J. W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev, "Against Money" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

New Books Network: J.W. Mason & Arjun Jayadev — "Against Money" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

Host: Tom Disena
Date: July 19, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode features economists J.W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev discussing their book Against Money. The authors challenge conventional economic thinking on money, exploring how its misunderstood nature shapes social life, power, and the economy. The conversation covers the relationship between money and real things, the historical evolution of money through debt and capital, interest rates, and the ideology surrounding the "real economy." The discussion also speculates about possible futures beyond the rule of money.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Relationship Between Money and Things

• Main Theme:
  • The book questions the assumed equivalence between the "world of money" and the "world of things."
  • Traditional economics frames money as a passive “veil” over real, material exchanges.
  • The authors argue money has its own logic and transformative power independent of “real things.”
• Origin Story:
  • The authors recall seeing a hand-drawn East Village flyer bartering language lessons for tech help—no money—highlighting how unusual non-monetary exchange is in practice despite economics textbooks treating barter as the fundamental economic interaction.
  • "It crystallizes the discrepancy between the way that we're kind of trained to think about the worlds of production and exchange ... and the actual way that we encounter them in our daily lives." — J.W. Mason [10:25]

"Money’s real job, we argue, is a sort of tool of coordination. It's this technology that allows strangers to cooperate, that anonymizes obligations. It's an active world making power, and that's why it has such a control." — Arjun Jayadev [05:46]

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2. Title Significance: "Against Money"

• The title plays on dual meanings: viewing the social world as it exists apart from money, and imagining alternatives to money’s dominance.
• References to similar intellectual works (e.g., Against Love, Sontag’s Against Interpretation).

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3. History and Central Concepts: Debt

• Why Start with Debt?
  • Money is viewed as a subset of credit, woven through various relationships and promises of payment.
  • Their research traces debt’s real impact during events like the 2008 financial crisis and the Eurozone crisis.
  • Conventional wisdom held that household borrowing exploded pre-2008; but the rise in the debt-to-income ratio was largely driven by high interest rates and low inflation, not excessive new borrowing.

"The rise in household debt in the United States is entirely a matter of higher interest rates, lower inflation, and...slower income growth. It's not about increasing borrowed. So that really shows you the sort of autonomy of money—that it's not just a reflection of the real." — J.W. Mason [16:44]

• Eurozone Crisis:
  • Financial market crises, not “real” deficits, destabilized countries like Greece.
  • ECB policy decisions were politically motivated, using financial mechanisms to enforce labor market liberalization.

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4. Class, Power, and the Social Impact of Debt

• The costs of financial crises and debt management are often shifted onto workers.
• Economic crises are used to justify policies that retrench social welfare and lower living standards.

"The reason for treating Greece this way is to compel workers elsewhere in Europe to accept lower living standards..." — J.W. Mason [22:50]

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5. Rethinking Capital: Three Faces of Capital

• Capital misunderstood:
  • Standard economics conflates capital as sum of money, stock of physical things, and a form of legal authority/power.
• The Cookie Stamp Metaphor:
  • Capital is like a “veto” over production, not just machinery or wealth.
  • Intellectual property emerges as a “purer” form of capital—it’s an authority that controls use, exchange, and production.

"Capital...is not a pile of stuff as much as sort of like a transferable veto over a production process. And I think that's what—once you see these two things as distinct, you realize you're talking about two different worlds..." — Arjun Jayadev [31:36]

• Critique of Piketty:
  • Criticizes measuring capital as a straightforward sum and drawing direct physical meaning from monetary values, noting that such approaches embed specific political and normative visions.

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6. Interest Rates: A Critique of the Mainstream View

• Interest rate vs. interest rates:
  • Mainstream economics treats “the” interest rate as the price of time—a tradeoff between present and future consumption.
  • Authors argue interest rates are really about the price of different money promises (liquidity, reliability, and transferability) and there is no single “natural rate.”

"The interest rate that we see in the real world does not look like that at all. That is not in any sense what it is the price of... It's the price of your ability to make promises." — J.W. Mason [34:48]

• Keynesian Tradition:
  • They draw on Keynes, emphasizing liquidity preference and the non-neutrality of money.

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7. Money is Never Neutral

• Money is not a neutral medium for real activity or a mere measurement tool.
• The limits on prosperity, social progress, or production are often about coordination—not sheer shortages of material resources.
• Financial architecture determines how—and whether—human capacities are able to meet social needs.

