Present Unknowns/The Unknowable Present?Looking More Closely at the Present to Understand the Future

Bill Maurer, Filene FellowDean, School of Social Sciences

Professor, Department of Anthropology and School of LawUniversity of California, Irvine

money

IgoBoerrigter

“coins to suit the modern consumer”

climate

bluelining

“Sorry you’re in a flood plane…we don’t lend there. Sorry we can’t approve this mortgage to buy this house it’s in a flood prone area. Sorry we don’t accept that appraisal because it’s not insured against climate forecast. These are some of the remarks waiting for people in the next few years.”

-Chris Knight

bluelining

“At some point in the next 20 to 30 years, absent substantial new approaches to reducing and managing flood risk, there may be a threat to the availability of the 30-year mortgage in various vulnerable and exposed areas”

-Michael D. Berman

“Flood Risk and Structural Adaptation of Markets: An Outline for Action”

knowledge

worker displacement

effect on gig economy

algorithmic discrimination and “engineered inequity”(Ruha Benjamin)

lifelong learning,up-skilling, andre-skilling

effect on policy

effect on people’s educational decision-making (Matt Harding, UCI)

1 quarter tuition =$4,830

real disruptors

$1.8-$2.3T Tax Cut > $1.5T student debt cancellation or 10 million units of low-income housing

“Since normally one justifies the positiveness of the interest rate with the fact that the future is more uncertain

than the present, the advent of negative interest rates would then imply that the present has become more

uncertain than the future.”

–Massimo Amato, Monetary Innovation, New Technologies and Society, Bocconi University

credit unions

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSFilene thanks its sponsors for their significant contributions to Filene’s

Center for Emerging Technology and for helping to make this research possible.

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