"Before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods-that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors-which lives on in full force to this day. So says anthropologist David Graeber in a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Renaissance Italy to Imperial China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like "guilt," "sin," and "redemption") derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today"--Publisher's description

This classic set of essays by Nobel Laureate and leading monetary theorist Milton Friedman presents a coherent view of the role of money, focusing on specific topics related to the empirical analysis of monetary phenomena and policy. The early chapters cover factors determining the real quantity of money held in a community and the welfare implications of policies that affect the quantity held. The following chapters formally restate why quantity analysis has become central to the science of economics. Friedman's presidential address to the American Economic Association, included here, provides a general summary of his views on the role of monetary policy, with an emphasis on its limitations and its possibilities. This theoretical framework is used in examining a number of empirical problems: the demand for money, the explanation of price changes in wartime periods, and the role of money in business cycles. These essays summarize some of the most important results of Friedman's extensive research over the course of his lifetime. The chapters on policy that follow survey the positions of earlier economists and deal with the importance of lags and the implications of destabilizing speculation in foreign markets. Taken as a whole, The Optimum Quantity of Money provides a comprehensive view of the body of monetary theory developed in leading centers of monetary analysis. This work is essential reading for economists and graduate students in the field. The volume will be no less important for practicing business and banking personnel as well. The new statement by Michael Bordo, a student of Friedman's and an expert in the field, provides a sense of where the field now stands in the economy and academy. Milton Friedman is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. Before that, he was Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. He has also taught at Columbia University, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Minnesota, and Cambridge University. Among his many books are Essays in Positive Economics , A Program for Monetary Stability , Capitalism and Freedom , and A Monetary History of the United States . Michael D. Bordo is professor of economics at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and author, with Lars Jonung, of, among other works, Demand for Money .

With a new foreword by Charles Lemert 'Its greatness...lies in ceaseless and varied use of the money form to unearth and conceptually reveal incommensurabilities of all kinds, in social reality fully as much as in thought itself.' - Fredric Jameson In The Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel puts money on the couch. He provides us with a classic analysis of the social, psychological and philosophical aspects of the money economy, full of brilliant insights into the forms that social relationships take. He analyzes the relationships of money to exchange, human personality, the position of women, and individual freedom. Simmel also offers us prophetic insights into the consequences of the modern money economy and the division of labour, in particular the processes of alienation and reification in work and urban life. An immense and profound piece of work it demands to be read today and for years to come as a stunning account of the meaning, use and culture of money. Georg Simmel (1858-1918) was born in Berlin, the youngest of seven children. He studied philosophy and history at the University of Berlin and was one of the first generation of great German sociologists that included Max Weber.

Investigating changes in the public and private uses of money in the United States between the 1870s and the 1930s, and money throughout cultures and throughout history, the author concentrates on domestic transactions, gifts, and welfare payments.

In response to widespread interest in a formal complete statement analyzing aspects of the money-income relationship and clarification of his quantity theory, Milton Friedman in 1970 published "A Theoretical Framework for Monetary Analysis," and a year later "A Monetary Theory of Nominal Income," both in the Journal of Political Economy. A combined version of these essays, first published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, begins this volume. Because his statement was important and controversial both as a commentary on the history of economic thought and as a theoretical contribution in its own right, the Journal of Political Economy in 1972 presented critical reviews from noted monetary theorists, including Karl Brunner and Allan H. Meltzer, James Tobin, Paul Davidson, and Don Patinkin. Their studies, which are printed in the present volume, focus on substantive issues, covering a variety of topics. All of their major points are discussed in Friedman's reply, which clarifies and expands upon his original themes and introduces interesting new material. Thus the synthesis of his two articles, the critical comments, and his response, together with an introduction by Robert J. Gordon, are combined in one volume for the convenience of scholars and students

After Ludwig von Mises's death in 1973, his wife, Margit von Mises, went through his unpublished and out-of-print essays and selected twenty-one of the essays for publication. The result was Money, Method, and the Market Process, published in 1990 by Kluwer Academic Publishers and the Ludwig von Mises Institute and reissued now by Liberty Fund. In his introduction to the book, Richard Ebeling describes it as a "convenient composite of Misesian economics.'" He says that the essays here touch on "almost every aspect of economic and social theory that Mises considered of paramount importance. The essays were written over a period of forty years, from the 1930s to the 1960s, so they serve as a wide sampling of Mises's thought on a wide range of subjects, and they are arranged thematically. The three essays in the first section, on "Method," discuss the differences between the social and natural sciences and include some of Mises's thoughts on the science of human action. The essays in the next section, on "Money," discuss inflation and money in economic exchange, and they include Mises's analysis of why stabilizing the price level will not necessarily stabilize economic activity. This leads readers to the section on "Trade," where Mises warns of the danger of international conflict in a world without free trade. There are seven essays on "Comparative Economic Systems," and they include detailed studies on capitalism versus socialism, the cooperative movement, the Russian Reform Movement, and equality and inequality. Under the heading of "Ideas," the final two essays are "The Role of Doctrines in Human History" and the well-known piece called "The Idea of Liberty Is Western". --

"This book will come to be known as the one that challenged the old, winner-takes-all view of international currency competition and established the new view. Barry Eichengreen and his coauthors present thorough and telling evidence that the historical reality is that multiple currencies play consequential roles in international trade and finance--and that lock-in effects and persistence are not as strong as traditionally assumed. In short, this is a must-read for all economists interested in international macroeconomics and finance." --Richard Baldwin, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva "Barry Eichengreen, our pre-eminent international monetary historian, and his coauthors have written a great book around the central theme that there have almost always been multiple rival international currencies and that the advantages of being the world's lead currency are not as marked as traditionally argued. The book is lucidly written, eschewing mathematical technicalities, though the background scholarship is deeply impressive. It should be read by everyone interested in the monetary history of the past two centuries." --Charles Goodhart, London School of Economics and Political Science "This eloquent and learned book will become the standard--perhaps one should say the gold standard--for discussions of international currency regimes, and for the analysis of the uncertainties that accompany changing global leadership." --Harold James, Princeton University "The authors put the plural back into global currencies, for good reason. As their historical but highly topical research establishes, there can be more than one global (or 'reserve') currency at any one time, as has often been the case in the modern world. This is an important corrective to the recurring oversold yen then euro then yuan will rival the dollar litany. But it is also a reminder that there is more to a stable global financial system than how many currencies there are, but how the leaders of those currencies take responsibility and interact." Adam S. Posen, President, Peterson Institute for International Economics "Drawing on new data, this book provides a rich contextual and historical analysis of reserve currencies in the global economy. This is very welcome, indeed." --Sebastian Edwards, University of California, Los Angeles