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Poverty? Isn't there an app for that?

None of my college journalism students has asked me that one yet. But I wouldn't be all that surprised if one of them did.

Millennials, it seems, have very different ideas about how to solve urban problems. And unlike the notions of this retirement-age New Dealer, their solutions typically don't include raising taxes or expanding the reach of some government agency.

This is, I think, a fast-evolving yet underappreciated phenomenon in American life and politics. The millennials, roughly defined as those born between 1985 and 2000, are so smitten with mobile technology and its social and economic applications that they see tech as the solution to just about everything.

Need a cheap ride? Punch-up Uber on the iPhone.

Hungry? Go to grubhub.com.

Their universe of digital conveniences is extensive and extending. When she needs a movie listing or a sports score, my 20-something daughter would no more pick up an ink-flecked sheet of dried tree mulch (aka a newspaper) than she would scan the horizon for smoke signals.

But is this new way of thinking birthing a new kind of politics? I think it is. And the new digital mindset is, at its core, libertarian. Which is to say: very liberal on social issues such as gay marriage and legalized pot, yet very skeptical of government efforts to regulate the economy or levy taxes.

So they're trending toward the Republican side of the ballot.

This was driven home in November's election when the two Chicago wards most associated with upwardly mobile millennials downtown's 42nd Ward and Lincoln Park's 43rd Ward carried, in the aggregate, for Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner.

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Millennials' surprise: There isn't an app to solve all problems

The Libertarian Angle: The War in Afghanistan
Each week, FFF president Jacob Hornberger and FFF vice president Sheldon Richman discuss the hot topics of the day. This week: the continuing saga that is Afghanistan. The Libertarian Angle...

By: The Future of Freedom Foundation

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The Libertarian Angle: The War in Afghanistan - Video

The digital currencypopular among a mostly white, mostly libertarian contingentmight prove useful in communities where it's relatively difficult to secure a loan or transfer money.

Lauren Giordano/The Atlantic

Edwardo Jackson will gladly drop a Bitcoin primer on anyone who's curious. Beyond his outer enthusiasm for the digital currencywhen he talks about Bitcoin, he speeds up as if discussing a newly-discovered oil reserve in his backyardhe loves trading it and tracking its movement in the markets.

In 2013, Jackson, a 39-year-old Las Vegas-based pro poker player and former writer for Upworthy, started spreading the gospel of the currency via his blog, Blacks in Bitcoin, where he claimed that he would spontaneously combust if he had no other outlet to voice his obsession with the digital barter.

Can you imagine what it would have been like to own a piece of email technology in 1994? asks Jackson, who believes the currency is still very much in its early adoption phase. Thats what Bitcoin is like right now, and its only getting bigger. While it's still being debated whether Bitcoin will ever gain a full foothold in the global financial ecosystem, there has been less discussion about the currencys potential effects within communities that arent well served by traditional financial services. Bitcoins promise in the African American community has been especially overlookedmore time has been spent worrying that the currency would facilitate criminal activity.

Jackson doesnt neatly fit the image many have of the typical Bitcoin userthe affluent, white, libertarian-leaning male. Jackson isnt white, and hes neither an Austrian School devotee nor a card-carrying member of the Seasteading Institute. (Im not what you would call an anarcho-capitalist, he says. I do believe that government can provide basic rules so that everybody can get along.) As overall awareness of Bitcoin has grown, African Americans like Jackson might be able to serve as the currency's cultural ambassador to certain minority communities.

From the looks of things, thats where the currency needs a higher profile. A study conducted in May 2014 by the Conference of State Bank Supervisors and the Massachusetts Division of Banks showed that African Americans are less likely than whites and Hispanics to have heard about virtual currencies in general. Another study, released in July 2014 by the digital media company Morning Consult, found that African Americans are less likely than white and Hispanics to know a lot about Bitcoin.

Bitcoin traders might interpret those findings to mean that there isnt a market for the currency in the black community. Nicholas Colas, the chief market strategist of the brokerage firm ConvergEx Group, doesnt believe thats the case. Having written online commentaries and appeared on cable financial-news outlets, Colas is one of Bitcoin's earliest and most vocal evangelists. He believes the currency would be useful to a variety of demographics. Bitcoin is a Rorschach test for anybody interested in banking, because different people see different things in what Bitcoin can offer different communities, he says.

With the African American community, Colas sees the currency filling a significant financial-services void. As support, he cites a Senate committee letter written in 2013 by then-Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, along with a Bitcoin primer published by the Chicago Fed. Neither offered any official endorsement of the currency, but both missives noted the possible benefits of facilitating low-cost transactions in communities where currency exchanges, pre-paid cards and payday loan services are prevalent. Thats where the promise is for the African American community, because in a finished form, it allows for a cheaper money-transfer system than anything that the current financial system can provide, Colas says.

According to Shawn Wilkinson, the founder of Storj, a cloud-storage service, Bitcoin could enable people to engage in online microloans. Bitcoin, or some kind of cryptocurrency, has the ability to decouple African Americans from the economic system in a positive manner, he says. With Bitcoin, there are a lot more methods with microlending, where you can have communities using cryptocurrencies to help themselves without any intermediaries."

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Why Are So Few Black People Using Bitcoin?

Martin Anderson, a conservative and libertarian-leaning intellectual who was a key adviser to Republican presidents and was credited with providing many of the ideas and arguments that created Americas all-volunteer military, died Jan. 3 at his home in Portola Valley, Calif. He was 78.

The Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where Dr. Anderson had been a senior fellow since 1971, announced his death but did not cite a cause.

During the presidential campaign years of 1967 and 1968, Dr. Anderson provided GOP candidate Richard M. Nixon with proposals that helped end the military draft and replace it with the volunteer force that in recent generations has been the basis of American defense and the underpinning of American foreign policy.

Dr. Anderson also was the first domestic policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan, becoming known as a member of the close circle of aides who set the ideological tone for Reagans administration in the 1980s.

One of the pioneering chroniclers of American politics, Theodore H. White, noted Dr. Andersons prominent position in Washingtons highest councils, those places where ideas intersect with actions.

In his book America in Search of Itself, White described Dr. Anderson as having been enlisted from the academic world to become in time Reagans Seeing Eye dog . . . a one-man warehouse of facts . . . guiding [Reagan] to that growing minority revolting against the dominant liberal ideas that reigned on American campuses.

A bespectacled man with a skeptical glance who swam against prevailing currents of academic opinion, Dr. Anderson over the years held many titles in Washington that suggested his proximity to power but did not always reveal the influence he wielded.

In the Nixon White House from 1969 to 1970, he was special assistant to the president and later a special consultant to the president. After being Reagans chief adviser on domestic policy, he served as a member of the presidents Economic Policy Advisory Board from 1982 to 1989.

From 1987 through 1993, during the later Reagan years and throughout the succeeding administration of President George H.W. Bush, Dr. Anderson sat on the presidents General Advisory Committee on Arms Control.

In addition, he was a trustee of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and, from 1993 to 1998, served on the California Governors Council of Economic Advisers.

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Martin Anderson, GOP presidential adviser, proponent of ending the draft, dies at 78

The Libertarian Angle: The Cuban Embargo
Each week, FFF president Jacob Hornberger and FFF vice president Sheldon Richman discuss the hot topics of the day. This week: the Cuban embargo. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly. Go to the...

By: The Future of Freedom Foundation

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The Libertarian Angle: The Cuban Embargo - Video