"We're much more limited by the types of promises we can make to each other than simply by the real resources that are available. The real constraint is coordination, not scarcity." — J.W. Mason [44:37]

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8. The Fetish of the Real: Language, Ideology, and Measurement

• The notion of the “real economy” is challenged.
• GDP and similar indicators are not measuring an underlying “real” thing—they sum chosen monetary flows, embedding social and normative choices (e.g., imputing rental value for homeowners, but not childcare).
• These choices reflect and reinforce dominant visions of social organization (commodification vs. non-market relations).

"There is some actual fact of the matter, that there is some meaningful sense in which you could actually measure real living standards...we’re really trying to say in this chapter is that is just not the case. The only thing a measure like GDP or per capita income measures is the sum of a particular set of money payments." — J.W. Mason [49:42]

• Periton metaphor:
  • Some quantities we measure (like GDP) are shadows cast without a corresponding “real” object.

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9. Comparative Wealth and the Politics of Measurement

• Economic statistics embody values about what “counts.”
• Example: Germany’s household wealth measures lower because tenant protections reduce market value of assets—illustrating the normative consequences of statistical choices.

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10. The Future: The Ends of Money and Prospects Beyond It

• Money is both transformative and historically contingent—not an eternal necessity.
• Money’s logic dissolves older social relations and creates new, large-scale forms of cooperation, but those forms don’t always need money to endure.
• Many social goods—education, libraries, social housing—can and do exist outside money-mediated exchange, suggesting a pragmatic, incremental path to decommodification.

"We would like to imagine a world that is less organized by money, where we've freed ourselves…and it doesn't. It's not an all or nothing thing, but increasingly from the rule of money." — J.W. Mason [63:45]

• The importance of seeing organizational reality:
  • Corporations, often seen as capitalist apexes, internally operate as planned economies, not markets—a pattern that already exists widely.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "If you watch It's a Wonderful Life, the bank is adding a lot. Because when you see the world where the guy commits suicide…Potterville…is very different. Clearly…lending activity carried out by the bank…has transformed real activity in some quite far reaching ways." — J.W. Mason [42:38]

• "GDP is not meant to answer, is 2020 America richer than 1950s America by a certain fraction? ... So many judgment calls need to be made." — Arjun Jayadev [56:11]

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Key Timestamps

• Money and Things Introduction: [03:52]
• Barter Flyer Story (Origin Story): [08:40]
• Debt as a Starting Point: [14:04]
• Eurozone Financial Crisis: [16:44]
• Class, Power, and Debt: [22:50]
• Understanding Capital: [24:11]
• Cookie Stamp/Capital Metaphor: [31:36]
• Interest Rate vs Rates (Money for Money): [33:38]
• Banks Creating Money / It’s a Wonderful Life: [41:52]
• Liquidity and Non-Neutrality of Money: [44:37]
• Fetish of the Real (Language & Measurement): [49:42]
• Cross-country Wealth & German Asset Example: [59:28]
• The Ends of Money and Prospects for Change: [61:40]

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Concluding Thoughts

The authors advocate for seeing money not as a neutral or inevitable fact of social life, but as a historically contingent set of technologies and conventions that can—at least partially—be moved beyond. By understanding money’s true nature and its role in shaping power and possibility, we can better imagine, and work toward, a world organized according to collective needs and cooperation rather than the imperatives of capital and commodification.

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Transcript

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Welcome to the New Books Network

[E]

welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Tom Disena from the Department of Communication, Journalism and Public Relations at Oakland University. My guests today are J.W. mason and Arjun Jayadev, the authors of Against Money. Money is everywhere in our daily lives. It lurks in the swipe of a card at the grocery store, in looming student loan debts, in the prices of things we want, and in our subconscious navigation of the modern world. In this revelatory book, economists Mason and Jayadev explain how and why money is so deeply misunderstood by the world it dominates, as well as the dangerous social implications of this misunderstanding against money, tackles the most dearly held truths of economics, arguing that the world of money has never been an impartial representation of the world of things. Instead, its existence in different forms, debt, capital, liquidity and interest, increasingly shapes events in the real world rather than just reflecting them. Sometimes money enables new forms of cooperation. More often it facilitates domination. Human existence is not just facilitated by money, but also governed by it. J.W. mason is an Associate professor of Economics at John Jay College and Senior Fellow at the Groundwork Collaborative. He was formerly the Policy Director of the New York State Working Families Party. Arjun Jayadev is Professor of Economics at Azimprinjay University in India. Gentlemen, welcome to the New Books Network.

