27, 35 sexual violence, 25 shareholder value society, 98 sharing on social media, 60–61, 84 Sharpton, Al, 102 shopping, mobile, 31–32 short message service (SMS), 6 Sidewalk Labs, 41 Sierra Club, 157 signals intelligence, 95–96 “silent spring,” 7 Silicon Valley, 115–41; distrust of, 125–31; and government control, 124; and spirit of capitalism, 115–25; taking back control from, 131–41 Silicon Valley Rising (SVR), 147 Sina Weibo (China), 94 Singh, Jagmeet, 93–94 the Singularity, 123 skeptics, 7–8 Skype, 81 slacktivism, 111 Slager, Michael, 19 Slutwalks, 108 smartness, 9 smartphone(s): demographics of, 3, 4; vs.

User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work & Play
by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant
Published 7 Nov 2019

This dynamic is happening all across the developing world: The mobile phone has led to innovative, design-led transportation experiments underway in Mexico City, Jakarta, and Delhi. Meanwhile, the spread of M-Pesa, the world’s most popular mobile money system, has yielded a platform for dozens of new services, such as Digifarm, a farmers’ marketplace (which was created by Safaricom, working with Dalberg Design). 3. Interview with Harry West, March 3, 2016. 4. See “How We Work Grant: IDEO.org,” Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/Quick-Links/Grants-Database/Grants/2010/10/OPP1011131; “Unlocking Mobile Money,” IDEO.org, www.ideo.org/project/gates-foundation; and “Giving Ed Tech Entrepreneurs a Window into the Classroom,” IDEO.org, www.ideo.com/case-study/giving-ed-tech-entrepreneurs-a-window-into-the-classroom. 5.

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They called the solution they hit upon Magic Ticketing. It was simple: Using a mobile phone, anyone could buy their ticket in advance. The idea took advantage of a mental model already ubiquitous in Kenya thanks to M-Pesa, which routes half the country’s GDP and remains one of the world’s most advanced mobile money systems. Yet Magic Ticketing didn’t merely copy the pattern—it adapted it. First, you’d send an SMS to a number. That number would bring up a simple menu, allowing you to buy a ticket. The bus drivers would get their money, and also a real-time sense of where their passengers actually were and an incentive to ply their entire route.

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The Atlantic, September 2017. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/. United States Securities and Exchange Commission. Form S-1: Registration Statement, Facebook, Inc. Washington, D.C.: SEC, February 1, 2012. Accessed July 6, 2018. www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512034517/d287954ds1.htm. “Unlocking Mobile Money.” IDEO.org. Accessed October 9, 2017. www.ideo.org/project/gates-foundation. Vincent, James. “Google’s AI Sounds Like a Human on the Phone—Should We Be Worried?” The Verge, May 9, 2018. www.theverge.com/2018/5/9/17334658/google-ai-phone-call-assistant-duplex-ethical-social-implications. Von Thienen, Julia P.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
by Marc Goodman
Published 24 Feb 2015

Vaughan-Nichols, “First Case of Android Trojan Spreading via Mobile Botnets Discovered,” ZDNet, Sept. 5, 2013. 26 As such, criminals: “Gartner Says Worldwide PC, Tablet, and Mobile Phone Shipments to Grow 5.9 Percent in 2013 as Anytime-Anywhere-Computing Drives Buyer Behavior,” Gartner Newsroom, June 24, 2013. 27 The vulnerability meant: Salvador Rodriguez, “Hackers Can Use Snapchat to Disable iPhones, Researcher Says,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 7, 2014. 28 Moreover, hackers were also: Selena Larson, “Snapchat Responds to Massive Hack,” ReadWrite, Jan. 3, 2014. 29 Worse, it was revealed: Kashmir Hill, “Snapchats Don’t Disappear: Forensics Firm Has Pulled Dozens of Supposedly Deleted Photos from Android Phones,” Forbes, May 9, 2013. 30 As a result, tens of thousands: Tyler Kingkade, “Ohio University Student Accused of Using Nude Snapchat Photos to Extort Sex,” Huffington Post, Dec. 30, 2013. 31 Today 89 percent of employees: Juniper Networks, “Trusted Mobility Index,” May 2012. 32 For just a few hundred dollars: Brian Montopoli, “For Criminals, Smartphones Becoming Prime Targets,” CBS News, Aug. 7, 2013; Dan Nosowitz, “A Hacked Mobile Antenna in a Backpack Could Spy on Cell Phone Conversations,” Popular Science, July 16, 2013. 33 In Kenya, for example: “Why Does Kenya Lead the World in Mobile Money?,” Economist, May 27, 2013. 34 Mobile money payment: Claire Pénicaud, “State of the Industry: Results from the 2012 Global Mobile Money Adoption Survey,” GSMA, Feb. 2013. 35 The Google Wallet system: Keith Wagstaff, “Google Wallet Hack Shows NFC Payments Still Aren’t Secure,” Time, Feb. 10, 2012. 113 Moreover, if and when a user loses: Sarah Clark, “Google Wallet Faces Its Second Hack of the Week,” NFC World, Feb. 10, 2012. 36 Given the volumes: Anthony Wing Kosner, “Tinder Dating App Users Are Playing with Privacy Fire,” Forbes, Feb. 18, 2014. 37 In fact, in 2012 police in South Australia: Miles Kemp, “Police Warn Photos of Kids with Geo-tagging Being Used by Paedophiles,” Herald Sun (Melbourne), April 18, 2012. 38 In 2012, the U.S.

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The future of money is mobile and virtual, and a bevy of new sensors and apps are on track to replace your wallet and the cash in your pocket. In fact, some mobile phone providers, such as Safaricom in Africa, dominate the overall payment space. In Kenya, for example, 25 percent of the nation’s GNP is actually transacted on Safaricom’s M-PESA payment system. Mobile money payment systems, which did not even exist at the turn of the last century, are now available in over seventy countries and are used to move billions of dollars every month. In particular, they have been incredibly useful in getting previously “unbanked” populations in the developing world access to the global world of commerce with significant positive impact for local economies.

