villagefinance

The cashless village: in a pre-cash village like this (Solomon Islands), value is not stored in currency. Villagers don’t depend on cash to exchange value, either.

In The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers – and the Coming Cashless Society (Da Capo Press, Boston MA, 2012) David Wolman seeks not the end of money generally but specifically the end of paper cash – the sooner the better.

He spends a year living without cash – those germ-infested, cocaine-smudged notes – and discovers little inconvenience. He concludes that paper money is in demand mostly among drug cartels, money launderers and tax dodgers.

But Wolman also has a moral vision, asserting that cash “is most harmful to the billions of people who have so little of it.” To prove this he visits India, and for the only time in his research he must touch cash. This illuminates its ‘hidden cruelty’: “the privileged don’t want it and can easily avoid it; the poor can’t avoid it, and are most penalized by it.”

Mobile money is a boon in big urban areas like Mumbai, where Wolman interviews self-proclaimed ‘assassin of cash’ Abhishek Sinha, the visionary entrepreneur behind Eko. But he doesn’t note that Eko’s clients are the progressive, rapidly urbanizing poor – not the 800 m living in India’s 600,000 + villages.

In fact, Wolman never acknowledges that poor people are heavily concentrated in a pre-cash world. Yes, they can be looped, through mobile phones and village shops, into the digital economy. But cash is a technology that teaches abstract numbers and time. It opens doors to the modern world. Slamming that door shut too early would be both cruel and foolish.