[C]

Thanks for having us.

[D]

Thanks for having us.

[E]

So your book complicates a lot of the popular understandings that we have concerning money. So let's start with the one that lies at the heart of this work. What is the relationship between money and things? Why do people so often get those two things confused? And what effects does that confusion have for those of us who have to navigate this world of money?

[C]

Okay, thanks very much, Tom, for having us. Yeah, so we really kind of spent some time on this in the introduction, as you said, you know, there are these two worlds, the world of money and the world of things. And for a long time the book was called Money and Things. And the question that this book asks is, what's the relationship between those two worlds? And really the dominant answer in economics for 250 years is that there's really only one world, the material one. And money is, as they say, just a veil over it, kind of shorthand. So when you see something like a price, it's a measure of something like scarcity or something else. Or if you see, you know, your, your debt statements or whatever it is, it's really just banked up consumptions, things that you've actually had in the world. Or, you know, we think about GDP a lot. GDP is just a number. We know it's a monetary number, but it's a stand in for real stuff. So the kind of standard view that economists are taught is that money doesn't do anything on its own. It's just sort of a veil. And we think that's wrong in a very, very fundamental way. And you know, we, in the introduction, we kind of date precisely when we started to think about this, which is, you know, we talked about, we talk about, you know, driving our in graduate school to Bard College. You Know where there was a, you know, a conference honoring the economist Hyman Minsky right in the middle of, should we say, the high period of finance where Alan Greenspan was being worshiped, as it were. And central banks at that point were treated as sort of technocratic wizards who figured out the economy and money was a kind of solved, neutral problem. And then 2008 happened, and Josh was working elsewhere. He came back to economics, I came back to the questions of finance, and everybody was asking about what money is. There was Bitcoin debates, there was debates around modern monetary theory. And we came back to thinking about this. And this book kind of represents our last 15 years of thinking about it. And so our argument is sort of, if you will, three steps. You know, the first thing is that money values don't just reflect preexisting real things that we've spoken about, not just simply measurements of some underlying material fact. And the second, once you stop seeing or assuming money is a passive mirror, you find that money world has its own logic. You know, we have to see money as its own thing, not just as a veil. And the third part, I think the one that we really most care about is to say what's kind of of the positive view of money. Money's real job, we argue, is a sort of tool of coordination. It's this technology that allows strangers to cooperate, that anonymizes obligations. It's an active world making power, and that's why it has such a control. It's not just a bookkeeping convenience. And so that's where our title comes from. Against Money has sort of two meanings. One is like a figure against a background. We're trying to see the concrete social world that exists apart from money. The other is more straightforwardly political. It's a kind of imagining of what lies beyond money's rule once you see money as separate from the world of things. So the rest of the book is really kind of making the rest of that argument. I don't know if Josh wants to jump in on that, but that's.

[D]

No, that's very clear. Yes, that covers what I would have said.

[E]

It's interesting, the title Against Money, as you just said, the word against has a couple of different meanings. There's a similar book that I have that uses the same sort of double meaning for Against Love. And it has kind of a similar effect.

[D]

Right.

[E]

Like nobody wants to think of themselves as against love. But then when you think about it as sort of to lean against, sort of shapes, it alters your perspective on things.

[D]

Yes. That was certainly a book we had in mind when we settled on this title, along with Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation, Feyerbend's Against Method, all of which are not simply polemically opposing the term and the title, but sort of challenging the way we think about it, imagining a position outside of it, imagining an alternative to it to try to complicate it as opposed to just sort of argue against it in a straightforward way. So, yes, that was definitely one of the things we wanted this title to resonate with.

[E]

Okay, awesome. So I usually start my interviews about what brings the authors to the project, but you actually put that story into your first chapter. So let's start a little bit with the origin story of this work. You already described sort of the 2008 crisis, but there was actually something even a little more grounded. What was the note that you both saw someplace? And how does it lead you to the question, which seems pretty obvious for most of us, I think, does money matter?

