Posted in Microfinance, The village, tagged cashless village, currency, Dan Ariely, mobile banking, mobile phone, moral hazard, Nina Mazar, technology, tokens on April 26, 2011| 3 Comments »
A number of mobile banking experts have been envisioning the ‘cash-less village’, in which villagers pay for groceries and services on their mobile phones. But, in his book Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely, a behavioural economist at Duke University, shows how the degree of abstraction of our currency can lead us to experience greater and greater distance from our ethical values, increasing moral hazard.
Posted in Orality, The village, tagged literacy, microfinance, numeracy, oral culture, saving, technology, Walter Ong on December 2, 2010| Leave a Comment »
Rural villages in the developing world are oral cultures; that is cultures in which the technologies of literacy (especially writing and print) are unfamiliar to most people.
A village bank in Cambodia
villagefinance 