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Google Wallet works with the NFC chips on a wide variety of mobile phones from HTC, LG, Motorola, and Samsung. The money as represented on these mobile devices is nothing more than data—data that are stored in vulnerable applications, controlled by deeply vulnerable mobile operating systems, using insecure sensor technologies and sensor data-transfer protocols. The obvious result? The future of mobile money may also be the future of mobile pick pocketing. The Google Wallet system has already been subverted by criminals on numerous occasions, and apps such as Wallet Cracker allow anybody to see a user’s personal identification code (PIN) number for the system on demand. Moreover, if and when a user loses his or her Android phone, any pre-stored money in the user’s Google Wallet (data on the device) can readily be spent in a store by the person who happens to steal or find the device.

The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa
by Irene Yuan Sun
Published 16 Oct 2017

Michael Joseph, interview by author, Cambridge, MA, April 14, 2016. 21. Bitange Ndemo, interview by author, Nairobi, Kenya, July 11, 2016. 22. Omwansa and Sullivan, Money, Real Quick. 23. Ibid. 24. Njuguna Ndung’u, interview by author, Nairobi, Kenya, July 8, 2016. 25. Mukhisa Kituyi, “Kenya’s Mobile Money Innovation Draws World Attention,” Daily Nation, May 21, 2011, http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Opinion/Kenyas+mobile+money+innovation+draws+world+attention+/-/440808/1166842/-/kctp0xz/-/index.html. 26. Tony Saich, Governance and Politics of China (3rd edition) (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 5, 7. 27. Ibid., 4. 28. Peter J. Katzenstein, Small States in World Markets: Industrial Policy in Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 79. 29.

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony
by David G. W. Birch
Published 14 Apr 2020

A key element of its success is that it was born of TELCO culture and conceived as an infrastructure on which others could build. Cashless schools, pay-for-use water, e-health and an incredible range of applications have been made possible by the ready availability of a mass-market payment system for the twenty-first century. This year, there will be some three billion mobile money transactions in Kenya. Not all of them will be sent through M-Pesa, but almost all of them will. Let us recap. Moving from a form of digital money that is held in the accounts of financial institutions to a digital currency that is a form of money which can be held in any number of places means solving the authenticity problem in moving from e-money to e-cash.

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So, it is important that we consider this carefully and adopt implementations that deliver what society wants – not simply what technologists will provide. * * * 43 In a recent BBC show on the subject, a UK reporter quoted a rickshaw driver, who turned down cash in favour of a mobile money transfer, as saying: ‘We just don’t use it any more.’ 44 See https://bit.ly/2wiCHeU. 45 As I have written before, I do not think a ‘cashless society’ means a society in which notes and coins are outlawed, but rather a society in which they are irrelevant. Under this definition, the PBoC could easily achieve this goal for China. 46 If you are unfamiliar with Mondex, I cover it in more detail in my book Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin. 47 Or ‘controlled anonymity’ as the PBoC calls it (John 2019). 48 You can see his presentation at https://bit.ly/2IVZ4tx.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 28 Jan 2020

Eight months after launch: Harford, Fifty Inventions, p. 229. According to research done at MIT: Tavneet Suri, “The Long-Run Poverty and Gender Impacts of Mobile Money,” Science 354, no. 6317 (December 9, 2016): 1288–1292. See: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6317/1288. 30 million people in ten different countries: Read the feature news story “What Kenya’s Mobile Money Success Could Mean for the Arab World” on the World Bank’s website here: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2018/10/03/what-kenya-s-mobile-money-success-could-mean-for-the-arab-world. bKash now serves over 23 million users: Read the International Finance Corporation’s Inclusive Business Case Study of bKash here: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/560181506580665929/pdf/119870-BRI-PUBLIC-bKash-Builtforchangereport.pdf.

The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Others Miss
by Ron Adner
Published 1 Mar 2012

[ CHAPTER 8 ] 194 Minimum Viable Ecosystem: In the first edition of The Wide Lens, this concept was referred to as “Minimum Viable Footprint.” 195 65 percent of the Kenyan population: “In Rural Kenya, M-Pesa Is Used as a Savings Account Tool,” Mobile Payment Magazine, March 3, 2011. 195 81 percent of Kenyans did not have access to a bank account: “Enabling Mobile Money Transfer: The Central Bank of Kenya’s Treatment of M-Pesa,” Alliance for Financial Inclusion, case study, 2010, p. 2. 195 27 percent of its citizens owned mobile phones: Ibid., p. 92. 195 63 percent of Kenyans were mobile phone subscribers: Kachwanya, “Kenyan Mobile Phone Penetration Is Now over 63%,” June 7, 2011.

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See also http: //mobilemonday.co.ke/ page/2/. 196 “too many challenges to mention”: Jaco Maritz, “Exclusive Interview: The Woman Behind M-PESA,” How We Made It in Africa, November 11, 2010, http://www.howwemadeitinafrica.com/exclusive-interview-the-woman-behind-m-pesa/5496/. 197 considerable complexity was added: Sarah Rotman, “M-PESA: A Very Simple and Secure Customer Proposition,” CGAP.org, November 5, 2008, http://technology.cgap.org/2008/11/05/m-pesa-a-very-simple-and-secure-customer-proposition/. 197 “bottleneck in transferring the money”: Nick Hughes and Susie Lonie, “M-PESA: Mobile Money for the ‘Unbanked’—Turning Cellphones into 24-Hour Tellers in Kenya,” Innovations, Winter/Spring 2007, p. 77. 198 “we would need to find a way to simplify things”: Ibid., p. 74. 200 expanded its customer base to 7.3 million: Michael Ouma, “M-Pesa Now Ventures Abroad to Tap into Diaspora Cash,” East African, October 19, 2009, http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/business/-/2560/673512/-/5gaimnz/-/index.xhtml. 201 (Kenya’s GDP in 2009 was $63 billion): CIA World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ke.xhtml.

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing
by Jacob Goldstein
Published 14 Aug 2020

Here are three possibilities. A World Without Cash Of all the ways that money might change, one is particularly easy to imagine: paper money might disappear. When you can use a debit card to buy a pack of gum, what’s even the point of paper money? This has been happening for a long time. Sending mobile money via text message took off in Kenya in 2007. By 2020, a single Chinese mobile payments app, called Alipay, was used by roughly 1 billion people. But in much of the world, even as payment apps proliferate, something strange is happening. Year after year, the amount of paper money floating around keeps growing faster than the overall economy.

