The Enigma of Money

The Enigma of Money

Author: Makoto Nishibe

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-10-24

Total Pages: 103

ISBN-13: 9811018197

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This book provides a new way of understanding modern money and markets by stressing their self-fulfilling/self-destructive properties as institutions from evolutionary perspectives. In contrast to an unrealistic view of the neoclassical general equilibrium theory that models the price mechanism of a “concentrated market” without using money, presented here is an alternative theory of markets on how a realistic “dispersive market” using a stock of money and inventory as buffers can work as a multilayered price-quantitative adjustment system. The central features of modern sovereign moneys seen in inconvertible IOUs of central banknotes can be depicted as “The Emperor's New Clothes” that correspond to the U.S. dollar and the Euro void of their own value. The image captures such characteristics of national currencies as “self-fulfilling ideas” by the inertia of conventions in the past and expectations of an uncertain future. Both ideas normally make money more acceptable and circulative so that its value can become more stable unless expectations for the future turn very pessimistic. The same logic also applies to such other currencies as Bitcoin and community currencies. Their recent diffusion has shown that Hayek's idea of denationalization of money and competition between multiple currencies in terms of its qualities, not its quantities sought as in ongoing quantitative easing, become more relevant under current situations. The qualities of money refer not only to stable monetary values and low transaction costs, but also to high ability in creating, sharing, and communicating social and cultural value. The potential of the logic of self-fulfillment of ideas can thus open up a new economic society when we realize that such various non-national currencies all depend on the same logic of money.


The Enigma of Clarence Thomas

The Enigma of Clarence Thomas

Author: Corey Robin

Publisher: Metropolitan Books

Published: 2019-09-24

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 1627793844

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The Enigma of Clarence Thomas is a groundbreaking revisionist take on the Supreme Court justice everyone knows about but no one knows. “One of the marvels of Robin’s razor-sharp book is how carefully he marshals his evidence.... It isn’t every day that reading about ideas can be both so gratifying and unsettling.” – The New York Times Most people can tell you two things about Clarence Thomas: Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment, and he almost never speaks from the bench. Here are some things they don’t know: Thomas is a black nationalist. In college he memorized the speeches of Malcolm X. He believes white people are incurably racist. In the first examination of its kind, Corey Robin– one of the foremost analysts of the right (The Reactionary Mind) – delves deeply into both Thomas’s biography and his jurisprudence, masterfully reading his Supreme Court opinions against the backdrop of his autobiographical and political writings and speeches. The hidden source of Thomas’s conservative views, Robin shows, is a profound skepticism that racism can be overcome. Thomas is convinced that any government action on behalf of African-Americans will be tainted by racism; the most African-Americans can hope for is that white people will get out of their way. There’s a reason, Robin concludes, why liberals often complain that Thomas doesn’t speak but seldom pay attention when he does. Were they to listen, they’d hear a racial pessimism that often sounds similar to their own. Cutting across the ideological spectrum, this unacknowledged consensus about the impossibility of progress is key to understanding today’s political stalemate.


Dinosaurs in Your Backyard

Dinosaurs in Your Backyard

Author: Hugh Brewster

Publisher: Harry N. Abrams

Published: 2009-04-01

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780810970991

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Discusses species of dinosaurs found on the continent of North America 70 million years ago.


The Enigma of Reason

The Enigma of Reason

Author: Hugo Mercier

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2017-04-17

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 0674368304

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“Brilliant...Timely and necessary.” —Financial Times “Especially timely as we struggle to make sense of how it is that individuals and communities persist in holding beliefs that have been thoroughly discredited.” —Darren Frey, Science If reason is what makes us human, why do we behave so irrationally? And if it is so useful, why didn’t it evolve in other animals? This groundbreaking account of the evolution of reason by two renowned cognitive scientists seeks to solve this double enigma. Reason, they argue, helps us justify our beliefs, convince others, and evaluate arguments. It makes it easier to cooperate and communicate and to live together in groups. Provocative, entertaining, and undeniably relevant, The Enigma of Reason will make many reasonable people rethink their beliefs. “Reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant...Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?...Cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber [argue that] reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems...[but] to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker “Turns reason’s weaknesses into strengths, arguing that its supposed flaws are actually design features that work remarkably well.” —Financial Times “The best thing I have read about human reasoning. It is extremely well written, interesting, and very enjoyable to read.” —Gilbert Harman, Princeton University


The Ways of the World

The Ways of the World

Author: David Harvey

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-02-05

Total Pages: 564

ISBN-13: 0190469463

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David Harvey is one of most famous Marxist intellectuals in the past half century, as well as one of the world's most cited social scientists. Beginning in the early 1970s with his trenchant and still-relevant book Social Justice and the City and through this day, Harvey has written numerous books and dozens of influential essays and articles on topics across issues in politics, culture, economics, and social justice. In The Ways of the World, Harvey has gathered his most important essays from the past four decades. They form a career-spanning collection that tracks not only the development of Harvey over time as an intellectual, but also a dialectical vision that gradually expanded its reach from the slums of Baltimore to global environmental degradation to the American imperium. While Harvey's coverage is wide-ranging, all of the pieces tackle the core concerns that have always animated his work: capitalism past and present, social change, freedom, class, imperialism, the city, nature, social justice, postmodernity, globalization, and the crises that inhere in capitalism. A career-defining volume, The Ways of the World will stand as a comprehensive work that presents the trajectory of Harvey's lifelong project in full.


