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money

Museums, Technology, and Money on the Table

By | Art & Social Change, Of Love and Concrete | 2 Comments

Digital technology is all the rage in art galleries and museums, or at least the thought that we should all be using it. But placing an iPad next to a priceless object with the exact contextual information that could be conveyed on a plaque is not an effective use of technology. It is merely the same old idea in a new medium. Worse than that, it lacks the appreciation of what the new medium can do. When used the right way, technology does truly present an opportunity to bring an old institution like a museum into the 21st century and provide greater access to human understanding.

I am pleased to say that I have not seen the offending iPad example in person. However, in conversations with people in social change fields, including museums, I have certainly cringed at the presentation of “innovative” ideas for technology deployment that even my grandmother would consider dated. Yes, it is a step further to use a screen to convey rich media (video, pictures) but this still leaves so much unsaid and undone. These are supercomputers not analog televisions. Computers, phones, notebooks and more could open up numerous opportunities for an institution like a museum.

Those opportunities converge on three key concepts: unexpected relationships, human relationships, and money.

In very simple terms, computers collect data and return data. That data can be stored, manipulated and analysed in a variety of ways between input and output. An institution has the opportunity to program a computer to prompt a certain response from an audience and provide feedback. For instance, an application on an electronic tablet next to an object could lead a user through a series of questions. Based on the response to the questions, the computer could provide more information that is targeted to that audience member and therefore more relevant and engaging.  Or the application could make recommendations on other objects or exhibits in the museum that might be of interest. The computer could expand horizons of the audience member by making connections they would not otherwise have made.

Along with algorithms to create opportunities for personal discovery, technology could heighten connections to other humans. Assuming data is collected, there is an opportunity for it to be stored and communicated. I think a quirk in being human is our fixation to know where we stand in relation to others. We enjoy knowing what other people think, and if nothing else we love knowing how we compare. We enjoy reading comments on blog posts (hint hint) because they give us new perspectives and may convince us we are not crazy after all. Learning what other people are experiencing in relation to objects could be a powerful enhancement of human understanding and learning.

Finally I think museums are missing a significant revenue opportunity. Technology provides easy access to information from your audience. Input into a computer can tell you a lot about the person putting the data into the device. Completely anonymous answers to questions that heighten the experience an individual has on a cultural field trip could be valuable. The data collected could expose what the audience is thinking and what they value. If you know what someone holds dear, you likely have the opportunity for a financial exchange.

Technology is a powerful tool when it is deployed to it fullest potential. It could help museums fulfill their mission and put some money in the bank.

IMAGE CREDIT. [Freemake.com].

How Free Money Can Save Us All

By | ChangeEngine, External Monologue | 3 Comments

While Baltimore attempts to ban the destitute from its streets and those who rely on food stamps to meet their basic needs face cuts, a radical experiment in poverty reduction is being contemplated an ocean away. In Switzerland, one of the world’s richest nations, voters will soon go to the polls to decide whether every Swiss citizen should receive a “basic income.” Under its terms, the only thing a Swiss citizen over the age of 18 would need to receive around $1,000 U.S. a month is a pulse. Yes, you read that correctly. You only need to be alive, merely exist, and you get $1,000 cash.

This idea has sparked a great deal of debate here in the states, setting the tongues of the chattering classes a-wagging with equal parts indignation and inspiration. Many dismiss the idea as impractical, madness. But the question that needs to be asked is, if the Swiss can do it, why can’t America — the richest and most powerful country in human history? And whether, given the way our economic system works now, we might not be the ones who are crazy.

Meet Jake

But don’t we already have welfare for those in need? Work harder and you will get somewhere, goes the American mantra. Well, lets take a hard look at the welfare system … Meet Jake, a 25 year old male with no dependents. Jake has a job working at Walmart. Luckily enough, he gets to work 40 hours a week at minimum wage. Unlike some of his colleagues, he earns $13,920 a year pre-tax in the state of Maryland. Between the current benefit programs, which include SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit), and Section 8 housing credits, Jake receives about $590 a month. If Jake wasn’t eligible for Medicaid, which in Maryland he would be, another $180 a month from the Affordable Care Act would come his way to get health insurance. Jake would only get a few hundred bucks extra under the Basic Income plan. And a large number of these programs are means-tested; creating a perverse incentive for those most in need — the less poor you get, however incrementally, the worse off you are. By supplying a basic income, work would actually pay off for Jake, and he would have a reason to strive for better pay and advancement.