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Visa’s transaction capacity comes from Visa’s website. Figures on Chinese miners come from the Reuters story “China’s Bitcoin Miners Scoop Up Greater Production Power.” The Gavin Andresen quote is from my interview with Andresen. Bitcoin exchange rates are from coindesk.com. Conclusion The Kenyan mobile-money-by-text system was M-Pesa. The figure for Alipay was cited by the Reuters story “China’s Ant aims for $200 bln price tag in private share sales,” by Julie Zhu, Kane Wu, and Zhang Yan. Figures for the amount of cash in circulation, and the denominations, come from the Federal Reserve. Ken Rogoff argued for getting rid of big bills in his book The Curse of Cash.

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology
by Kentaro Toyama
Published 25 May 2015

For packaged interventions to have positive impact, they need a positive human force to amplify. Rule 2 – Use packaged interventions to amplify the right human forces. Gandhi observed what Green Foundation was already doing and used technology to amplify its work. It’s also possible to amplify the impact of unorganized social trends. In Kenya, for example, a mobile money transfer system called M-PESA famously increased the flow of money from urban to rural areas because there was already an underlying culture of urban migrants sending cash back home.12 Rule 3 – Avoid indiscriminate dissemination of packaged interventions. Digital Green doesn’t work without a strong partner that has rapport with farmers.

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Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21(3):384–388, http://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/h0032317. I-TECH. (2011). About I-TECH, www.go2itech.org/who-we-are/about-i-tech. ———. (2013). The leader who says “I can.” Everyday Leadership.org, www.everydayleadership.org/video/p519. Jack, William, and Tavneet Suri. (2011). Mobile money: The economics of M-PESA. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 16721, www.nber.org/papers/w16721.pdf. Jakiela, Pamela, Edward Miguel, and Vera te Velde. (2012). You’ve earned it: Combining field and lab experiments to estimate the impact of human capital on social preferences. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 16449, https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/16449.html.

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British Journal of Educational Technology 41(5):672–688, www.hole-in-the-wall.com/docs/Paper13.pdf. MixMarket. (2014). Microfinance institutions, www.mixmarket.org/mfi/. Mnookin, Seth. (2011). The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear. Simon and Schuster. Morawczynski, Olga. (2011). Examining the adoption, usage and outcomes of mobile money services: The case of M-PESA in Kenya. PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/1842/5558/2/Morawczynski2011.pdf. Morawczynski, Olga, and Mark Pickens. (2009). Poor people using mobile financial services: Observations on customer usage and impact from M-PESA.

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations
by Nandan Nilekani
Published 4 Feb 2016

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/ zimbabwe/1520590/The-100000-note-that-wont-buy-a-loaf-of-bread-in-Zimbabwe.html 14. Gustafsson, Katarina, and Magnusson, Niklas. 28 October 2013. ‘Stockholm’s Homeless Accept Cards as Cash No Longer King’. Bloomberg. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-27/stockholm-s-homeless-accept-cards-as-cash-no-longer-king.html 15. 14 November 2013. ‘Mobile Money: The Opportunity for India’. Mobile Money Association of India (MMAI) and GSMA submission to the Reserve Bank of India. 16. Ghosh, Suprotip. 8 December 2013. ‘Banking the Unbanked’. Business Today. http://businesstoday.intoday.in/story/rbi-expansion-general-public-helps-take-banking-rural-india/1/200646.html 17.

The Lessons of History
by Will Durant and Ariel Durant
Published 1 Jan 1968

Conquered Greeks, Orientals, and Africans were brought to Italy to serve as slaves on the latifundia; the native farmers, displaced from the soil, joined the restless, breeding proletariat in the cities, to enjoy the monthly dole of grain that Caius Gracchus had secured for the poor in 12 3 B.C. Generals and proconsuls returned from the provinces loaded with spoils for themselves and the ruling class; millionaires multiplied; mobile money replaced land as the source or instrument of political power; rival factions competed in the wholesale purchase of candidates and votes; in 53 B.C. one group of voters received ten million sesterces for its support.62 When money failed, murder was available: citizens who had voted the wrong way were in some instances beaten close to death and their houses were set on fire.

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy
by Mehrsa Baradaran
Published 5 Oct 2015

In 2007, Kenya’s leading mobile company, Safaricom, joined up with the Central Bank of Kenya to launch M-Pesa for Kenyans, who are 80 percent unbanked. As of January 2013 (in just under six years), 17 million adults (approximately 74 percent of Kenya’s adult population) used M-Pesa, and over 25 percent of Kenya’s gross domestic product was funneled through mobile money services.77 With over forty thousand agents across the country, users can make deposits, transfer funds to anyone with a mobile phone, pay bills, distribute employee salaries, and even get loans. Financial inclusion of the unbanked in Kenya has resulted in significant benefits. Not only do Kenyans waste less time waiting in lines at banks or paying bills, one study even found that in rural Kenya, households that used M-Pesa enjoyed increased incomes of 5 to 30 percent!

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Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, “How Wal-Mart and Google Could Steal Young Customers from Traditional Banks,” Washington Post, May 27, 2014, accessed March 15, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/05/27/how-wal-mart-and-google-could-steal-young-customers-from-traditional-banks/. 77. “Why Does Kenya Lead the World in Mobile Money?,” Economist, May 27, 2013, accessed March 15, 2015, www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/05/economist-explains-18. 78. “[Sixty-nine] percent of the unbanked … [and] 88 percent of the underbanked have access to a mobile phone … 39 percent of underbanked consumers have used mobile banking in the past 12 months.”

No Slack: The Financial Lives of Low-Income Americans
by Michael S. Barr
Published 20 Mar 2012

Bertrand, Marianne, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Eldar Shafir. 2006. “Behavioral Economics and Marketing in Aid of Decision Making among the Poor.” Journal of Public Policy and Marketing 25:8–23. Beshouri, Christopher, and others. 2010. “Mobile Money for the Unbanked: Unlocking the Potential in Emerging Markets.” McKinsey on Payments, June (www.mckinsey.com/ clientservice/Financial_Services/Knowledge_Highlights/Recent_Reports/~/media/ Reports/Financial_Services/MoP8_Mobile_money_for_the_unbanked.ashx). Borzekowski, Ron, Elizabeth K. Kiser, and Shaista Ahmed. 2008. “Consumers’ Use of Debit Cards: Patterns, Preferences, and Price Response.” Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking 40:149–72.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
by Anthony M. Townsend
Published 29 Sep 2013

Indian Express, last modified January 3, 2012, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/is-your-city-smart-enough/894919/. 22“UN award for SA’s Dr Math mobile tool,” SouthAfrica.info, blog, last modified June 9, 2011, http://www.southafrica.info/business/trends/innovations/drmath-090611.htm#. UHA-00IQTzI. 23Katrina Manson, “Kenya to India: exporting the mobile money model,” Financial Times, blog, last modified November 11, 2011, http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2011/11/11/kenya-to-india-exporting-the-mobile-money-model/. 24“Ericsson and Orange bring sustainable and affordable connectivity to rural Africa,” Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson, Stockholm, last modified February 18, 2009, http://www.ericsson.com/news/1291529. 25Andrew Nusca, “Vodafone Debuts $32 Solar-Powered Mobile Phone for Rural India,” Smart Planet, blog, last modified July 27, 2010, http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/smart-takes/vodafone-debuts-32-solar-powered-mobile-phone-for-rural-india/9367. 26A.

