My Story


Sometime ago I had this crazy idea: I wanted everybody to be able to understand the economy. If the economy has so much of an effect on people’s lives, I thought it would be good if they understood it. Don’t you agree?

But how would I do that? I decided to do that with pictures.

To make the pictures, I needed to find out what the economy has that can be illustrated. I didn't want to make pretty pictures. I wanted to present the economy accurately and faithfully and be scientifically correct.

So, I looked at the economy straight in the eyes and asked her: what are you? And the answer came back: “I am nothing but dollars moving around all the time. People describe me with fancy terms that I really do not understand. I am just a simple girl. All I do is distribute money the way people ask me to do. Look for yourself. A kid can understand that.”

That was it then: I will illustrate the movement of dollars.

The next question was: how do the dollars move, so I know how to draw them? For an answer to that I looked at the economy again, but this time closer. I noticed that the dollars don’t move at random but along paths that have a beginning and an end, and also a purpose. I also noticed that associated with the paths are conditions we put in place to force the dollars to move along those paths and satisfy the purpose. I decided to call this set of conditions a money pump, because they act like a pump that forces water to move in a certain way.

This is how I arrived at the model of the economy shown on this page: dollar paths and money pumps. Based on this model I created all the illustrations on this website.

For example, you are sitting in a comfortable chair of a car dealership waiting for your car to be fixed. You may not realize at that time that you are in the middle of a large money pump creatively designed to transfer money from your pocked to the dealer’s pocket. And the purpose? To make money, of course. Look around you. It’s like that everywhere in the economy.

But I was not quite there yet. I wanted to tackle the psychological factor, because talking about money can be depressing. I needed to find a way to wash away the dark emotional clouds that a money discussion may generate and replace them with joy. That’s when I came up with the idea of the Flying Dollars moving merrily along paths with funny shapes.

Now I had the total package.

I had a method to describe the economy with pictures. I call this method SeeTheDollars and the pictures money flow diagrams.

The task now is to develop an application based on this method that anyone can use to create their own money flow diagrams all by themselves. I believe that the illustrations will motivate people to do many wonderful things, such as

- understand the economy and their finances,
- talk about money with confidence and a sense of humor, and
- use the dollar paths to tell us, on a gut level, what kind of economy they would like to see or how their finances should be handled, without getting entangled in economic terms.

I call this application SeeTheDollars.

SeeTheDollars will be an open-source interactive application and I am inviting web developers to become part of the team.

I would like to thank all the people and life events that helped me get this project off the ground. A special thanks goes to my good friend Lori Foster for walking with me through the baby steps of this project. It was actually during one of our discussions that I came up with the name SeeTheDollars. And another special thanks goes to my sister Rodiani Voreadou, who helped me significantly give this website a strong shape.