[C]

Okay, great. Yeah, actually, this was fun. So Josh and I, you know, we've been friends and talking about these things for about a quarter century now, plus, and, you know, we often meet in New York. We both worked in New York, and on one of my trips there, we were just talking about these things. We were walking in the East Village where, you know, Josh's son used to go to school in. After, you know, dropping him off at school. We were walking through this place and we saw this kind of, I think it was a hand drawn flyer offering, if I'm remembering correctly, French lessons and Italian lessons and even Renaissance painting in exchange for help with a computer or phone, you know, and it was no money at all. It was extremely charming as a, as a kind of artifact and yeah, it kind of feels strange to us, right? I mean, you know, there is this kind of thing which is very quaint. It seems like, you know, there's an older person doesn't know how to handle computers, but was trying, you know, so, you know, this, this, this question of, you know, money. And he's very clear that he doesn't want, or she is very clear that it's not a market exchange. There's no money that's being exchanged. Now, we might think it's pretty quaint, but really economics textbooks treat it as if, in fact, that's exactly what's happening. This question of people exchanging real things for real things, and money is just sort of a, a kind of convenience. Right. The idea is that going back to Adam Smith, really, that society started out bartering and money was invented later as a convenience and we found it extremely charming. But of course, it's the work of David Graeber and others who sort of demolished this pretty thoroughly that people already use money and so on. So, yeah, that was the original story.

[D]

Yeah. I mean, what's interesting about that flyer is that if you study economics, you get the idea that this is a perfectly typical economic transaction. In fact, this is the model that we should think of economic. For my economic activity, that I have an endowment, I have certain things that I possess or am able to do, I have labor, and I'm going to exchange that for other things I want that will better satisfy my needs. That that is the sort of atomic economic transaction. And all this stuff having to do with money and finances is kind of second order and built on top of that. And yet when you actually see a concrete example of that sort of transaction, it sort of takes you aback because you realize actually most of our economic life doesn't look like this at all. And it sort of crystallizes the discrepancy between the way that we're kind of trained to think about the worlds of production and exchange and consumption and the actual way that we encounter them in our daily lives.

[E]

So you would know better than I. My economic training ended with an undergraduate course. There was an accelerated macro micro into one very long class. And I learned it as guns and butter.

[D]

Right? Trade offs. It's all trade offs.

[E]

Paul Samuelson, right. I think, was the textbook author. And you know, country A has guns and country B has butter. And they got to figure out a way to get the guns to the people who want the. Or vice versa.

[D]

Yeah. It's even more pronounced, I think, in discussions of trade than in other areas of economics that every, you know, you'll. If you take a course on international trade, I mean, it's really quite interesting. If you look at an international economics textbook, the first half is typically the theory of international trade, which does not mention money, finance, exchange rates at all. The entire discussion of trade is in terms of exactly what you say. One country has this good, the other country has that good. And look, they can be better off by trading with each other. And then almost as a completely separate topic, you will later, probably even in a different course, introduce all the things that actually shape international relationships between countries, like money, exchange rates, foreign lending and so on. You know, the other, the other thing we could have added is sort of another complementary illustration to this. We mentioned it in the book, but we don't have a picture of it around the same time, I recall noticing some ads in the subway, a bunch of ads at this point in subway for various services that allow you to finance different things in your life that make it easier to sell your used furniture. The MTA itself was advertising at this point, the fact that you can now start paying for your Metro card using a credit or debit card. So in other words, services that are about, oh, now it's easier to pay for things with money or easier to convert things to money than it previously was. Which again, kind of makes you think, well, what is the problem being solved here? If we already live in a world where everything is kind of exchanging for everything else, why do you need to advertise a new way to sell or buy something? And again, it kind of highlights the fact that the role of money is something more specific and more particular in real life. It's not just a kind of second order incidental aspect of the fundamental act of trading things for things.

[E]

And so that leads you to the conclusion essentially that money does matter in ways that, for instance, standard economics teaches us that it doesn't. Am I getting that correctly?

[D]

That's right.

[E]

Okay, so the next section of the book traces a history of money through some of its most important concepts. And you begin here, I think, for those of us who are not economists, maybe counterintuitively with the concept of debt. Why is debt foundational? That is, why does it come first in our understanding of money?