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Jan 2015

It’s just one more challenge that leaves so many trapped in poverty. For them, the pursuit of other freedoms—of speech, for example—must be subordinated to the task of tackling these financial and economic challenges. The escape from all that, bitcoiners surmise, may lie in those $5 phones and a radical new mobile-money system. Mali is one of the poorest nations on the planet. It ranked 175th out of 187 nations on the UN’s Human Development Index. More than 70 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. It is largely dependent upon agriculture, and per capita income averages $500 a year. There are efforts to boost tourism, but the country’s history of violence, including the coup in 2012 that drove people such as Fatima from their homes, makes that a hard sell.

…

Five people were at her first meetup; six months later, there were forty, and they were doing coding and coming up with their own apps. “People are responding, people are excited about it,” she says. M-Pesa, now combined with a nascent bitcoin community, is proving to be Kenya’s on-ramp to a broader technology revolution, as mobile money and the Internet spark a wave of creativity and entrepreneurship. Nairobi has become one of Africa’s most important tech hubs, if not the biggest. It is sometimes called Silicon Savannah. The city even has its own version of 20Mission, a hacker house called iHub that’s not far from the University of Nairobi’s science center.

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt
by Sinan Aral
Published 14 Sep 2020

The struggling Ugandan economy inspired Ugandan citizens and businesses to move online in an effort to leapfrog the antiquated telecommunications infrastructure there. But in July 2018, following protests against his rule, Yoweri Museveni imposed a five-cents-per-day tax on social media and increased taxes on mobile money by 5 percent to curb antigovernment sentiment and increase tax revenue. Unfortunately, this broadsword approach had devastating unintended consequences for Uganda. For many Ugandans, social media is the on-ramp to the Internet, and apps like Facebook and WhatsApp are essential for business, education, news, social support, and access to emergency services.

…

Autor, Lawrence F. Katz, and Alan B. Krueger, “Computing Inequality: Have Computers Changed the Labor Market?,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 113, no. 4 (1998): 1169–213. Ugandan Internet usage fell 26 percent: Abdi Latif Dahir, “Uganda’s Social Media Tax Has Led to a Drop in Internet and Mobile Money Users,” Quartz, February 19, 2019, https://qz.com/​africa/​1553468/​uganda-social-media-tax-decrease-internet-users-revenues/. tax increased Internet connection costs by 1 percent: Juliet Nanfuka, “Social Media Tax Cuts Ugandan Internet Users by Five Million, Penetration Down from 47% to 35%,” Collaboration on International ICT Policy in East and Southern Africa, January 31, 2019, https://cipesa.org/​2019/​01/​%EF%BB%BFsocial-media-tax-cuts-ugandan-internet-users-by-five-million-penetration-down-from-47-to-35/.

Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage
by Roger L. Martin
Published 15 Feb 2009

The automobile was central to the sense of open-ended possibility shared by America’s rapidly growing middle class. Spurred by the development of the Interstate Highway System, new roads were rolling out from the cities to the suburbs springing up at their edges. The number of cars sold in America leapt from just seventy thousand in 1945 to more than six million in 1950. A mobile, moneyed lifestyle was taking root, with the automobile at its center. Some of the first entrepreneurs to see the opportunities in this cultural change planted their flags in California, where so many American trends first take root. Drive-in burger joints began to spring up across southern California, where the nascent car culture cross-fertilized a leisure culture centered on the beach.

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future
by Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever
Published 2 Apr 2017

Ray Kurzweil, “The law of accelerating returns,” Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence 7 March 2001, http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns (accessed 21 October 2016). 7. Dominic Basulto, “Why Ray Kurzweil’s predictions are right 86% of the time,” Big Think 2012, http://bigthink.com/endless-innovation/why-ray-kurzweils-predictions-are-right-86-of-the-time (accessed 21 October 2016). 8. Tom Standage, “Why does Kenya lead the world in mobile money?” the Economist 27 May 2013, http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/05/economist-explains-18 (accessed 21 October 2016). 9. Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, New York: Free Press, 2012, p. 9. CHAPTER FOUR 1. Tim Kise, “Uber: Congress’ [sic] new private driver,” Hamilton Place Strategies 11 November 2014, http://hamiltonplacestrategies.com/news/uber-congress-new-private-driver (accessed 21 October 2016). 2.

The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Banks
by Ann Pettifor
Published 27 Mar 2017

By shielding its activities from public oversight and academic scrutiny, it has been possible for the finance sector to turn society’s social construct – credit, and the social relationships between debtors and creditors – into both a false commodity and an artificial market – independent of democratic public authority. As part of a utopian scheme to create a single unregulated global ‘shadow banking’ market in credit, mobile money, trade and labour, finance capital hoped to create a parallel self-regulating planet under private authority. A planet untrammelled by human values, regulations, accountability or standards. These are values, standards and democratic institutions that societies have developed over centuries of civilising evolution.

