Shelling Out: The Origins of Money (2002) | Hacker News Reader

Shelling Out: The Origins of Money (2002)

nakamotoinstitute.org

26 pointswalterbell8 comments

A rigorous and ideologically alternative viewpoint is expounded in Debt: The first 5000 years by David Graeber, a professor of anthropology with a leftist bent. PDF freely available here [1]. It is longer, being a book and all, and emphasizes anthropological evidence and models, being written by an anthropologist and all.

[1] https://libcom.org/files/__Debt__The_First_5_000_Years.pdf

In addition — In Defense of David Graeber’s Debt:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/09/in-defense-of-david-graeb...

A summary of the book from the above article:

"Reading Debt is no substitute for serious study of economics... But if you do get your economics from Debt, you will at least come away with a few important ideas. First, that money contracts come before, and are about more than, the exchange of goods. Second, that some monetary systems are based on commodity money and some are based on credit, and the two behave quite differently. Third, and most urgently, that decisions about the money supply are not "too important and technical" for democracy. On the contrary, they are too important and inherently political to be made any way except democratically.

"Debt’s economic arguments are not always presented as clearly as they could be. But none of them are present at all in the typical economics textbook. They are, on the other hand, found in some form or another in the thought of a great many rebels, heretics and reformers within the economics profession."

> Reading Debt is no substitute for serious study of economics

The thing about studying economics is that unless you do it to considerable depth, you'll come away with the wrong conclusions.

Undergraduate economics textbooks teach that central banks try to control the supply of money as an explicit target, and that commercial banks lend out their reserves - both of which are objectively false.

Debt has its flaws, but it at least gets the basic mechanics correct.

Which textbooks get the basics right? Can be technical and/or aimed at a non-beginner level.

I'm don't know of a good textbook that explains it well. But for an example of a textbook that gets it wrong, see Mankiw's introductory macro book. Mankiw alludes to the important brake on credit creation (capital constraints), but dismisses them as 'arcane', then goes on to describe a fractional reserve system that doesn't really exist anymore.

I've pieced together what I can from reading blogs (Frances Coppola [0] is very informative in this regard). The Bank of England wrote a document explaining their view of the process of money creation [1], which is widely accepted as correct.

Edit: actually, this might do: http://neweconomicperspectives.org/money-banking

[0] http://www.coppolacomment.com/

[1] http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarte...

For a look at today's money, see Modern Money Mechanics :

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5c4DinvHeF2eEpKbFZTOU5CUWs/...

The author implies that the idiom 'shelling out' has its origins in shell money, I'm pretty skeptical of that claim:

https://wordhistories.net/2016/09/21/shell-out/

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