[C]

Well, I'm not sure it comes first. Well, there's two things. One is that we think of money very much in what we might call a credit theory of money. So money is just a form of, of credit. And where the line between money and credit happens is actually a historical exercise. Now, chronologically in our book, we start with debt. We could have started with something else, partly because that's where we started to actually do our own work on this particular topic. So when we were working in, I think about 2010, 2012, the big question that was there in the US economy was the question of household debt and the consequences of the financial crisis, which itself was predicated on this rise in household debt. And the Obama administration was protecting creditors during the worst recession in generations. You had the Tea Party and Occupy, and they were both furious. There was all this foment going on at the same time. But something that everyone assumed was that this large rise up in debt to income ratios of households that happened from the 1980s all the way till 2006, 2007, was simply a case of American households Having gone on a borrowing binge, right? And the left said it was because incomes were not, you know, rising, and the right said it was because of profligacy. But what was taken for granted was this idea that there was more borrowing in that period. Now, if you look at debt as an object, debt to income ratio as an object, it's not just borrowings which matter. For debt to income ratios, inflation and interest rate matters hugely. Inflation, interest rate, and of course, the growth rate of nominal income matters hugely. And if you actually do a decomposition, which you can very simply, what we found was that in the 80s and early 90s, actually new borrowing was relatively low. In fact, what drove the debt ratio up for 25 years was the Volcker shock of the early 80s. So interest rates on existing mortgages and credit, they stayed elevated for a couple of decades, actually, relative to the early 80s. And so we call this Fisher Dynamics, after the great economist serving Fisher, who noted something quite similar during the Great Depression. And at that point, you actually had everyone frantically paying down debt, but because incomes were collapsing even faster, debt to income ratios were rising. So that was how we started our. And you know, from then on, in fact, there's another big kind of episode of debt, which was the Eurozone crisis. Maybe Josh can speak about that, you know, second.

[D]

Yeah, yeah. You know, I think we started with debt, as Arjun says, partly because from our point of view, the fundamental money is a sort of subset of a larger set of ways of organizing human activity in terms of these relationships, these payments and promises of payments. And so money is really, and this is, I think, a strand in the history of economic thought. We couldn't really get into this in the book, but if you look at people like how Joseph Schumpeter and other people, you know, Keynes himself, have written about money, they're very clear that what we call money is a subset of a broader set of relationships and instruments that we class as debt or credit. So that's one reason. But the more important reason is because talking about debt gives us a couple of stories that illustrate the themes of the book, really, I think, really powerfully. One, as Arjun says, is this rise in household debt, which, as we have shown in other work that we refer to in the book, we don't do this analysis in the book, but it draws on our earlier work. The rise in household debt in the United States is entirely a matter of higher interest rates, lower inflation, and to some extent, slower income growth. It's not about increasing borrowed. So that really shows you the sort of autonomy of Money that it's not just a reflection of the real. The, the other case is the European debt crisis. And again, there's a story that people tell that says, oh, the financial position of these countries is just a reflection of their real activity. These countries had unsustainable budget deficits. These countries meaning Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, to some extent that they were spending more on public services than they were collecting in taxes. And so of course that created a crisis eventually which the markets were simply sort of recognizing the objective fact in the situation. And yet when you dig a little bit into what actually happened, it doesn't look like that at all. The only one of those, those countries that had any sort of fiscal potential, fiscal, you know, persistent fiscal imbalance before the crisis was Greece. The others, you know, most of them had smaller trade deficits and lower debt GDP ratios going into the crisis than for instance, Germany did. The. And when you ask, you know, it wasn't what, what happened to made these countries situations become unsustainable. It wasn't because of an accumulation of excess of public spending. It was because of a crisis in financial markets that drove up interest rates and cut these countries off from new borrowing. And then that in turn the rise in interest rates drove up their debt. And in some cases the other aspects of the financial crisis, like in Ireland, the assumption of private bank debt by the government. But in any case, it was the financial crisis that led to the explosion of public debt relative to GDP and not vice versa. So that's one. And then the other point that comes to very clearly there was the deliberate policies of the European Central bank that essentially refused to take normal actions that a central bank would take to resolve the crisis in order to create political pressure for a kind of pro market liberalization of labor laws and so on. So this was a sort of political choice to allow this crisis to develop in the way that it did. And then of course, once ECB had gotten what it wanted, and also once the leadership of the ECB shifted, they were able to resolve the crisis almost instantaneously. It was not in fact necessary to have some major fiscal retrenchment to bring borrowing costs down for these countries. So it really shows you both again the way that financial outcomes, monetary outcomes are doing their own thing. They're on their own track, they have their own set of causes. They're not simply reflecting something that happens in the real economy. That's one. But two, the way they then can profoundly reshape outcomes in the real economy because these countries, as a result of the financial crisis were forced to adopt all sorts of policies that they almost certainly never would have otherwise. And then of course, the way that the idea that this stuff is just sort of an objective outcome of real facts about the world can disguise political choices.

