Charitable banking of the future

To be created at MIT, thanks to a five-year commitment of 3-5 million dollars . . . each year:

The new research center, which will be located at the Media Lab on the MIT campus, will […] explore new ideas in banking by inventing technologies that reveal and leverage insights across a wide range of physical and social scales, from one-on-one customer interactions to global transactions.

Professor Deb Roy, Chair of MIT’s academic program in Media Arts and Sciences and a pioneer in cognitive modeling, communication theory, and human-machine interaction, will serve as the Center’s Founding Director and Principal Investigator. “The Center sets the stage for potentially path-breaking research that will tap into core Media Lab capabilities and extend them in exciting new directions,” says Roy. “We will create a focus of intellectual energy that brings together researchers with radically different perspectives, including behavioral economists, social scientists, computer scientists, psychologists, designers, and others who share a passion for innovative thinking. It’s a recipe for producing unexpected new ideas that will trigger significant innovations in the world of banking.

This may sound like a sell-out of charity to corporate interests, but consider: for centuries banking was a religious institution, and double-entry bookkeeping emerged out of the charitable banks of early modern Italy. Just another example of why the emphasis on the so-called revolution of social enterprise obscures more than it reveals.