That's Capital

Bill Maurer Talks Money

Guest: Bill Maurer
Jonathan Field and Titus Levi talk with UC, Irvine anthropologist Bill Maurer about curating an exhibit about alternative currencies in Southern California, his studies about the way currencies function in different communities, and his latest book, Mutual Life, Limited : Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason

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Host A Conversation

That's Capital is looking for scholars, journalists, students, business professionals or anyone thinking deeply about the way economics impacts our lives. Free market capitalist, tax-hating libertarian, left-wing communitarian, hopeful anarchist or old fashioned liberal, we'd love to have you become part of our producing team, or maybe just host one of our many on-going conversations. Below are some specific areas we want to explore in the next year. If you have thought about any of these areas with any intensity, or have found others who do, please get in touch, wherever you  live. 

Infrastructure: What are the social molecules that come together in ways that support or derail the core structure around educational, health, and energy systems?  How do people either generate or stymie new infrastructure development?

Imagined economies: Jerusalem, Singapore, Brazilia, Hollywood.
That's Capital will be looking at a few cities where the economy grew from powerful visions of a specific collective.

Old Media/New Media: How does media impact the economies which it serves. And more specifically, how are digital media technologies effecting how economies function, from the global to local level.

Marketing: Scourge or savior? Where, where and who does marketing serve? What's the difference between concepts like "branding," traditional advertising, and the birth of a new genre of selling call "buzz?"

Science and economics: How do advances in science work to advance economies? Where do economies serve to advance scientific discovery and innovation?

Romance - Love or Money?: Through the 20th century, Hollywood has  seeded a particularly American view of romance around the world. It's myth-making power is powerful. But where the classic Hollywood film posits romance as a connection between two individuals that is profoundly personal, there are economic consequences of marriage that are played out in different ways around the world. 

Money & Trust (four parts)

 

FOUR PARTS                                                                        

PART I
Marion Asnes and her guests explore the relationship between "real" money and emerging digital currencies.

 

Guests
Atefeh Riazi, Senior Partner and Chief Technology Officer of Ogilvy Worldwide
Mark C. Taylor, philosopher and scholar of religion and architecture

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PART II
Jonathan Field and Titus Levi continue the conversation with Mark C. Taylor, focusing on the evolving forms of money and how they reflect changes in everyday life.

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PART III 
Guest: Bill Maurer
Jonathan Field and Titus Levi talk with UC, Irvine anthropologist Bill Maurer about curating an exhibit about alternative currencies in Southern California, his studies about the way currencies function in different communities, and his latest book, Mutual Life, Limited : Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason.

Stream  (click here to listen on your computer)Podcast (click here to download to an iPod or another MP3 player)

PART III

Designer Nathan Felde leads a conversation with Peter Koenig. Author of 30 Lies About Money, Koenig is an organizational architecture consultant and writer based in Zurich, Switzerland. For the past 20 years, he's been leading workshops with businesses and individuals, helping them re-think attitudes towards money.

Nathan Felde, a designer and musician who once held the postion of director of the Media Lab for the NYNEX Center for Science and Technology, brought Koenig to That's Capital as someone who is leading people to "rethink money:" how it operates in our life and where it either empowers or disempowers us all.

That's Capital producers Titus Levi and Jonathan Field join the discussion, another part of our examination of the nature of money.

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Boomers at Work. Old or Wise?

Human Resource professional Sunny Bates talks with Titus Levi and Jonathan Field about work-place attitudes facing Baby Boomers as they move close to retirement. 

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Sunny Bates is the author of How to Earn What You're Worth, and CEO of Sunny Bates Associates.               

Speculation

In the June 15, 2005 issue of The New Republic, Jackson Lears writes a brilliant review of historian Steven Fraser's book, Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life.

Notes from Titus Levi

How I Ended Up Here

I first became interested in economics when I started college.  Economics provided tools that I could use to better understand questions I had had for many years about all sorts of things: Why didn’t more of my friends like jazz?  Could Ronald Reagan cut taxes, balance the budget, and increase military spending?  How could sparsely populated farm states wield so much political power?  Why does the market produce so much junk?  My interest in applying economic tools to such questions drove me to learn more and more… until I finally earned a PhD in the field.

