Money: The Unauthorised Biography by Felix Martin
A book review…
[M]oney is more than the oil in the engine – a mechanical lubricant – but a socially-created system of transferable credit, a way of keeping account of what people owe each other, while allowing them to transfer their various “IOUs” to others. Crucially, it is not just governments that create money – others can, too.
via Money: The Unauthorised Biography by Felix Martin – review | Books | The Guardian.
Reality Economics
I’ve got to read Economists and the Powerful.
Today’s supply and demand approach treats the economy as a “market” in a crudely abstract way, as quantities of goods (already produced), labor (with a given productivity) and capital (already accumulated, no questions asked) are swapped and bartered with each other. This approach does not inquire deeply into how some people get the capital to “swap” for “labor.” To top matters, this approach gets the direction of technological growth and basic business experience wrong, by assuming conditions of diminishing returns and diminishing marginal utility. The intellectual result is a parallel universe, whose criterion for economic excellence is merely the internal consistency of its abstract assumptions, not their realism.
9 Things You Didn’t Know about the History of Debt
Debt seems to be everywhere in the news nowadays: debt ceilings, sovereign debt crises, credit crunches, senate battles over debt protection agencies, subprime mortgages, the creeping feeling that the United States has somehow hocked itself to China. It might cause one to wonder: how did all this happen? How did politics suddenly become all about who owes who how much money?
via David Graeber: 9 Things You Didnt Know About The History Of Debt PHOTOS.
Thom Hartmann: Rebooting the American Dream
Rebooting the American Dream: 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country
New Books
I posted a couple of new book links on the Recommended Reading page. Keynes: Return of the Master is on the policies of John Maynard Keynes as put forth by his biographer, Robert Skidelsky. The other is an offering by a Australian economist, Steve Keen, Debunking Economics in the neo-Classical vein.
2008 Nobel Prize Winner — Paul Krugman
I was pleased to hear this morning that Paul Krugman has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. Paul is a professor of economics at Princeton University, syndicated columnist for the New York Times, and the author of Conscience of a Liberal. I highly recommend reading the book, which provides some historical prespective around why the United States has developed the political climate we now live in. His main focus seems to be Universal Healthcare, and he supports his case by linking it to other successfully implemented New Deal policies.
Economics @ ITT 
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