But the problem of welfare isn’t just the amount of money but the message that’s sent in how it’s distributed. Stores that accept SNAP benefits have large signs stating what they can and can’t be used for. No hot food, no prepared food, no booze or tobacco. So on SNAP Jake can’t head to the deli counter and get a hoagie to-go or some of Eddie’s Mac and Cheese to share with his kids for dinner. The system assumes that the poorer you are the worse your choices will be, which is being proven wrong in many countries around the globe. The fact of the matter is that cash payments, with little to no strings attached, work. A majority of recipients in such programs spend the money on fixing their house, better food, expanding or creating small businesses, and their education.

Try to do any of this under the current regime, and Jake will get a rude awakening. Section 8 housing vouchers, while they are supposed to be universally accepted, are often refused by landlords. That is assuming you are getting them in the first place because the process for those benefits can take months or years. SNAP benefits need to be reapplied for every six months and don’t you forget! Because if you do you are going to spend at minimum a whole day down at the welfare office getting it straightened out. How is someone working hourly on minimum wage, who has kids or has to go to school supposed to do this? The amount of red tape is astounding. Think of how much energy would be saved — and unleashed — by simply replacing all of this with a basic income.

Free Money and The Protestant Ethic

“But it is still free money and why would you work if you get free money? We will all get lazy!” yells my inner economist. But what if I told you that wasn’t the case? When Canada ran an experiment in the town of Minocome, productivity and work rates only dropped by 1 percent on average. The groups that dropped the most were new mothers and teenagers supporting their families. The mothers spent more time with their children and the teens spent time in school. That sounds like a win-win to me. Our friend Jake could go back to school part-time to become a carpenter, finish his GED, or gain other skills. American productivity levels are off the charts, while the share of profits for most Americans has declined. It is about time the American Worker got their fair cut of the pie.

The best part is that a basic income is financially doable. All we need is the political will. Jake would no longer have to cut through red tape to try to make a better life for himself. Every American would get a bigger cut of the productivity they already put into the system. The cash payouts would empower renters to become homeowners, single mothers to spend more time with their children, and give young adults in this struggling economy the security to start their own business. A basic income could be the fuel that allows America to thrive in the 21st century.

IMAGE CREDIT. Wikimedia Commons.

Outlawing Spare Change

By | Homelessness, The Race to End Homelessness | One Comment

Some people are surprised to learn that I don’t usually give money to panhandlers. It isn’t because I don’t care about those experiencing homelessness. It is because 1. Working in homeless services (shockingly) doesn’t pay me enough to pull out my wallet every day, 2. I don’t carry cash nearly as often as I should, and 3. I can’t give away money to the clients at my job, even if I could afford to.

So today, when I gave a dollar bill to a guy with a sign and a battered Red Sox cap, it wasn’t because I thought it would end homelessness. It was because I am so disturbed by the legislation before Baltimore City Council this month that attempts to make panhandling illegal that I wanted to give a dollar away before it becomes too late. Also, I am really rooting for the Red Sox.

Several Baltimore laws already prohibit aggressive panhandling, but a new proposal would encourage police to put increased pressure on individuals asking for money. The bill would outlaw panhandling within ten feet of any restaurant or storefront. Anyone who has spent time in Baltimore will realize that this essentially outlaws asking for money in all of downtown. Councilwoman Rochelle “Rikki” Spector, who supports the bill, thinks these rules will put an end to what she deems the “atrocious behavior” of asking people on the street for spare change.

