Related papers: An Apology for Money
Money was invented to address the difficulty in the double coincidence of wants between the supply and demand when people exchanged their goods and services. There are two information states in society: one is the initial state that people…
Money is a technology for promoting economic prosperity. Over history money has become increasingly abstract, it used to be hardware, gold coins and the like, now it is mostly software, data structures located in banks. Here I propose the…
The institution of money can be seen as a foundational social mechanism, enabling communities to quantify collectively regulate economic processes. Money can be said, indeed, to constitute the micro-macro link in economics. This paper…
A group of people wishes to use money to exchange goods efficiently over several time periods. However, there are disadvantages to using any of the goods as money, and in addition fiat money issued in the form of notes or coins will be…
Designed to compete with fiat currencies, bitcoin proposes it is a crypto-currency alternative. Bitcoin makes a number of false claims, including: solving the double-spending problem is a good thing; bitcoin can be a reserve currency for…
The key characteristic of a true free market economy is that exchanges are entirely voluntary. When there is a monopoly in the creation of currency as we have in today's markets, you no longer have a true free market. Features of the…
The subject of this study is inflation, a problem that has plagued America and the world over the last several decades. Despite a rich trove of scholarly studies and a wide range of tools developed to deal with inflation, we are nowhere…
This is an invited article for the Discussion and Debate special issue of The European Physical Journal Special Topics on the subject "Can Economics Be a Physical Science?" The first part of the paper traces the personal path of the author…
We argue that the present crisis and stalling economy continuing since 2007 are rooted in the delusionary belief in policies based on a "perpetual money machine" type of thinking. We document strong evidence that, since the early 1980s,…
Humanity has been fascinated by the pursuit of fortune since time immemorial, and many successful outcomes benefit from strokes of luck. But success is subject to complexity, uncertainty, and change - and at times becoming increasingly…
One frequently given explanation for why autocrats maintain corrupt and inefficient institutions is that the autocrats benefit personally even though the citizens of their countries are worse off. The empirical evidence does not support…
The contradiction between physical and economical sciences concerning the growth of the production/consumption mechanism is analyzed. It is then shown that if one wishes to keep the security level stable or to enhance it in a growing…
With negative growth in real production in many countries and debt levels which become an increasing burden on developed societies, the calls for a change in economic policy and even the monetary system become louder and increasingly…
A theoretical self-sustainable economic model is established based on the fundamental factors of production, consumption, reservation and reinvestment, where currency is set as a unconditional credit symbol serving as transaction equivalent…
We investigate the structure of the currencies (systems of coins) for which the greedy change-making algorithm always finds an optimal solution (that is, a one with minimum number of coins). We present a series of necessary conditions that…
The article analyzes the essence of the phenomenon of corruption, highlights its main varieties and characteristics. The authors of the study apply historical analysis, emphasizing the long-term nature of corruption and its historical…
City road infrastructure is a public good, and over-consumption by self-interested, rational individuals leads to traffic jams. Congestion pricing is effective in reducing demand to sustainable levels, but also controversial, as it…
This paper studies the role of banks' money creation in monetary transmission. I develop a monetary-search model where demand for the monetary base and the money multiplier are endogenously determined through banks' money creation. The…
This paper proposes a model of tax compliance and fiscal capacity grounded in universalization reasoning. Citizens partially internalize the consequences of concealment by imagining a world in which everyone acted similarly, linking their…
The use of equilibrium models in economics springs from the desire for parsimonious models of economic phenomena that take human reasoning into account. This approach has been the cornerstone of modern economic theory. We explain why this…