Give People Money
by Annie Lowrey
Published 10 Jul 2018

he shouted, jumping up and down and dancing. That very day, he went to purchase a goat. Erick Odhiambo Madoho was happy too. He walked to the cow-dotted local highway nearest the village and took a matatu, a shared minibus overloaded with twenty passengers, down to Lake Victoria. There, he found an M-Pesa stand, and converted his mobile money into shillings. He used the cash to buy the first of the three rounds of filament-thin fishing line that he would need to hand-knot into nets to catch tilapia in the lake. When the nets were done, in about three months, he told me while we sat in the minibus, he would rent a boat and hire a day laborer to work with him.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism
by Aaron Bastani
Published 10 Jun 2019

McKibben, Bill. ‘The Race to Solar-Power Africa’. New Yorker, 26 June 2017. Poushter, Jacob. ‘Cell Phones in Africa: Communication Lifeline’. Pew Global Research, 15 April 2015. ‘Reducing Risks, Promoting Healthy Life’. World Health Organization, 2002. T.S. ‘Why Does Kenya Lead the World in Mobile Money?’ Economist, 2 March 2015. Tricarico, Daniele. ‘Case Study: Vodafone Turkey Farmers’ Club’. GSM Association, June 2015. Vaughan, Adam. ‘Time to Shine: Solar Power Is Fastest-growing Source of New Energy’. Guardian, 4 October 2017. Wind Davies, Rob. ‘Wind Turbines “Could Supply Most of UK’s Electricity”’.

Broken Markets: A User's Guide to the Post-Finance Economy
by Kevin Mellyn
Published 18 Jun 2012

Some of it reflects the suspicion of banks, much of it deserved, felt by many people without much money or education. We stand at the cusp of a much cheaper and more transparent consumer financial services model based on mobile devices. Poor countries such as Kenya have already demonstrated the potential of mobile money to improve the lives of people living on a few dollars a day. These same technologies and business models could vastly increase financial inclusion in the United States. However, the rush of post-crisis legislation—including the Card Act discussed previously; the Durbin Amendment to Dodd-Frank, which sets prices on debit card transactions; and above all, the establishment of an unaccountable CFPB with expansive powers under Dodd-Frank—could swing the pendulum in the direction of reducing the incentives of banks to operate in the consumer segment.

API Marketplace Engineering: Design, Build, and Run a Platform for External Developers
by Rennay Dorasamy
Published 2 Dec 2021

This has enabled a paradigm shift as it could allow people to not make long-term investments in property and motor vehicles. Future generations may not need a driver’s license as it may be more economical and practical to use ridesharing than owning a car. From an industry perspective, the lines between organizations are blurring. One of the most successful mobile money services in East Africa is run by a telecommunications company. Healthcare providers have also entered the banking fray and are providing financial services. Banks have not rested on their laurels and are now offering telecoms services as Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNO). Although movements into new industries are possible, it is far more difficult for established organizations to achieve this.

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
by Thomas Frank
Published 15 Mar 2016

Hillary Clinton’s remarks are found on p. 29. A pdf of the report may be downloaded here: http://www.microcreditsummit.org/resource/59/1997-microcredit-summit-report.html. 27. Verveer: “Launch of the State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report 2011,” March 7, 2011. Otero: “Keynote Address to the Mobile Money Policy Forum,” Nairobi, Kenya, November 30, 2010. Hillary herself: Hard Choices, p. 149. 28. On microcredit in Bosnia, see Bateman’s blog post, “A New Balkan Tragedy? The Case of Microcredit in Bosnia,” April 8, 2014. In “From Poverty to Power,” an Oxfam blog post dated April 20, 2011, Bateman poses the following rhetorical question: “With so many countries having achieved microfinance ‘saturation’ this last decade or so (notably Bolivia, Bosnia, Mexico, Peru, Cambodia and others), why is it that in none of these countries can we see obvious substantive poverty reduction and ‘bottom-up’ development gains?”

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero
by Tyler Cowen
Published 8 Apr 2019

lobbying Lockheed Martin Luce, Edward Machiguenga MacIntyre, Alasdair Maheshwari, Sapna Manjoo, Farhad Marriott McCarthy, Michael A. McClellan, Mark B. McDonald’s McFadden Act media business and CEOs and Facebook and harassment scandals and new vs. old media politics and short-term thinking tech sector and Trump and See also fake news; social media Medicare See also health care MetLife Microsoft mobility Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible (Goetzmann) monopolies overview real problems Monsanto Moran, Joe Motorola Mobile Mozilo, Angelo multinational corporations Musk, Elon Myspace National Security Agency (NSA) National Venture Capital Association nationalism “Nature of the Firm, The,” (Coase) Neiman Marcus New Republic magazine New York Times NIMBY (not in my backyard) regulations Nobel laureates Nokia nonprofit institutions See also profit Northern California Obama, Barack Obamacare online advertising online banking online dating online education online lending online media privacy Oswald, Andrew J.

Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity Into Prosperity
by Bernard Lietaer and Jacqui Dunne
Published 4 Feb 2013

These individuals are left vulnerable to theft; they are excluded from all e-commerce transactions and forced to utilize expensive cash-wiring ser vices. “More than a billion people worldwide lack bank accounts but do have mobile phones, providing a dramatic opportunity to achieve greater financial inclusion,” according to a recent Mobile Money Market Sizing study.27 Furthermore, and perhaps most important, mobile banking will be free to expand, unfettered legislatively, and “since no deposits are accepted or interest paid, the ser vice provider does not need a banking license.”28 The convergence between ever-cheaper computing and growing access to the Internet and to mobile phones will drastically change the global banking scene.

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery
by Stewart Lansley
Published 19 Jan 2012

They accounted too for a very high proportion of trading activity on the New York and London stock exchanges. 372 The hedge fund industry had been ‘pushing the limits of financial regulation for decades.’373 When the US Congress pushed for tougher regulation of hedge funds in 2008, the industry’s lobbying organisation, the Managed Funds Association, spent $17 billion on donations to politicians with influence.374 An increasing number of companies and countries came to know only too well what it was like to be on the receiving end of hedge fund speculation. Because of this ‘active’ management—a strategy of moving huge sums of mobile money in and out countries, markets, commodities and companies often at great speed—they have the firepower to do serious economic damage. Moreover, while hedge funds rely heavily on wealthy individuals, an increasing share of their funding has been coming from once risk-averse endowments and institutional investors.

Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System
by Alexander Betts and Paul Collier
Published 29 Mar 2017

The internet in particular offers the chance to create footloose and highly mobile livelihoods. Value chains can be disaggregated in ways that allow people in one part of the world to contribute on the basis of their particular comparative advantage. New financing opportunities, including crowdfunding, peer-to-peer networks, and mobile money, may offer ways in which even remote communities can be connected to the global economy. Business – from multinational corporations to small and medium-sized enterprises to social enterprise – is engaging with refugee issues more than it has in the past.20 There is every reason to believe that a development toolbox should offer even greater prospects than was the case even two decades ago.

