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his overall idea about risks people may be facing now in a digitalized era. As the rise
of information industry, all kinds of risks concerning people‘s career prospect as well
as everyday life may vary a great deal from what they were traditionally thought to
be.
Professor raises two points supporting his view. First, the search engine provided by
the Internet will help people to access the information that best suits their needs in
the shortest time possible. Second, the quick replication feature of modern industry
will also provide people the best product they need with incredibly high efficiency. As
a result, such rapid acceleration of information technology may create the same
effect for more and more occupation replacement. According to him, occupation like
translator, assembling line worker and chess player will be facing risks of gone
obsolete, for they can be easily replaced by computers or robots. Meanwhile, as the
family insurance, which focuses solely on fire insurance previously, has obviously
gone out of date, people need new insurance policy, especially to protect their estate
values against real estate bubbles if there is any, and inflation.
In solving these two questions his points out, Professor Schiller lists two new
insurances created by his own: the livelihood insurance and home equity insurance.
First, for people who facing the risks brought by information technology
development, they may now benefit from the livelihood insurance of getting financed
to retrain themselves if their major would by any chance, ―gone obsolete‖. Second,
for people who were hesitating about the rocketing prize of real estate, they may
benefit from home equity insurance to protect their property values.
―However, if all these are not based on an indexed basis, in another word, if
everything is not counted by economic units,‖ said Professor Schiller, ―the whole
system would still be far from successful.‖
With this statement, Professor Schiller naturally moves his second topic today: a new
financial order based on an index basis.
He starts from the income taxation system, which according to common knowledge,
is not so successful in the western countries in that they failed to sustain the equality
between rich and poor as they previously thought to be. According to Professor
Schiller, ―inflation indexed debt allow savers to lock in their future returns,‖ while
―inflation indexed life annuities allow people guarantee their retirement.‖
―Economic unites of measurement, in this sense, will function much better, compared
to previous polices.‖
However, an indexed financial order must be based on an e-money system. With a
e-money system, ―the previously impossible real time indexing can be realized
easily‖.
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