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And there's a strong element because when you describe some of the changes that were forced upon the countries that had those things forced on them, it's falling primarily onto workers. Right. So in the same way that, you know, there's this sort of moralizing that goes on and it's almost always directed towards people who are, well, they're working. Right. Like, like even, even the, the consumption problem that you talked about in the US is people trying to, you know, fund, you know, the actual, the actual borrowing doesn't go up. It's the price that they're paying for that borrowing that's going up.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, there's obviously a very central sort of class element of this, which is very clear in the European crisis. But I think obviously applies in other cases, too. You can get this sense if you read, for instance, Yanis Verrifakis wonderful memoir, Adults in the Room, about his time as the Greek financial minister. It's very clear that people like the German financial minister, Schauble, I think I'm probably. My German pronunciation is Margaret Chavel. We're all really actually quite explicit about this, that the reason for treating Greece this way is to compel workers elsewhere in Europe to accept lower living standards and less protections on the job. That was the fundamental goal.

[C]

And we should just say our teacher Jerry Epstein wrote about this quite effectively at that point of time. You're really saying that a lot of this was really to push back the quite remarkable advances in the social welfare state of Europe at that point in time.

[E]

So the second in this section, the second chapter deals with another foundational concept, capital. Here I'm going to be a little bit more specific, I think. How is it that we misunderstand capital? And how is it, if I understand correctly, a form of power?

[C]

We very much enjoyed writing this chapter because once you start looking at these things, they're actually so interesting and complex and have so many consequences. So we argue that capital is actually three different things bundled together, sort of like a historical accent. So in the old Marxian thing, it's a sum of money trying to become a larger sum of money. It's also a stock of machines and buildings and so on. And what sometimes people forget a kind of form of authority, a legal right to sort of command other people's productivity, ability to work, labor in a production process. So modern economics sort of collapses all of these things. And the metaphor that is used is that it's like water in a bathtub which sort of fills up, and the capital stock is like the water in a bathtub. And we really want to spend a lot of time in this chapter showing that this bathtub metaphor, that there's really a lot of. That there's stuff that's behind it, is just false, or rather not false, but constructed. And we take two different methods, two different kind of entry points into this. And I'll speak about one of them, which is these tables, which are called the Penwell tables. And these are very often used by macroeconomists for many, many kinds of calculations. And they have a variable which they call the capital stock. And the assumption is that it's kind of the value of some machines and stuff that's. That's been produced. Now to build this. There's a lot of assumptions that go into the process. You know, I mean, this might be getting into the weeds, but it's actually kind of important to build it. You need, you know, a depreciation rate for every kind of asset in every country. And it turns out that to use it, you use certain depreciation rates which were in the 1960s in a handful of American studies, and apply it to the world. Or the other kind of issue is that you need an initial capital stock. You need to assume an initial capital stock for when you start this thing. And in some instances these are just sort of pulled out of thin air as 2.7 times GDP. The point really that we're trying to make is that what a lot of economists use and assume that capital is sort of the money value of a physical set of things in the world is just a construction and often constructed in order to make the theory work rather than anything real in the world. So that's one thing. And then maybe Josh can speak about the other measure, which other entry point, which is piketty.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, capital is one of the most complex and difficult and also of course important and really central concepts in economics. And I don't know that our perspective is going to convince everybody, but it's certainly the one that we feel is the most productive. And that's really to start from the point that this thing that we call capital is a kind of relationship between people, which I think we don't quote Marx a lot in this book, but I like to think that there's a lot of Marx in the book in the spirit of the book, and I think in this case I would say that we are in the spirit of Marx saying that we should think of a relationship between people that really has three dimensions. And what we call capital is really the kind of fusion or combination or superposition of these three very distinct kinds of relationships. One is this, the quantitative one, a money claim. Your capital is measured in a certain amount of money. It's money in your possession that you can deploy in order to acquire more money. This pot of money endlessly being redirected in order to create a bigger pot of money. This kind of self referential process of money being acquired for the sake of acquiring more money, that's one, Two is a kind of stewardship or authority over particular kinds of means of production or a particular production process that you have some relationship with a building or machine or plot of land or set of ideas that have been turned into capital through intellectual property rights. And the capital is in some sense identified with those, with that particular form means of production. And then three is that there's an authority over other people, that you have the ability to claim other people's labor, to give commands as the boss, and have other people obey those claims, that you are directing the division of labor in some way. And those logically are three different things, but it's the fusion of them in a concrete set of social relationships that creates capital. Okay, so then our, our kind of. The way we approach this in our framework is to say when we look at capital in a quantitative way, the only part that we can look at is the first one, that the pot of money, the pot of money we can put a number on money is inherently quantitative. There's an amount of it at any given moment, and we can talk about how that changes over time. We can measure wealth over time. And this is, you know, as Arjun said, one of our starting points in thinking about this stuff, maybe the foil we were pushing against a little bit, is the very important work of Thomas Piketty and his collaborators, which was one of the sort of starting points for our work on this book. Very, very influential work of economics about what, 20 years ago now? And there you've got very systematic, very comprehensive measurements of wealth as money over quite a number of countries over a very long period of time. Very, very impressive empirical work. The problem comes when you try to impute the quantity of money and treat that as a quantity of physical means of production. So you say, well, that quantity of money increases because people have got an income and they've saved and accumulated, and that increases the stock of means of production. And in his early work, Piketty, who was coming out of a more mainstream economics background, was very explicitly using that sort of framework. If you want to explain why there's more money wealth in society than there was before, then you have to ask, well, why is there more physical means of production than there was before? And so you even get very silly and completely ahistorical claims like the fall in wealth relative to income in the middle of the 20th century was due to the destruction of physical means of production during World War II, which is just utterly false. You know, it's just completely wrong. I mean, among other things, that fell just as much in the United States, which was unscathed by the wars it did in Germany or Japan. So that's, that's one. So you, so you, you misunderstand changes in monetary wealth. You ignore this specifically monetary factors, and you try to quantify the means of production in themselves, which is not Something you can actually do. And then, of course, you ignore the fact that this is a social relationship of authority. So that the increase in monetary wealth in many cases reflects a victory in a conflict between workers and capital owners. And I should say Piketty himself, as we mentioned in the book, I think, has come to something that is much closer to our perspective on this in his more recent work. So he's really stopped talking about how the production function and returns on physical capital allow capital to be accumulated in greater quantities than before. And he talks a lot more about things like changes in corporate governance that empower shareholders at the expense of other stakeholders, holders.