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends
by Richard Dobbs and James Manyika
Published 12 May 2015

In fast-growing developing economies, more than 143,000 Internet-related businesses launch every year.57 Jumia, a Nigerian e-commerce company that now operates in Ivory Coast, Kenya, Egypt, and Morocco, in 2013 became the first African winner of the World Retail Award for “Best Retail Launch of the Year.”58 M-pesa, a mobile-money service started in Kenya, is now disrupting traditional banking, payments, and money-transfer service providers across Africa. Build New Global—and Digital—Ecosystems Digital platforms enable companies to expand rapidly and profitably to customers further away from their home markets than was possible in the past.

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 14 May 2014

The Internet reached more than half the population in a mere decade.3 Now Google is experimenting with super-high-speed connections that operate more than a hundred times faster than regular broadband.4 The second force is globalization. Sloan’s GM was upended by the Japanese, not Ford or Chrysler. Fast-growing emerging markets are throwing up global companies, such as China’s Huawei in telecoms. Even Africa is leapfrogging ahead of the West, as Kenya is doing with “mobile money” (using cell phones to make payments). The third force is consumer choice. Henry Ford’s world, in which you could have a car in any color so long as it was black, has been replaced by a rainbow of choice. ­Cable-TV companies offer hundreds of channels. Amazon offers you a selection of a million or more books and can deliver the next day.

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 13 May 2013

Ten long years later, Jim’ale and the entire al-Barakat conglomerate were finally removed from the list of al-Qaeda-related terrorist organizations. But a separate UN Security Council committee then put Jim’ale on a new list, one that imposed a travel ban and froze his assets, the suspicion this time being that he was an arms trafficker. In its decision the Security Council noted that “Jim’ale established ZAAD, a mobile-to-mobile money-transfer business and struck a deal with Al-Shabaab to make money transfers more anonymous by eliminating the need to show identification”; that his company, Hormuud, is “one of the single largest financiers of Al-Shabaab”; and that Hormuud “cut off telephone service during Al-Shabaab attacks against pro-Somali Government forces.”

The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa
by Calestous Juma
Published 27 May 2017

Waage, Science and Innovation for Development (London: UK Collaborative on Development Sciences, 2010), 37. 25. International Telocommunication Union, The World in 2014 ICT Facts and Figures, Geneva: International Telecommunication Union, 2014, http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/ Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2014-e.pdf. 26. W. Jack and T. Suri, Mobile Money: The Economics of M-PESA (Cambridge, MA: Sloan School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009). 27. I. Mas, “The Economics of Branchless Banking,” Journal of Monetary Economics 4, no. 2 (2009): 57–76. 28. M. L. Rilwani and I. A. Ikhuoria, “Precision Farming with Geoinformatics: A New Paradigm for Agricultural Production in a Developing Country,” Transactions in GIS 10, no. 2 (2006): 177–197. 29.

Capital Without Borders
by Brooke Harrington
Published 11 Sep 2016

Salmon (1928), 46 meritocracy, 204, 218–19, 231 methodology of this study, 22–35; barriers to access, 22–27; ethnography, 27–30; participant observation, 30–32; semistructured interviews, 32–35 Michael (Guernsey-based wealth manager), 91, 137, 212 Middle East: Arabian Peninsula, 88, 110–12, 116–17, 166; EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), 243; Israel, 270, 303; Middle Easterners in cash-for-passports programs, 239–40; Saudi Arabia, 108, 111–12, 174, 280; United Arab Emirates, 128, 174 Mill, John Stuart, 18, 204 Miller, Bill, 212 Mills, C. Wright, 15, 199 mistresses, 125, 165 mobility, economic. See economic mobility money changing, 132 money laundering, 12, 23, 132 Morgan Stanley, 60 Morris (New York–based wealth manager), 118–19, 151 Mossack Fonseca, 197 multiterritorial clients, 127 Muslim clients, 111–12, 117, 166–67, 174 mutawallī, 111–12 Nadia (Panama-based wealth manager), 85, 87–88, 165, 168–69 Nancy (Buenos Aires–based sole practitioner), 71–72 Neal (Cayman Islands–based wealth manager), 81–82, 102, 207, 229, 230 Ned (Cook Islands–based wealth manager), 146–47, 158 neoliberalism, 205 net worth.

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News
by Clint Watts
Published 28 May 2018

The continent’s development at times is so behind, it’ll skip some advancements entirely—say, landline telephones—and adopt an invention two or three generations ahead. Somalia, ravaged by war and completely ungoverned, has led the continent in cell phone and money transfer companies. Today, Somalis gripped in violence or starving from famine might nevertheless be able to talk to a fellow clansman half a world away and receive mobile money in an instant—a strange twist.3 For many Africans, their first connection to global telecommunications was not mediated simply through a computer connected to the internet, but through a mobile phone social media platform. When searching for information, an African might say, “I’ll look it up on Facebook,” rather than the common Western internet shorthand, “Google it.”

The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet With Ethereum
by Camila Russo
Published 13 Jul 2020

Three board members were also hired. The middle-aged, corporate men didn’t exactly mesh with the typical Ethereum developer. Lars Klawitter held a high-level job at Rolls-Royce, Vadim David Levitin ran business development for Fortune 500 companies, and Wayne Hennessy-Barrett was founder and CEO of 4G Capital, a mobile money fintech business based in Kenya. Kelley had worked with art nonprofits in San Francisco before moving to Berlin and started work at Ethereum in February 2015 with the goal of creating standards and bylaws for the foundation. But she realized very early on that there were more urgent matters. Cash was drying up.

The Industries of the Future
by Alec Ross
Published 2 Feb 2016

The mobile penetration rate: “Democratic Republic of Congo—Telecoms, Mobile and Broadband—Market Insights and Statistics,” Market Briefing, October 2014, http://www.telecomsmarketresearch.com/research/TMAABOEF-Democratic-Republic-of-Congo---Telecoms--Mobile-and-Broadband---Market-Insights-and-Statistics.shtml. What goes for the Congo is: Matt Twomey, “Cashless Africa: Kenya’s Smash Success with Mobile Money,” CNBC, November 11, 2013, http://www.cnbc.com/id/101180469. Today that number is over: John Koetsier, “African Mobile Penetration Hits 80% (and Is Growing Faster Than Anywhere Else),” VentureBeat, December 3, 2013, http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/03/african-mobile-penetration-hits-80-and-is-growing-faster-than-anywhere-else/.

