Training teaches how to carry out a specific task more efficiently and reliably. Education, on the other hand, opens and enriches a person’s mind. To train a person, you need know nothing about who they really are, or what they love, or why. Education reaches out to embrace the whole person. Historically, we have treated money as a matter of training, rather than education in its wider and more dignified sense.
Price is a public matter — a negotiation between supply and demand. A thing’s price is set in competition. So the price of a car is determined by how much some people want it, how much they are willing to pay, and how ready the manufacturer is to sell. It’s a public activity: lots of people are involved in the process, but your voice is almost never important in setting the price.
Value, on the other hand, is a personal, ethical and aesthetic judgment — assigned finally by individuals, and founded on their perceptiveness, wisdom and character.
Troubles are urgent. They ask for direct action. … By contrast, worries often say more about the worrier than about the world. … So, addressing money worries should be quite different from dealing with money troubles. To address our worries we have to give attention to the pattern of thinking (ideology) and to the scheme of values (culture) as these are played out in our own individual, private existences.
By mapping income versus self-described happiness in several countries worldwide, the study’s authors found that the more money people had, the happier they tended to be. The trend was clear across the board, leading the economists to conclude that there’s “no evidence of a satiation point,” a theoretical level of contentment past which more cash doesn’t translate into more happiness.
Contrary to previous research suggesting happiness levels out after a certain point of income growth, new study suggests money can buy you happiness. Still, philosophy might still have a better answer than science.
For the time being, bitcoin is in many ways the best and cleanest payments mechanism the world has ever seen. So if we’re ever going to create something better, we’re going to have to learn from what bitcoin does right – as well as what it does wrong.
The internet is the greatest disintermediating force the world has ever known, and it’s going to have to change the way that charities campaign — at least with respect to the ones who like to use individual stories as a way of raising collective funds. That worked much better when you couldn’t help the individual directly.
Excellent graphic explainer of the fiscal cliff from Newsbound
…the four commodities of the street — cash, drugs, sex, and bikes… You can virtually exchange one for another.
