Suchergebnisse

The question: 'What would be the best way to use ten million dollars?' leads to many other questions when related to anti-trafficking work.What should the money be spent on? Who should be appointed to spend the money? And, perhaps most importantly, who should be the beneficiaries? In other words, are the ten million dollars to prevent trafficking of people meant for activities to stop smuggling of people, to stop unwanted migrants, or to protect and uphold people's rights when they move across borders and need to be protected from trafficking? Would the money be best spent on anti-trafficking work, or would it be better spent on strengthening the rights of all migrants to minimise the risk of trafficking?

In this article in the symposium on Costa Lapavitsas Social Foundation of Money, Market, & Credit, the author asserts that money does matter in capitalist society, & frames the thematic question of how money in capitalism differs from non-capitalist money. The development of fiat money in the form of derivatives is explored as a means for trading risk or hedging. Analysis of the social relations mediated by money explores the Marxist limitation of a theory of power & trust, & Lapavitsas reconciliation of that limitation by theorizing the dominance of fiat money. A shift to the global level is argued to distinguish the differences between gold & fiat money, & the resultant break between money & capital, & supports the conclusion that derivatives are distinctly capitalist money that embody the process of competition & accumulation. References.

Geld gehört zu den mysteriösesten kulturellen Erfindungen überhaupt. Es ist nicht nur ein Tauschmittel, es dient auch der präzisen Verteilung von Macht in Geldwirtschaften, während sich dies in traditionellen Gesellschaften durch Gewalt und Blutvergießen vollzieht. Geld lockert zwischenmenschliche Beziehungen, erweitert aber gleichzeitig den Freiheitsspielraum jedes Einzelnen. Geld ist nicht an ein besonderes Gut wie Gold oder Silber gebunden und kann auch in der sublimen Form des Kreditgelds auf elektronischen Konten existieren. Es lässt sich am besten als eine Art institutionalisiertes Vertrauen begreifen, dessen Gültigkeit ständig durch eine Art permanentes Plebiszit bestätigt werden muss, durch das tagtägliche Handeln der Menschen, die Geld benutzen. (ICEÜbers)

Conservative welfare state policies as in Germany often presume that money is a common resource within couples and, therefore, pooled. Research, however, indicates that money is increasingly managed separately or partly separately. This trend is either explained by the diversification of forms of relationships or interpreted as a general decline of the joint pooling of money. Contributing to this debate, this study investigates whether couples abandon independent money management when particular life events occur or when partners' resources change. Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for the years 2004, 2005 and 2008 are used. Panel analyses show that marriage leads to joint pooling or partly independent money management. An increase in women's incomes, however, is associated with independent money management. Women's wish for independence apparently contributes to the decline of the joint pool. The substantial prevalence of financial independence within couples calls into doubt the adequacy of German welfare state policies.

We use data from a survey of residents of five Italian cities conducted in late spring 2004 to estimate the discount rates implicit in (1) money versus future risk reductions and (2) money versus money tradeoffs. We find that the mean personal discount rate is 0.3–1.7% in (1) and 8.7% in (2). The latter is lower than the discount rates estimated in comparable situations in many recent studies, greater than market interest rates in Italy at the time, and exhibits modest variation with age and gender. The discount rate implicit in money versus risk tradeoffs is within the range of estimates from studies in the United States and Europe, and does not depend on observable individual characteristics. We use split samples to investigate whether a completely abstract risk reduction—one where the risk reduction delivery has been stripped of all specifics, so that respondents should focus on the risks without being distracted by details—results in WTP and discount figures comparable to those from an identified delivery mechanism (a medical test). We find that while WTP for an immediate risk reduction is 42–73% higher with the abstract risk reduction, the discount rate in the money versus risk tradeoffs and the variance of the error term in the WTP equation are the same across the two variants of the questionnaire.