Money: The Unauthorized Biography
by Felix Martin
Published 5 Jun 2013

On the political and economic level, money promised something unprecedented: that it would combine social mobility with political stability. With money, society could have its cake and eat it too. The sterile constraints of an immutable and absolute social system could be jettisoned in favour of ambition, entrepreneurship, and social mobility: money would be the universal solvent that could dissolve all traditional obligations. Crucially, though, the society that resulted would not collapse into chaos. Because money, the concept of universal value, and the idea of an objective economic space, were founded upon the ancient institution of communal sacrifice; and as such upon the invisible but irresistible communality of mankind.

Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil
by Nicholas Shaxson
Published 20 Mar 2007

Oil Politics in the ‘Kuwait of Africa.’” See http://www.nci.org/05nci/02/IPC-feb7.htm, or http://www.iranpolicy. org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=19&Itemid=29. Senate Hearing, page 593. The joint venture was called Nusiteles; Senate Hearing, pages 302, 346–356, and 693–695. McColm admitted that IDS and IFES received Mobil money, in an e-mail to journalist David Hecht, July 2, 1999. CMS, which sold out to Marathon, also provided support. See, for example, Duncan Campbell, “Marketing the New ‘Dogs of War,’” U.S. Center for Public Integrity, October 30, 2002, available at http://www. publicintegrity.org/bow/report.aspx?aid=149.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
by Kate Raworth
Published 22 Mar 2017

It would act as a basic income, giving every person access to the market as a means of providing for their needs. What’s more, for the first time in history such a scheme could actually work, thanks to the rapid worldwide spread of mobile phones and the proven success of mobile banking. Kenya has been a trailblazer in mobile banking since launching its M-PESA mobile money service in 2007. Within six years, three quarters of all Kenyan adults had used the service, including 70% of those in rural areas, and – astonishingly – over 40% of Kenya’s GDP was passing through M-PESA.88 Worldwide, 5.5 billion people are expected to be using mobile phones by 2018, and mobile banking will come as part of the package.89 In essence, it will soon be feasible to create a phone book of the world’s ‘bottom billion’ and to text digital cash directly to them.

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism
by Kevin Phillips
Published 31 Mar 2008

Part of the reason for sketching some of the realignment of wealth that has flowed from the rise of the financial sector is simply to underscore how yesteryear’s support for the creative destruction of a free and fast-flowing marketplace would logically have evolved into support for an assets “Plunge Protection Team” or a federal assets-maintenance strategy instead. Keep the markets up. Please, gentlemen, especially with all of those crazy people in the Middle East and the dollar coming unglued. Meanwhile, the new economy is breeding more stratification and inheritance than mobility. Money makes money. When Barron’s published its 2007 survey of the top forty wealth-management firms in the United States—most part of banks or other large financial institutions—among them they appeared to have some seventy thousand private client managers.47 Wealth management has become a large and growing business in the United States, and wealthy Americans are no more likely to submit their swollen and cherished assets to the unfettered whims of the free market than Japanese asset owners were when Japan’s real estate and stock bubble began to deflate in 1989.

Innovation and Its Enemies
by Calestous Juma
Published 20 Mar 2017

Digital medicine has an even greater potential of taking root in regions of the world, such as sub-Saharan Africa, that have limited access to healthcare.48 Such regions could become the source of new medical applications that would otherwise be obstructed by incumbent interests in industrialized countries. This could follow the patterns of mobile money transfer and banking that first emerged in Africa before they spread to industrialized countries through the process of reverse innovation.49 The emergence of new fields such as the Internet of Things, 3D printing, digital learning, and open-source movements provide collaborative opportunities for inclusive innovation.50 Collaborating innovation changes the way productive systems are organized.

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information
by Frank Pasquale
Published 17 Nov 2014

Though this book is primarily about the private sector, I have called it The Black Box Society (rather than The Black Box Economy) because the distinction between state and market is fading. We are increasingly ruled by what former political insider Jeff Connaughton called “The Blob,” a shadowy network of actors who mobilize money and media for private gain, whether acting officially on behalf of business or of government. 24 In one policy area (or industry) after another, these insiders decide the distribution of society’s benefits (like low-interest credit or secure employment) and burdens (like audits, wiretaps, and precarity).

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott
Published 9 May 2016

However, new technology could remove that step. He said, “A lot of African countries leapfrogged the infrastructure of landline telecoms with cellular. They skipped that step. Blockchain will have the greatest impact in areas where the payment networks don’t exist or are very poor.”20 Blockchain will push many nascent initiatives, such as mobile-money service providers like M-Pesa in Kenya, owned by Safaricom, and microcredit outfits globally, into high gear by making them open, global, and lightning fast. A bank is the most common financial institution, and so we will use it as an example here. How do you open a bank account? If you live in the developing world today, you will likely have to visit the branch in person.

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 29 Nov 2011

And non-Western companies are becoming powerhouses of innovation in everything from telecoms to computers. A UNESCO report on innovation argues that the proportion of global R&D that is being done in the emerging world increased from 30 percent to 37 percent in 2003–07. The emerging world has already leapfrogged ahead of the West in areas such as mobile money (using mobile phones to make payments) and online games. Microsoft’s research laboratory in Beijing has produced clever programs that allow computers to recognize handwriting or turn photographs into cartoons. Huawei, a Chinese telecom giant, has become the world’s fourth-largest patent applicant.

Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes
by Mark Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne
Published 5 Sep 2007

So it is far below a 1 percent microtrend, but it ranks as a critically important and obviously dangerous nanotrend. It does not need to become a mass movement to be successful. Rather, it needs a growing cadre of smart, sophisticated, tough operatives. Its growth now depends not on attracting hundreds of millions but on successfully creating a leadership class that can mobilize money and resources and carry out operations. While poverty is often cited as a prime reason for the growth of fundamentalism, the founders of the terrorist movement come from surprising backgrounds. In fact, poverty and despair are remarkably unrelated to either the rich and well-educated founders like bin Laden or to many of the frontline terrorists, including the 9/11 hijackers or the July 7 train bombers in London.