While my ability to answer such questions remains a mixed success, I still believe that thinking through problems from an economic point of view can yield deep and valuable insights, if not final, definitive answers.  But as I went through graduate school, it became clearer that by adopting more and more abstract means of analysis, economics had become the least social of the social sciences.  That is, we had taken people – messy, irrational, fascinating – too far out of the analysis in a real and robust sense.  Fortunately, during these years I learned about sociology and anthropology, and how insights from these fields could inform economic thinking.  After joining the faculty of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, I continued to learn more about other social sciences and how they could inform economics and vice-versa.  In the back of my mind I pondered how a dialog among these disciplines could be set into motion.

During my years as a student and academic, I had become involved in media.  I worked as a jazz journalist through the latter half of the 80 and into the 90s.  In the 90s I worked as a radio DJ and program producer.  I developed a deep affection for radio, and eventually made it my field of research expertise, delving into issues of regulation, technological change, and business strategy.  I’ve been particularly fascinated by the move toward digital distribution of radio and radio-like programming through means such as streaming audio, satellite radio, and podcast.  These are powerful tools in search of the right kind of programming and the right mix of audiences.

Back in 1998 when I met Jonathan Field, I had no idea that we would launch an online radio program.  But over the years we have had conversations on all manner of topics: the evolving market for advertising, the possibilities for peace in the Middle East, the wonders of good food, the possibilities for new sorts of radio programming, the problem of news writing and presentation being either superficial or misguided, the rise and reshaping of pop culture.  Our email exchanges really could cover some ground.  And it’s those exchanges, those conversations, which stayed with me.  Conversation is enriching: it relies on listening, it helps to deepen and broaden one’s view, it informs others.  It’s not about winning or losing, or getting one’s way.  It’s about give and take.  About building something together.  The conversations I’ve had with Jonathan over the years have had these qualities.  The trick was to figure out how to bring these qualities into a broader and more open context.

When I left academia, I really wanted to do something with economics, but to make it more available and presentable to more people.  Not to water it down as a means of popularizing it, but to have people use economic tools to think systemically about what they observe.  Frankly, people already do this more than they think: as one of my professors would tell us over and over again: Economics is common sense made difficult.  Or at least, more formal or technical.  But even though most folks had some notion about economics and economic analysis, it seemed clear that applying a somewhat more rigorous or thoughtful economic analysis would be of use in helping more people understand policy, as well as their day-to-day lives.  Some economists have taken up this challenge, but in general, the media have not been good to economics or economists. For the most part, journalists often mishandle stories on economics and business, and worse, don’t apply economic or systemic analysis to a variety of questions and problems where economics would be a big help.

By using a variety of tools, Jonathan came up with a way to put something out there that would use economics and economic analysis, but to make it accessible.  And it would reclaim that great lost art (at least in the media): conversation.  This program would address the most prosaic and familiar of life’s experiences as well as the biggest financial and policy issues.  And it would have a really cool title, named for one of the most robust and thoroughgoing of analyses of capitalism.

So here we are.  At some point, we hope to offer this program over more types of radio platforms.  But for now, this is home.  Come in, take your shoes off, put your feet up, and hang out for a spell.

And remember to join in the conversation.

Paula Fass on the History of Babyhood

Guest
Paula Fass
Jonathan Field talks with historian Paula Fass about "babyhood" in 20th century America. Fass dives into the way changing ideas about babies translated into products, as well as conceptions of citizenship, progress, and what makes a meaningful adult life.

Fass is Byrne Professor of History at UC, Berkeley, and the author of several books on childhood, including The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s; Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education; Kidnapped: A History of Child Abduction in the United States, and is the co-editor of the Childhood in America. Her forthcoming book on children and globalization will be published next year.

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Podcast (click here to download to an iPod or another MP3 player)

Bios

Jonathan Field
Executive Director
Field runs Fieldwork, a brand research and strategy consultancy in New York City.  Previous to marketing, he worked as a reporter, playwright and producer.                                                                                                   

Titus Levi
Managing Director
Levi became interested in economics as a way of understanding music distribution and consumption. After finishing his PhD in 1997, he joined the faculty of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communications, teaching classes on business strategy and market analysis in the communications industries and conducting research on radio regulation, technological change, and market development.             

