Orthodox monetary theory is kneecapped by an overly concrete conception of money, which has led in recent decades to a reaction of moneyless models of monetary policy. By contrast, this paper generalizes monetary theory in terms of the plans of economic agents to hold and dispose of liquidity in...

Despite the past decade’s rapid innovation in adapting blockchain technology to new uses, financial intermediation remains elusive except in basic and highly collateralized forms. We introduce the concept of the technical frontier to delimit the kinds of interactions that can feasibly be...

A complement of metaphors inherited from the classical era has held back progress in Austrian capital theory (ACT). In particular, the attachment to circulating capital as the paradigmatic capital good, largely motivated by the business cycle theory, has locked ACT into a nonoperational...

Criminal organizations are frequently organized monopolistically and hierarchically. This is puzzling given the greater vulnerability of centrally organized firms to law enforcement: a loose and atomistic market would seem more appropriate to the legal constraints on operation. We argue that, in...

A great number of theories have been offered as to the root of the difference between the modern mind and the premodern mind. One neglected account comes from Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, which argues that the rise of the mass money economy in the early modern era encouraged calculative...

We leverage a transaction costs narrative to provide a theoretically unified presentation of the evolution of exchange, with the latest evolutionary frontier being cryptocurrency and decentralized finance. We show that with each new development in the evolution of money, the new form or medium...

Agent-based modeling tools commonly trade off usability against power and vice versa. On the one hand, full development environments like NetLogo feature a shallow learning curve, but have a relatively limited proprietary language. Others written in Python or Matlab, for example, have the...

If there exist no incentive or selective mechanisms that make cooperation in large groups incentive-compatible under realistic circumstances, functional social institutions will require subjective preferences to diverge from objective payoffs – a "noble lie." This implies the existence of...

A challenge for quantity-theoretic explanations of business cycles is that recessions manifest despite central banks' scrupulousness to avoid falls in monetary aggregates, a fact which would seem to indicate a structural explanation. This paper argues that a broader and theoretically richer...