Machine Learning Design Patterns: Solutions to Common Challenges in Data Preparation, Model Building, and MLOps
by Valliappa Lakshmanan , Sara Robinson and Michael Munn
Published 31 Oct 2020

In the next chapter, we’ll navigate the next step in the machine learning workflow—design patterns for training models. 1 For the explicit computation of these values, see Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville, Deep Learning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), Ch. 7. 2 This is just an example being used for illustrative purposes; please don’t take this as medical advice! 3 See https://oreil.ly/kDndF for a primer on call and put options. 4 The dataset was generated based on the PaySim research proposed in this paper: EdgarLopez-Rojas , Ahmad Elmir, and Stefan Axelsson, “PaySim: A financial mobile money simulator for fraud detection,” 28th European Modeling and Simulation Symposium, EMSS, Larnaca, Cyprus (2016): 249–255. Chapter 4. Model Training Patterns Machine learning models are usually trained iteratively, and this iterative process is informally called the training loop. In this chapter, we discuss what the typical training loop looks like, and catalog a number of situations in which you might want to do something different.

How Money Became Dangerous
by Christopher Varelas
Published 15 Oct 2019

The concept of phone minutes as currency has recently taken hold in some African nations, where the public has so lost faith in their government and its fiat currency that it has become common for people to pay one another or make financial transactions by transferring phone minutes, or “airtime,” between mobile devices. The Economist covered the phenomenon in a 2013 piece: “Unlike mobile money, airtime’s value does not rely directly on a government’s stability or ability to hold down inflation by, say, showing restraint printing money.” Money doesn’t have to be money anymore. And a lot of that evolution has been fueled by a loss of trust in government and our financial institutions.

Scots and Catalans: Union and Disunion
by J. H. Elliott
Published 20 Aug 2018

If Spain were to retain its European hegemony and Philip IV be acknowledged as the greatest ruler in the world, it was essential in Olivares’s eyes that all the kingdoms of the Monarchy should contribute to the common enterprise. This could only be achieved if they no longer exploited their laws, liberties and parliamentary institutions to block measures for mobilizing money and manpower across the monarquía to the benefit of all. The prime requisite, therefore, was to make Philip in practice what he already was in name, a true ‘King of Spain’. Olivares’s desire, as expressed in his secret instructions to Philip, to ‘reduce these kingdoms of which Spain is composed to the laws and style of Castile’, would seem to justify contemporary suspicions and later assumptions that he was planning a progressive ‘Castilianization’ of the peninsula.

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley
by Jimmy Soni
Published 22 Feb 2022

“[Nokia] had a bunch of good ideas on adopting the Palm OS,” Powers remembered. 6 HOSED Throughout the spring and early summer of 1999, Confinity and X.com occupied adjoining office suites at 394 University Avenue in Palo Alto. After the fact, much was made of the two companies’ cohabitation, but it started as mere coincidence. X.com and Confinity were neither competitors nor collaborators—Confinity pursued mobile money transfer and cryptography while X.com went about building its financial services superstore. Each company thought the other was misguided. Musk was unreserved in his criticism of PalmPilot money beaming. “I’m like, That’s a dumb idea. They’re doomed,” he remembered thinking. Meanwhile, Confinity expected X.com to sink in regulatory quicksand.

Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics
by Robert Skidelsky
Published 13 Nov 2018

But there is no incentive to do anything about either set of imbalances, as long as economists and policymakers believe in leaving control of financial flows to the financiers. V I. Ba n k i ng I m ba l a nc e s In the nineteenth century it made sense to talk of British or French savings ‘flowing abroad’ to finance the capital development of their clients, because capital-rich countries like Britain and France alone had the financial markets able to mobilize money for foreign loans. It was not accidental that financial facilities were located in the country in which saving (in the sense of non-consumed income) was most plentiful. But even then there was no automatic connection between a current account surplus and foreign lending: the Rothschilds raised money from a variety of locations.

This Is Service Design Doing: Applying Service Design Thinking in the Real World: A Practitioners' Handbook
by Marc Stickdorn , Markus Edgar Hormess , Adam Lawrence and Jakob Schneider
Published 12 Jan 2018

We used these insights to evolve our core offer: large PV systems coming in three different sizes, complete with battery, cabling, lights, etc. The offer also includes a three-year credit agreement and free maintenance throughout the repayment period. A second prototype of the PV system was developed, now fully functional (but still very ugly): we could remotely turn the PV system off and on based on incoming mobile money payments (M-Pesa), and gather performance and usage data in real time to foresee maintenance activities. A hardware prototype made from DIY components helped to overcome cultural barriers and get honest feedback from our pilot customers. During our trip, we had found a small, like-minded Tanzanian organization, with whom we started a field test soon after.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
Published 15 May 2023

New York Times, May 13. www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/upshot/what-was-the-greatest-era-for-american-inno vation-a-brief-guided-tour.html. Isaacson, Walter. 2014. The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster. Jack, William, and Tavneet Suri. 2011. “Mobile Money: The Economics of M-PESA.” NBER Working Paper no. 16721. DOI:10.3386/w16721. Jäger, Simon, Benjamin Schoefer, and Jörg Heining. 2021. “Labor in the Boardroom.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 136, no. 2: 669‒725. James, John A., and Jonathan S. Skinner. 1985. “The Resolution of the Labor-Scarcity Paradox.”

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order
by Colin Kahl and Thomas Wright
Published 23 Aug 2021

Nonessential businesses were shuttered, and social distancing and hygiene requirements were imposed across the country, with special protective measures implemented for those parts of the economy—such as agricultural collection centers—that were allowed to stay open. Borders were closed, flights into the country were banned, and domestic travel between cities and districts was suspended. The government also encouraged the use of mobile money apps and online banking to limit physical interactions. On March 21, the government imposed a nationwide stay-at-home order. In late April, the lockdown was loosened, but the government put in place a mask mandate for all public places and multifamily compounds. A nighttime curfew was also maintained, and places of worship and schools remained closed.2 As was the case in many other countries that acted quickly, recent experience contending with infectious diseases appeared to play a role in shaping the Rwandan government’s actions.

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World
by Liaquat Ahamed
Published 22 Jan 2009

Moreau did not want to be blamed for a world economic collapse. Some French banks undoubtedly did pull some deposits home but this was mere commercial prudence in the light of the deteriorating turn of events. Meanwhile, in an effort to forestall a breakdown in world finances, Norman and George Harrison of the New York Fed had begun mobilizing money to support the Reichsbank. At this point, with a financial crisis looming, Lord Revelstoke saved the day by suddenly dropping dead. The consequent suspension of the proceedings forced the parties to catch their breath for a few days and step away from the brink. Schacht left with the German delegation for consultations in Berlin.