[C]

So I. I want to just say one more thing. You know, where we. Talking about Piketty and, And. And. And the Penwell tables. I just want to say one metaphor that actually I should say is really Josh's, which I really like a lot, was the. You know, we have this thought experiment, right, about a neighborhood where everyone bakes and shares cookies freely until someone's, you know, handed an exclusive stamp, you know, a sort of monopoly over who's allowed to bake it all. And this stamp has a market price, okay? It can be used to solve a coordination problem, or it can be used to squeeze people. It really doesn't matter. But capitalism, historically, of course, does both. But that's the real nature of capital. It's not a pile of stuff as much as sort of like a transferable veto over a production process. And I think that's what. Once you see these two things as distinct, you realize that you're talking about two different worlds, and it's important to keep them separate when we, in our measurement.

[D]

Right, that's right. Yeah. That's really getting to the heart of it, that we should think of capital first and foremost as a specific form of authority, a veto over a production process. It's obviously attached in some sense to some particular thing. And in this sense, incidentally, intellectual property is, which people often talk about as some sort of weird outgrowth of capital or deformation, is in some sense a purer form of the idea of capital than things that we traditionally think of like machinery or buildings.

[E]

Yeah, it was. Again, I appreciated that metaphor reading the book as well, because it's one of those metaphors that captures something that once you see it, you can't unsee it.

[C]

Thank you.

[D]

Yes, that's the goal.

[E]

All right, so the next section of the book is called Money for Money, and it begins with a discussion of. And you'll have to forgive me here for the proper term, either the Interest rate or interest rates. So what are we talking about with the distinction between interest rate in the singular and interest rates in the plural?

[D]

