Random thoughts I had to purge from my mind:

1 Those who most worry about the afterlife are those who fear death most.

2 It's weird to think how much money has changed. Imagine it's 1800's America and you've got a few cents. You could buy quite a bit for less than a dollar. (I'll look up what the housing prices could have been like, but even recent examples illustrate the point.)

For the sake of argument, imagine a house in 1820 is $2000. Today, say a house of a similar size would run you say $200,000. Now, I'm not interested in the exact numbers and the inflation rates, currency adjustment, changes in technology, etc., but what's interesting to me is the principle. If you had 10 cents in 1820, the value of that was a lot more than today. The money was worth more relative to your house and also could buy you more in the store. Yet in both instances it may have been necessary to mortgage your home in order to be able to afford it. One would think that we'd be less attune today to things like those marginal sales at most retailers (10% off this, 30 cents off that - with coupon, etc.), yet if anything those types of minor discounts and disparities, in sales, loan rates, etc., are more prevalent than ever before. Who would have conceived of a second mortgage in 1820, let alone 1950? Yet they're happening today, with all sorts of minute differences in rates between various lenders.

Aside from all the formal (governmental and financial institutions) changes to currency, it's interesting that cents, such as they are today, are still valued. To a large extent, I believe this is a result of economies of scale. In 1820, your local tailor may gripe over a penny would have been because that penny had real purchasing power - not because it would or would not cost his shareholders (like he'd have any!) so many thousands of dollars. Today, we may not gripe over pennies, but we do gripe over all sorts of values under $1 - despite the fact that those cents are far less valuable to us than they possibly ever have been. Part of this is also because we're so hyper-aware of prices in our intense consumer atmosphere, but behind that intense consumerism looms the giant corporations who make or lose millions on our pennies. It's in their best interests to keep meticulous track of every penny to maximize their profits and offer consumers appropriate incentives to sell their products.

I'm not saying we should be frivolous with our money. This is a principle that very much cuts both ways. If anything, the focus on small denominations of money is a good thing in general, as it should foster much-needed fiscal responsibility on both the corporations' and consumers' parts.

I'm merely fascinated by the fluidity of our monetary construct.

3 As history progresses along its spiral, we seem to be heading (and all distopian novels echo this) toward a society in which "the state" (primarily government, but increasingly corporations) supersedes the family as the societal 'safety' net. Corporations are obviously reluctant to fill this role (and certainly don't do so out of any obligations to moral or altruistic constructs), but they still provide pensions so they do participate. The government is still primarily responsible for wealth distribution and this is the role which used to be played primarily by the extended 'family' - e.g., tribe - in more ancient Western cultures (or in some non-Western cultures even today).

I wonder how much this has to do with individualism - I won't take a handout from my dad (to prove my independence) but free money from the government? Bring it! I'm not sure I understand fully the motivations behind this shift, but it's there and I think it's not too difficult to extrapolate from it a future society in which people socialize in familial ways with non-relatives (obviously quite far in the future, since even in the most extreme examples Western culture has not yet totally eradicated the familial ties - though children divorcing parents is arguably at the cusp of such a reality). My idea (which is part of my coming novel, Aanthe) is further along the time line - a time when children don't know who their parents are, are raised communally according to genetic predispositions (possibly administered by the state/corporations), and where the random genetics that dictated who was born into what family are instead manipulated such that aptitudes dictate your place within the state/corporation (e.g., engineer, biologist, doctor, etc.). People of that time would look back on the randomness of the genetic ties that bind us today as an absurdity because they can much better control the genetic odds to group people into what they would presumably perceive to be much more rational groupings based on inherent aptitudes and temperament.