I’ve been reading ‘Nature of Money’ by Ingham. Pretty interesting.
The way I’m now seeing money is this notion of abstract value from an issuer. Money is whatever is considered a settlement of the debt by the issuer. In a sense money originates from a collection, a body of government etc. This is my conceptual model. I use to hold the natural veil idea that it emerges out of the ‘real’ economy. I still think that can explain some things but it’s not a very useful explanatory model for todays world it seems. Also, it seems that spot trade and barter doesn’t really exist, examples of it can’t really be found.
Debt often has negative connotations but in this light its similar to civic law in that we use it for the ‘good of the many’ for a more ‘well run’ efficient society. Maybe Graebers book would be good to read too.
It seems there’s just two schools of thought. The monetarists, who take money as emergent from the real economy for efficiencies sake and the creditalists who see this notion outlined above that purchasing power is derived from the issuer and that money just measures ‘units of account’. I still haven’t been able to seperate this abstract notion of a unit of account and the physical money just quite yet in my head.
The state theory of money says that money does not exist without the idea of the state. Money is not medium that emerges from exchange. It is a means of accounting for the settling debts. The most important of which is tax debt. The value of the debts is expressed in the money of account.
There’s a lot of reference to the price level, can a price exist separate from money?
All money as token credit
I really don’t see much of a difference in the two sides of the debates. I’ve been reading his section on how Marx’s labour theory of value still manifested in a commodity view of money so then he just falls on one side of the debate.
- Have a list of reasonable questions you want answers to before you start.