Tag Archives: David Graeber
Gold, credit and the Ikon: Three kinds of money
What are the differences between a commodity money, credit money and the Ikon – currency of the future ? Using the gold standard as an example of the first, where the price of gold was fixed and money was convertible into it on demand at that price, gold and sure claims on gold were money….
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Man is born free and everywhere he is in debt
Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Graeber is fascinated by the past. Indeed, Graeber might have started his book (“Debt: the first 5,000 years”) with an echo of the famous opening of The Social Contract: “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains”. But perhaps he thought that would be presumptuous. Graeber starts off…
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Memories of Professor James Buchanan
I first came across James Buchanan through his long-term collaborator and colleague, Professor Gordon Tullock. It must have been in 1972 or 1973. Gordon and I met by accident in Frankfurt, where I was interviewing the then president of the Bundesbank for The Banker, of which I was then editor. We had one of those…
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