From virtualpolitik:

"As someone now directing a series of courses on Culture, Art, and Technology, including a first-quarter sequence on material culture and artifacts, money is a subject about which I feel considerable pedagogical investment. After all, we are teaching a lot about money this quarter in all our CAT courses: cowry shells, ancient coins, bank notes, and e-barter are all subjects discussed from the podium by our faculty team.

So I was delighted to be asked to be the official blogger for the annual research conference of the Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion. (I wrote about their Bottom of the Pyramid conference last year too.)

My former UCI colleague Bill Maurer leads the institute and gave the welcome address at the conference. In his opening remarks, Maurer reviewed "what I bought yesterday and how I paid for it." Maurer's repertoire of monetary transactions from a single day began with a breakfast with cash, moved on to lunch with a swiped credit card, continued with a free coffee acquired with loyalty card, was temporarily stalled when an attempt to pay for a Coke for another conference participant with coupon failed before the problem was resolved by charging the hotel room for the drink, resumed again smoothly with a text message that a cell phone bill had been automatically paid with a deduction from Maurer's bank account, and concluded with a dinner charged to UC Irvine corporate card. Maurer pointed out that this process of self-maintenance largely devoted to keeping himself "caffeinated and awake" entailed engagement with "six different payment methods and technologies."

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