Other People's Money

Other People's Money

Author: John Kay

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2015-09-22

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1610396049

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The finance sector of Western economies is too large and attracts too many of the smartest college graduates. Financialization over the past three decades has created a structure that lacks resilience and supports absurd volumes of trading. The finance sector devotes too little attention to the search for new investment opportunities and the stewardship of existing ones, and far too much to secondary-market dealing in existing assets. Regulation has contributed more to the problems than the solutions. Why? What is finance for? John Kay, with wide practical and academic experience in the world of finance, understands the operation of the financial sector better than most. He believes in good banks and effective asset managers, but good banks and effective asset managers are not what he sees. In a dazzling and revelatory tour of the financial world as it has emerged from the wreckage of the 2008 crisis, Kay does not flinch in his criticism: we do need some of the things that Citigroup and Goldman Sachs do, but we do not need Citigroup and Goldman to do them. And many of the things done by Citigroup and Goldman do not need to be done at all. The finance sector needs to be reminded of its primary purpose: to manage other people's money for the benefit of businesses and households. It is an aberration when the some of the finest mathematical and scientific minds are tasked with devising algorithms for the sole purpose of exploiting the weakness of other algorithms for computerized trading in securities. To travel further down that road leads to ruin. A Financial Times Book of the Year, 2015 An Economist Best Book of the Year, 2015 A Bloomberg Best Book of the Year, 2015


I.O.U.

I.O.U.

Author: John Lanchester

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2010-01-05

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 143916987X

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For most people, the reasons for the sudden collapse of our economy still remain obscure. I.O.U. is the story of how we came to experience such a complete financial disaster, starting with the magical proliferation of credit that led to an explosion of lending on the global and local landscapes of banking and finance. Viewing the crisis through the lens of politics, culture, and contemporary history—from the invention and widespread misuse of financial instruments to the culpability of subprime mortgages—Lanchester deftly draws conclusions on the limitations of financial and governmental regulation, capitalism’s deepest flaw, and most important, on the plain and simple facts of human nature where cash is concerned. With newly updated, superbly written reportage, Lanchester delivers a shrewd perspective and a digestible, comprehensive analysis that connects the dots for expert and casual reader alike. Part economic primer, part fiscal and historical analysis, I.O.U. is an eye-opener of a book.


Money and Calculation

Money and Calculation

Author: Massimo Amato

Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan

Published: 2010-09-17

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13:

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Emotions, reputations, relationships -- so many aspects of social and organizational life today are subject to quantification and other calculative practices. Calculation develops due to a demand for control and accountability. Money is one such instrument of calculation, and the foremost. As a unit of account and means of payment, it serves the purpose of exchange. Yet, money has itself increasingly become an object of calculation and exchange on financial markets tending less to the production and exchange of real goods than the elimination of uncertainty by means of exchangeability. Has the economy therefore lost its measure? The essays collected in Money and Calculation investigate, from various viewpoints, how calculation and money bear upon the meaning of measure in contemporary economic life. They will excite and give much pause for thought to economists, sociologists, and all who have an interest in the meaning of life in our globalized world.


Money

Money

Author: Michel Aglietta

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2018-10-23

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 1786634449

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The major French economist offers a new theory of money As the financial crisis reached its climax in September 2008, the most important figure on the planet was Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. The whole financial system was collapsing, with little to stop it. When a senator asked Bernanke what would happen if the central bank did not carry out its rescue package, he replied, “If we don’t do this, we may not have an economy on Monday.” What saved finance, and the Western economy, was fiscal and monetary stimulus – an influx of money, created ad hoc. It was a strategy that raised questions about the unexamined nature of money itself, an object suddenly revealed as something other than a neutral signifier of value. Through its grip on finance and the debt system, money confers sovereign power on the economy. If confidence in money is not maintained, crises follow. Looking over the last 5,000 years, Michel Aglietta explores the development of money and its close connection to sovereign power. This book employs the tools of anthropology, history and political economy in order to analyse how political structures and monetary systems have transformed one another. We can thus grasp the different eras of monetary regulation and the crises capitalism has endured throughout its history.