Cash and Human Connection
Dec 4, 2023
Alongside its tangible benefits—such as being usable offline, anytime, anywhere—cash has a cultural and emotional impact that is harder to quantify, and its relevance to the human experience today may be greater than ever.
Writing for Khaleej Times, finance influencer Arjun Vir Singh notes ‘the future, while influenced by technological advancements and economic trends, is also shaped by human emotions, cultural nuances and unforeseen global events.’ Accordingly, he argues cash is likely to retain an important role in economies in the coming decades, suggesting ‘the future is less cash but not cashless.’
Whatever the form or frequency of its existence, cash will always echo the stories of societies, their aspirations, and their progress. Just as societies evolved from barter systems to coinage and paper currency, the next fifty years will be a testament to humanity’s ability to innovate, remember and continuously redefine the tangible and intangible markers of value.
As a ‘tangible marker of value’ cash is particularly important to ensuring economic stability, on a micro level—such as when a local shop loses internet connectivity and goes cash-only for a few hours—right up to the macro level, with examples including natural disasters that bring down electricity and internet for days or weeks, or cyber-attacks that compromise electronic payment systems. Singh suggests ‘it will become a social responsibility for governments to maintain access to cash’ to ensure these eventualities are covered.
There is also the increasingly important issue of privacy, with concerns around the logging and potential control of cashless payments ensuring cash retains special significance in ensuring people can freely interact with the economy, purchasing any and all goods and services without oversight or interruption.
While cash might seem like a relic in a hyper-digital future, it's essential to remember that its roots are intertwined with the very evolution of trade, trust, and human interactions.
Banknotes and coins are a nation’s calling cards, with designs reflecting its proudest achievements and greatest natural wonders, people, architecture and landmarks. Recognising the cultural cohesion fostered by cash, the European Central Bank asked Europeans to propose themes for its new banknotes earlier this year.
The physical nature of cash also gives rise to the well-researched ‘pain of paying’, which describes the negative feelings people experience when handing over a tangible resource, with a clearly understood value, of which they have a limited supply. The associated ‘cashless effect’ describes the corresponding tendency to buy more products—especially non-essential ones—and pay more for them when paying cashless. This lends cash added importance for budgeting during times of economic hardship, such as those presently being experienced in nations worldwide.
Adrienne LaFrance, Executive Editor of The Atlantic, recognises the role of cash in reshaping our relationship with money—and ultimately encouraging a return to human experience—as artificial intelligence and digitisation rapidly restructure societies and nations. As well as the immediacy and certainty of cash payments, their face-to-face nature is also an inherently social experience, contributing to the maintenance of social connections that will be at increasing risk of erosion over the coming decades.
The story of cash, in its various incarnations, is far from over.