Money and Other Useful Myths

Trevor Stone's talk at Ignite Boulder 14

Ignite is an event meme. Several speakers give five minute talks, each of which are backed by 20 slides which advance every 15 seconds. Ignite talks educate and entertain; the time and format constraints break people out of the PowerPoint mindset into a vehicle of insight and wit. I attend Ignite events at Ignite Boulder which has had the largest crowds in the world.

On March 3rd, 2011, I spoke at Ignite Boulder with a talk titled Money and Other Useful Myths. Here are the slides: 31 MB OpenOffice or 1 MB PDF, made available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. The video is available on YouTube in the IgniteBoulder channel.

If you're interested in the subject, here are some links worth pursuing:

Planet Money from NPR and This American Life. A great podcast that explores contemporary and theoretic economic themes with an entertaining and easy-to-understand approach. If you're mostly interested in the "how does money work" stuff, check their pieces on currency.
Planet Money came out of the fantastic This American Life episode The Giant Pool of Money, exploring several levels of the housing market collapse of the late naughties.
Speaking of podcasts, The BBC's Business Daily is informative and accessible, though it's usually not of the "Let's explain how money works" variety.
Crisis of Credit, a good animated short explaining the financial collapse of late 2008.
economicshelp.org is sort of an FAQ about economics concepts. Here's their money category.
Social Capital blog, from the Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America.
Socialstructing, a good post from Marina Gorbis on BoingBoing.
Gift economies like Burning Man are communities which use non-monetary forms of persuasion to create awesome stuff.
NeighborGoods, a site making it easier for folks to share resources.
The Awesome Foundation is a local-chapter based organization that gets a few people to pitch in to give $1000 grants to awesome projects that promote awesomeness.
As always, Wikipedia has a lot of good information about currency and even local currencies if you want inspiration for creating a new one. They've also got a big page on social capital.

If you're particularly interested in what I say, you can check out my blog, flwyd.livejournal.com where I sometimes write about economics and money. You can also follow me as @flwyd on Twitter or any of the various forms of contact on my about page.