electronic money

erhavi

writing a thesis on electronic money, and believe its implementation could improve a number of aspects of civilised life (such as, say, to give each citizen a wage percentage of total state resources based on merit (resources/100)*(assigned percentage)). any thoughts ?

Peregrinus

I don't think you need to have electronic money in order to distribute a social dividend/universal basic income/whatever to citizens, though it undoubtedly makes things easier. But if you can have old-age pensions without electronic money - and we did - then you can have any kind of social payment.

As to the idea of a regular payment to each citizen, it's not a novel idea, as no doubt you know. What is novel, I think, is that the amount should be apportioned to the individual citizen's "merit", whatever that means. I think the first thing you have to do is flesh out (a) what is meant by "merit" in this context, and (b) how and by whom each individual's "merit" would be determined in practice.

And the third thing you have to do is to advance an argument as to why such a payment should be "merit"-based at all. If the payment is to go to each citizen, should we require anything of them as a condition of receiving the payment other than that they be, well, citizens?

Nody

If you want to argue for electronic money then go for the privacy vs. criminal aspect of it instead. If every transaction has to be digital it will make it harder for people to get paid black (you'd have to buy products to bribe with instead of money which can show suspicious patterns; items in their house they have not paid for etc. gives traceability). It also means that the state knows exactly everything you're spending money on and that information is of interest to be sold to other companies for targeted marketing/insurance etc. to see if you tend to buy to much chocolate (higher insurance) or if you went and spent money before claiming you can't afford to pay your loans etc.

johnnyskeleton

Mod note:

Not really a suitable topic as per charter. Maybe try one of the college forums for discussion on essays etc. Feel free to start a discussion on this issue when youve researched it some more and have formed opinions on it that you wish to discuss.