You’ve likely seen the cardboard signs, “Looking for Work,” or “Homeless, Anything Helps.” To me, these signs are people silently screaming for help, people who have run out of options. Asking for help is what we teach children to do at a young age, and yet Baltimore is considering taking away that right. If visitors to the downtown area don’t want to give money, they can — and should — calmly say no. Panhandling will not put an end to homelessness. It has no place in the The Journey Home, nor is it anyone’s ideal source of income. But on a day when someone is hungry, or needs bus fare, or shampoo, is it wrong to ask your neighbors for some help?

I often hear that people are afraid the person they donate to will use the money for drugs or alcohol. More than once I have accompanied an individual into a sandwich shop or a grocery store and picked up the tab (as has Change-Engine contributor Robyn Stegman), but when I give cash, I don’t ask questions about where it is going. Giving money away is my choice, but how someone spends it is not.

If “atrocious behavior” means buying something to eat, talking to strangers, or asking for help, then I’d suggest that we are all guilty — and I’d hope for more, not less, of this behavior in Baltimore.

This is Your Brain on Wealth: How Money Hacks Your Brain

By | Social Enterprise, The Thagomizer | 2 Comments

For ages when we talk about wealth inequality we focus on the effect it has on the poor. Yet, this video from PBS Newshour, made me reflect this week that perhaps we need to also start talking about how wealth inequality impacts the rich:

The video cites various studies connecting wealth with a lack of empathy for one’s fellow man. For example, one study shows that people with luxury cars are less likely to stop for pedestrians, while another reveals students from wealth are more likely to take candy from children. The results seem to suggest one conclusion: money turns us into less compassionate, more immoral, selfish people.

A study from Harvard University and the University of Utah showed that simply having money on the mind changed the way participants made decisions. One group was given phrases like “She spends money liberally” to get them thinking about money while another group was given neutral phrases like “She walked on grass.” The two groups were then given a slew of tests that determined whether they would engage in immoral behavior such as stealing paper from the school copier or deceiving a friend for financial gain. Those who were thinking about money were more likely to make immoral decisions to the detriment of their social bonds than those who were given neutral phrases. As one researcher concluded, “These findings suggest that money is a more insidious corrupting factor than previously appreciated, as mere, subtle exposure to money can be a corrupting influence.”

Does this mean we are better off living without money? Money allows us to get everything we need without much social interaction. We no longer need to depend on each other to survive. Wealthy people do not need to rely on social bonds. Perhaps this is why upper class people are less able to pick up social cues and exhibit empathy with others who are suffering as found in research from UC Berkeley. “These latest results indicate that there’s a culture of compassion and cooperation among lower-class individuals that may be born out of threats to their wellbeing,” said one researcher describes. While viewing a video showing a family dealing with a child with cancer, lower-class participants were more likely to lower their heart rate, a sign of compassion, while higher-class participants were more likely to remain neutral. “It’s not that the upper classes are coldhearted,” the author of the study said, “They may just not be as adept at recognizing the cues and signals of suffering.”

While I believe there are other ways of transaction that better strengthen social bonds and build community, I think the real problem is not money, but the abundance of it. What concerns me is the skewed perception we have of wealth and those who have it. The changes that occur in the participants are a result of the power we perceive comes with wealth, a greater power than that of our social bonds. Part of this connection between power and wealth is forged by a strong belief in the American Dream. This national fable teaches us we can achieve whatever we want if we make enough money through hard work. It also teaches us that those who are rich must have gotten there through their own hard work, and not a set of advantages they were born with. One study featured in the video above involves a rigged monopoly game where one participant gets an extra dice to roll and double the money of the other players. Even though this participant is far more likely to win the game, when they were interviewed afterward they would attribute their success to their individual skills and talent. They would feel like they “deserved to win” the game.

Our perception that wealth is created solely through hard work doesn’t take into account the many challenges people in poverty have to face that those with money do not. Just as the abundance of money changes the way the mind works, so does the lack of it. Humans have a limited mental bandwith and when our minds our focused on getting our basic needs, we are less able to focus it on other higher orders of thinking.  A study recently  published in Science showed people concerned about making ends meet made worse decisions, were more forgetful, and were less likely to notice things. The impact of poverty is equivalent to losing 13 IQ points. “All the data shows it isn’t about poor people,” one of the researchers said, “it’s about people who happen to be in poverty.” 