Since leaving academia, he has worked as a consultant to artists, arts organizations, and media companies. Over the last 20 or so years, he has also worked as an arts administrator, concert promoter, radio DJ, and music journalist.  That's Capital is his latest attempt to meld these various interests into a single activity.                                                                                                

Mark Hatwan
Chief Engineer and Technical Producer
For more than 15 years Mark has worked at KUSC-FM, one of the largest public radio stations in the US, where he now serves as its Director of Programming Production.  When he isn’t editing files and twirling knobs he hangs out with his wife Tammy and their three sons.

 

Mark C. Taylor on Money

Jonathan Field and Titus Levi continue the conversation with Mark C. Taylor, author of Confidence Games.

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Our Story

from Jonathan Field

Executive Director

Economics. Does the word make your eyes glaze over? Personally, I nearly failed my first college course in economics. But coming to know Los Angeles-based media economist Titus Levi, he made it clear to me that economics is simply the study of how people and communities share and trade things of value. Then why is it a subject only policy wonks seem to understand, even though it impacts all of our lives?

I take it personally. Here’s why. We live in a world full of products and marketing. I'm part of that marketing, helping businesses brand themselves. In my mind, smart marketing can create feedback loops between all these parties, feeding knowledge that, in turn, generates tangible value. At the same time, there's also a lot of seemingly useless products and advertising polluting the landscape.

I can imagine a world without so much marketing. I’ve visited such worlds. Twice. First, for a summer as a teen, living with a family of blacksmiths down in a town south of Oaxaca, Mexico.  The next time was 12 years ago, when I spent four months on a sparsely populated Greek island. The nights were as magical, with nothing to do but talk, drink and dance into morning. The days were languid, with air sweet with the scent of the nearbye sea. The foliage was rich in color, texture and taste, the ocean clear as gin. But at times, the sun would pound the earth relentlessly. Boredom could be endemic. Your meals consisted of the same foods, day after day. People gossiped. About everything. Life could feel very confining.

I came home. I was happy to have warm showers. Even television.  But today, whether you're in a city or suburb or just online, every inch of space seems open to selling something, whether it's on billboards, clothing or even people's bodies.

But the reason there are so many messages telling us to buy are there are so many businesses competing with each other. Those businesses employ us. If they disappeared, what would most of us do to earn a living? Farm? Fish? Hunt? Maybe, but it would be far from an idyllic existence. And if ads suck frequently, there are some great ones that compel attention because they reflect something accurate about life, as well as about what they're selling.

The larger question is given how many brilliant products our markets generate, why can't we also produce cars that burn less fuel, medical care that doesn't bankrupt families and businesses, or fund an educational system that will generate the broad base of graduates who form the core of any powerful economy?

Capitalism has a wonderful essential spirit that taps directly into human imagination. The desire to make "things," enjoy "things," share "things." To be part of a community and, by extension, a market. But it's far from perfect. Thinking about all that led me to wonder what are the alternative economies we can form? Can our markets and the institutions that surround them create something more sustainable?  And how do we come to create what we do have?

Hence the roots of developing That’s Capital. Together with Titus Levi, we wanted to define a space to host an ongoing conversation about such questions and issues. 

When Titus and I talked to a few people about the idea, most gave one thematic response. “Too intellectual.” Our response was, “to who?” Because while most of us leave formal discussions of the economy to policy wonks, the American lexicon is rich with economic jargon, whether in terminology about "branding one's self" career-wise or uses of terminology like "that's pimp" among the MTV generation.

For Titus and myself, as information science was to the early 1990s (the future backbone of businesses like Google), economics is to our era. We think it is an arena rich for public discourse. "Economics is too important to be left to economists," Titus told me. Both being radio junkies, we decided to create audio media around this subject under the rubric of That's Capital, the name play on Karl Marx famous book of similar name.

To help us structure and turn our ideas into salient media content, we sought the help of veteran money-issue journalist and editor, Marion Asnes. Marion helped guide us and host our first few shows, giving us the hands-on experience of someone who has spent two decades writing about related issues for trade magazines ranging from Money Magazine to Vogue. Together, we are evolving this program... attempting to further the general discussion about the way our choices and desires are the DNA for our economy.

At this point we are streaming and podcasting content, but we hope to actually start to air on an actual radio platform, whether traditional, public or satellite. In the meantime, we welcome your comments and input. Keep listening. We will continually be adding content to existing subjects, as well as exploring subjects like the economy of neighborhood, design, and many other basic areas of life.