Pages

▼

Pages

▼

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

James Surowiecki — A Brief History of Money


Hap tip to Micheal Boudreaux in the comments, who says, "I just came across an article in IEEE Spectrum magazine (Electrical Engineers) that gets a lot of stuff right or pretty close. It quotes Graeber, talks about the neoclassical fascination with scarcity and notes that gold standard was such because it was declared to be, much like our current fiat paper. Wiki claims 380K readership for the magazine. The article is not perfect, but better then most. IT seems to me that Engineers (like me) catch on to MMT and closed systems more easily then many."

Read it at IEEE Spectrum
A Brief History of Money
Or, how we learned to stop worrying and embrace the abstraction
by James Surowiecki

James Surowiecki writes The Financial Page at The New Yorker.

at

4 comments:

  1. paul meliJune 20, 2012 at 5:34 PM

    We math-based organisms don't get a lot of love.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Tom HickeyJune 20, 2012 at 8:12 PM

    Not completely true, paul. The problem with math is that love is not quantifiable, and indeed, some take Lord Kelvin to the extreme and claim that if it can't be quantified and measured, it can't be said to exist. Those people define themselves away from quality. Of course, not all quants are like that.

    “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science.”
    ― Lord Kelvin (Sir William Thomson)

    ReplyDelete
  3. paul meliJune 21, 2012 at 7:43 AM

    Another math-based organism discovered:

    http://econintersect.com/b2evolution/blog2.php/2012/06/20/the-ponzi-arithmetic-of-profit

    This caught my eye:

    "Money is a zero sum accounting equation, and arithmetic doesn’t care about our political values."

    ReplyDelete
  4. Custom Lapel PinsSeptember 7, 2012 at 7:58 PM

    Wiki claims 380K readership for the magazine. yup its right. i am agree with this

    ReplyDelete