The staggering wealth inequality in the United States creates unhappiness not only for the poor but for the rich. Research shows that the happiest countries in the world are those with the most equality. As the saying goes “money can’t buy you happiness.” Happiness comes from both money and from social bonds. The poor lack money to sustain themselves, yet create a strong community. The rich on the other hand maximize their wealth while destroying relationships. The kind of wealth had by the 1% at the top is making no one happier. Not the haves, not the have nots. A study from Princeton showed that after you reached a salary of $75,000, having more wealth didn’t continue to increase your happiness. Having a ridiculous amount of wealth doesn’t really make any one happier and makes rich people into worse human beings, it’s a pretty raw deal for all involved. It’s seems to me like it is time for a new American dream.

Summer: Sun, Humidity, and Hurricanes

By | Health, The Global Is Local | No Comments

Remember Sandy? She (or he) was barreling down on us not so long ago. There were recommendations to stockpile water for three to five days, BGE was pre-emptively cutting tree limbs that threatened wires, and I’m sure there was a run on Old Bay and Natty Boh in the supermarkets.

Image credit: USGS

The reason Sandy is now just a memory of a disaster that could have been (for most of us in Baltimore City, anyway) is that things turned out very differently than they could have. The storm turned away from us and instead focused it’s attention on our neighbors to the north.

What I heard most often in the days afterwards were variations on “We were so lucky!” Homes and lives were destroyed in New York and New Jersey. Entire hospitals were evacuated. Billions of dollars in damages are still being assessed, repaired, and replaced. Part of the extent of the damage has to do with the sheer density of the regions affected, of course, but Fells Point and Canton aren’t exactly ghost towns, and the Inner Harbor is far from a dilapidated dump that can be written off for the insurance money.

“Lucky” might be a bit of an overstatement, though. It’s certainly good that we didn’t get a direct hit, of course, but there are massive atmospheric forces at work that dictate the speed, direction, and overall countenance of storms.

Last October, I was wondering a couple of things as Sandy traipsed along the coast.

1. Why is everyone in such a tizzy? Doesn’t this happen all the time? We’re right near the coast!

2. What is Natty Boh?

The answer to number two became clear before long, although it has yet to make a substantial impression on me. Cheap beer that isn’t terrible is good to have available, though, so I don’t have any objections.

Number one, regarding tizzies, has only started to make sense in the (almost) year since then. First, Baltimoreans like to have strong reactions to weather, whether it’s complaints about the heat, driving like a fleet of grannies in a quarter inch of snow, or stockpiling for the apocalypse when a big storm approaches. Second, like I said earlier, there are some macro factors that affect the behavior of hurricanes. Atlantic hurricanes that move up the East coast typically follow a consistent, if broad, path that dog-legs North and East as it passes the mid-Atlantic region. This is why there has not yet been a direct hit on the city, despite the storm surge from Isabel that I still hear about sometimes. So although that general pattern was still predicted (see image above), that dog-leg would mostly be over land, and pass right over us, which would be unusual. Needless to say, Sandy decided to follow protocol and headed North and East instead.

Changes in the behavior of the Gulf Stream have the potential for throwing many of our normal prediction models for a loop. Along with hypothesized frigid temperatures in Europe, there are many questions about how future storms will behave, and whether past prediction models are adequate to assess risk in various places. Due to the effects of a little “theory” about global warming, the 100 or 500 year storms are now storms of our time, not of the distant future or past, and their behavior is becoming less predictable. Even a hurricane such as Sandy – large, strong, but not record breaking by most measures — had a storm surge that would have put much of the downtown area underwater including City Hall, the police headquarters, and of course most of Fells Point, Federal Hill, Canton, and Locust Point, among others.

If those aren’t compelling reasons for some serious consideration about how we invest in infrastructure, housing, and tourist destinations in places like the Inner Harbor, I don’t know what would be.

The Business End of Social Change

By | Social Enterprise, The Thagomizer | One Comment

Perhaps by now you have noticed the spiffy new banner to accompany my post (thanks to blog-master-extraordinaire Hasdai Westbrook). Yet perhaps now you are wondering, “What exactly is a thagomizer and what does it have to do with your blog?”

