Posts Tagged ‘money’
“While money can’t buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery”*…
A survey of 43 countries published on October 30th by the Pew Research Centre of Washington, DC, shows that people in emerging markets are within a whisker of expressing the same level of satisfaction with their lot as people in rich countries. The Pew poll asks respondents to measure, on a scale from zero to ten, how good their lives are. (Those who say between seven and ten are counted as happy.) In 2007, 57% of respondents in rich countries put themselves in the top four tiers; in emerging markets the share was 33%; in poor countries only 16%—a classic expression of the standard view that richer people are more likely to be happy. But in 2014, 54% of rich-country respondents counted themselves as happy, whereas in emerging markets the percentage jumped to 51%…
More at “Money and Happiness.”
* Groucho Marx
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As we wander past a warm gun, we might recall that it was on this date in 1922 that British archaeologist Howard Carter and his crew discovered a step leading to the tomb of King Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. The subsequent discovery of Tut’s nearly-intact tomb was a world-wide sensation, and ignited renewed public interest in ancient Egypt, for which “King Tut”‘s burial mask, now in Cairo Museum, remains the popular symbol.
(For an amusing– and enlightening– explication of “The Mummy’s Curse,” click here.)
Mask of Tutankhamun’s mummy
“Nobody knows what a dollar is, what the word means, what holds the thing up, what it stands in for… what the hell are they? What do they do? How do they do it?”*…
From this website QuiltBank, a “subsidiary” of master quilter Nina Paley’s Pale Gray Labs, money– a $1000 “bill”– that one can actually use…
Each individually numbered bill is lovingly stitched by our robot Behemoth, which labors for over eight continuous hours at up to 1500 stitches per minute. Slowed down by the many twists and turns of the design, along with thread breaks, bobbin changes, and mysterious mishaps, each bill takes about two days to stitch. Nonetheless we achieve a pattern far more complex than any commercially available quilt.
The individual bills are painstakingly bound by Nina Paley, using a hundred-year-old foot-powered treadle sewing machine. This soft and tactile bill contains over 360,000 stitches through 100% cotton fabric, lofted with quality polyester batting – the best type for this purpose, though cotton or wool can be used on request. QuiltMoney can be machine washed like any other quilt; this is known as money laundering.
The design is based on a 1934-series $1000 bill featuring the portrait of Grover Cleveland, the only US president to serve two non-consecutive terms…Each $1000 bill is 40 inches high by 90 inches wide (3’4″ x 7’6″, or 1m x 2.3m) with bound edges. A rare uncut sheet of two is 92″ square, suitable for use on a queen or king size bed.
More at QuiltMoney.
* Boggs, (“money artist,” quoted in Lawrence Weschler’s wonderful Boggs: A Comedy of Values)
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As we cozy up with our currency, we might send rebellious birthday greetings to Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin; he was born on this date in 1814 (as recorded, O.S., in Russia; it is also rendered, N.S., May 30). A student of philosophy who immersed himself in Hegel, Bakunin moved to Paris, where he became first a friend, then an antagonist of Marx. While Bakunin shared Marx’s dedication to justice for peasants and workers, he disagreed that acting through the State was the remedy. Rather, Bakunin, an anarcho-socialist, argued for the replacement of the state with federations of self-governing workplaces and communes. Their rivalry came to a climax at the 1872 Hague Congress, at which Marx and his supporters expelled Bakunin and his from the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA). Bakunin then held a rival conference, and recruited a larger faction of IWA members than Marx. In the end, of course, while Bakunin was right to predict that Marxist regimes would be one-party dictatorships over the proletariat, not of the proletariat, it was Marx’s approach that enthralled Lenin.
Bakunin argued that, post-collectivization, money should be replaced by labor notes, recompense for work democratically-determined according to time spent and difficulty; still, he would surely have approved of Paley’s hand-crafted currency.
“Gold is the corpse of value…”*
In the wake of World War I, with metals scarce, Germans faced a shortage of pocket change. So cities, corporations, and sometimes individuals printed and used Serienschein (series notes), a form of Notgeld (emergency money). Circulating from 1917 to 1923, in the run up to the great inflation that presaged the rise of National Socialism, the Serienschein were denominated in small amounts– one Pfennig up to one or two Marks– unlike the Notgeld issued during the great inflation, which were issued in giant denominations, up to $100 million Marks…
And even then, required wheelbarrows for transactions…
But the Serienschein were unlike the huge inflation bills in another way, too: while the Weimar bills were as uniformly drab as the circumstances that spawned them, Serienschein— sourced from many different places, as they were– were hugely various and often strikingly designed…
These fascinating notes began to give way to their drab– but astronomically denominated– successors in 1922, when the European victors in WWI, led by England, demanded their reparations payments in full (and in gold). Reeling still from their loss, and unable to rev their economy sufficiently quickly to cover the vig, the Germans were effectively bankrupted… and reduced to printing money. Printing it as fast as they could. The social toll was huge, and had a profound political effect, paving the way for the rise of Hitler and the Nazis.
One notes that once again a group of European countries, this time ironically led by Germany, is looking to a beleaguered neighbor, this time Greece, for repayment at a time when the Greeks do not have the capacity to earn their way to solvency. (One notes, too, that Spain, Portugal, Italy, and others are trailing perilously closely behind Greece…). So as one watches right-wing nationalist movements gather strength in these debtor nations, one can only hope that the folks with hands on the tillers in Germany (and at the EMU) recall George Santayana’s admonition (in The Life of Reason): “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
See more examples of Serienschein here.
*Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
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As we think again about stuffing our mattresses, we might recall that it was on this date in 1929 that panicked sellers traded nearly 16 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange (four times the normal volume at the time), and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 12%. Remembered as “Black Tuesday,” this was the conclusive event in the Crash of 1929, and is often cited as the start of the Great Depression.
Money, money, money…
More bracing bank notes at Occupy George.
As we remember that four out of five U.S. bills are contaminated with cocaine, we might also recall that it was on this date in 1901 that a “get-away car” was used for the first time– by bandits fleeing after the robbery of a Paris shop.
1901 Darracq Type C Tonneau (source)
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