As a dino-phile it is only fitting that I find inspiration for the title of my blog from my favorite “terrible lizard,” the Stegosaurus. The spiky end of a Stegosaurus tail is called a “thagomizer” and it is the business end of Stegosaurus: it is what packs the punch, delivers the painful blow, and shows predators who’s boss. Similarly how we create, define, and share wealth is, in this blogger’s opinion, the business end of social change. It pays our salary, funds our programs, and defines success. The economy is both a constructive and destructive driver and plays a central role in everyone’s life and pursuit of happiness. If we are looking to radically change our world to maximize the happiness and wellness of everyone then I think we need to start with what we value.

The traditional nonprofit model separates the way we raise money from the way we use it for social good. Donors make money doing everything from finding oil to running big box stores and then give it to nonprofits who use it for various projects for social change. The donor side then is free to consider the best ways to make money without regard to social impact and the nonprofit can focus on doing good with no consideration of economic impact. In this way we separate organizations and actions that create money from those that create social good.

I believe this results in many of the problems Scott Burkholder has commented on in his series on Dan Pollata’s Ted Talk on the way we think about charity. He points out five challenges social change makers face:

  1. Below average compensation
  2. Small or no budget for advertising and marketing
  3. No tolerance for taking of risk in pursuit of new ideas for generating revenue
  4. Expectation to make change in short time frames
  5. No profit to attract risk capital

When we create a split between organizational and personal contributions to the economy and contributions to social good we do not expect the way we make money will make us happier or more well and we are mistrustful of any model of social good that also seeks to make money. It is for that reason we create different standards for nonprofits than businesses. Nonprofits must use the bare minimum amount of money in order to run their program (i.e. no overhead), give no economic incentive to their employees (i.e. minimum compensation), and must always be able to produce results from economic inputs (i.e. no risk, no innovation, just results) because it is the only way they can prove their value.

Nonprofits are marginalized as takers rather than contributors to our society since money is the thing most valued and nonprofits by definition take money without offering any economic return. This makes them subject to their donors who do have money, and thus power to dictate how a nonprofit operates. Innovation in social change in this system then requires nonprofits to find donors to take a risk. Without willing funders a nonprofit cannot succeed.

Take for example Artprize, an innovative art initiative in Grand Rapids featured on the ChangeEngine blog this week. Founder Rick DeVos is grandson of the co-founder of Amway, Richard DeVos and much of the funding for Artprize comes from various DeVos or Van Andel (the other Amway co-founder) family foundations. While the method of giving out Artprize is democratic, participatory, and a brilliant model, the funding model hasn’t shifted much since ancient systems of patronage. To create change we often have to rely on finding the Rick Devoses of the world, the people with the access to money but the vision to invest in something new.

What first interested me in the economy, social enterprise, and alternative ways of exchanging was this conundrum. How do we merge the economic creation with the creation of social good? How do we take the ability to influence and control social change out of the hands of a few wealthy individuals and businesses? The Thagomizer is a way to explore those questions and consider how to:

  1. Change what we value and find ways to measure and compensate those who make our lives, society and world better
  2. Blur the line between business and nonprofit by creating businesses that measure social impact and nonprofits that are funded through their own economic activities
  3. Give everyone the economic opportunity to have the ability to improve their lives and give to others

By tearing down the walls between making money and doing good, we can begin to start a conversation about how we can do both at the same time.

More Money, More Problems

By | Social Enterprise, The Thagomizer | One Comment

Local currency can be a great way to keep money in your community and support the amazing businesses that make your town unique. However, every alternative economic system comes with its own legal considerations.

Enter Bernard Von NotHaus, the architect of the Liberty Dollar, a private currency. Last year he was convicted of counterfeiting and labeled a “domestic terrorist,” by the FBI. Since the Liberty Dollar is an alternative currency, akin to the BNote, Bay Bucks, and other local currencies, several have raised the: “Are we doing something illegal too?” question.

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