Yeah, I mean, this is, as we say at the beginning of this chapter, one of the most fraught issues in economics. And I don't know, I've heard from some people that these two chapters are a little more challenging to reader. You know, they're, they're a little farther from kind of headlines or stuff that's in our daily lives than some of the other chapters. But it really is a fundamental question in terms of how we think about the world and the role of money in it. The sort of conventional economics view, which is, you know, what you'll get in an economics textbook today, but really is deeply rooted in the tradition of economics going back to the 18th century, is that interest is fundamentally a real trade off between consumption today and consumption tomorrow. That it's the price of having stuff now versus waiting for it. And the older economists would use nice terms like it's the price of abstinence, but you get similar language today, although maybe not in that particular word. So in this idea, again, this is going back to this sort of central theme. Is money a veil over a fundamentally non monetary world or is it kind of doing something autonomously, independently? This is saying it's a veil. There's a trade off, There's a real trade off between, you know, the, the, the metaphor that I like that Canute Vixel use. You know, you've got wine in a barrel. If you tap the barrel and drink the wine today, that'll, that'll be nice, you don't have to wait, but the wine will get better if it ages in the barrel. So you've got this trade off. Do I, do I drink it today or do I wait and let it improve in the barrel or, you know, people used to talk where you've got corn, you've got seeds that have you've harvested, do you eat them or do you plant them and have more next year? So that's sort of one way of thinking about the interest rate. But our argument, and here we're really in these chapters, we're drawing very much on Keynes in particular in these chapters of the book, is that the interest rate that we see in the real world does not look like that at all. That is not in any sense what it is the price of. It's a price of one set of money promises for another set of money promises. There's no, in general shift in consumption, in time, in the real Transactions that we see the interest rate in. It's about having a set of money promises that is more certain and more flexible, as opposed to one that is less certain, riskier, or more inflexible. So the classic example, and this is one that we do experience in our daily life, is if you go to the bank and you get a loan, for instance, a mortgage or some other loan, what you really are doing there is swapping two IOUs. You make a promise to the bank of repayment, that's the thing we call the loan, but the bank is making a promise to you. That's what we call the deposit. And this is why we say banks create money when they make loans. The deposit that is newly created money, you can use it to make payments, is simply an IOU from the bank to you. It's just two offsetting IOUs. And this means that nobody is shifting consumption forward or backward. No real goods are being moved between the present and the future. What's happening is that you are getting a promise that is very reliable. The bank is a very trusted person to make this sort of promise, and that you can in turn transfer to anybody else freely. You can use to meet whatever payment obligations you need to you, you have. The bank is getting a promise from you that's less reliable. You as a person might default on your loan. And also that is harder to, to swap for other things. And because of that, the promise that the bank gives is more valuable than the promise that you give. And that difference is what we see as the interest rate. So this is really, it's not the price of time, it's not the price of waiting, it's the price of your ability to make promises. And that's sort of the starting point of this chapter. So the first, you know, we have two chapters on the interest rate. The first one is sort of a critical one, trying to explain why it doesn't make sense to think of the interest rate as the price of time. And then the second one is sort of struggling with Keynes ideas about liquidity as a way of thinking through this alternative understanding of the interest rate.

[C]

Yeah, so that's, I think, great summary of both the chapters. So you asked Tom, interest rate versus interest rates. And we start with this thing because this is actually a very important sort of delightful debate once you go into the invective and so on between Hayek and Strafa and other older economists. Right. So, you know, once you, you know, you, you start, we have to start with the fact that isn't one interest rate in the economy there are thousands, you know, between, if you take your one good versus another good, own interest rates, you know, depending on how a particular goods price moves relative to anything else. Every good has its own set of interest rate. And Hayek, you know, tried to build a theory based on a single non monetary natural rate. Right. And so, and of course there's a story about how Piero Strafa is a great, you know, Italian economist, took it apart. So we go into that. But this notion that this single non monetary natural rate really has a hold on macroeconomics. And the first part is to sort of, the first chapter is to sort of pull at these, you know, and to look at its history, but also to look at, you know, the fact that there's this thing which nobody can observe and yet everybody talks about as if, as if it exists.

[E]

So, you know, and is important, like, I mean, we.

[C]

Well, the claim is that there is this thing called the natural rate which kind of, once the, the central bank sets the monetary rate, their rate to the natural rate, however they, they find it, that stabilizes the economy. That's an old idea going back to Excel, but which, you know, Jerome Powell, before Kevin Wash and others used to kind of talk about. Right. So the Fed or the central bank supposed to locate this natural rate and that's their job. Once they do that, the economy is stable. But of course, in the real economy, the multiple rates and so on. So we spend a lot of time trying to disentangle, as Josh was saying, and this notion of a single interest rate as the price of time before going into the Keynesian story. So that was just a quick coda to the question of rates versus rates.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, the rate versus rates is also important because when you think about the interest rate as a price of time, then there's something called the interest rate on one side, which is a singular thing. And then individual interest rates that we observe on different types of loans or different types of assets are that fundamental rate plus a premium that is supposed to represent risk in some fashion. But there's a fundamental difference between the overall interest rate and the differences between different assets. But from our point of view, when we really see a price between either the security, the credibility of a promise or the transferability of a promise, that's something that exists in the same way between any pair of assets. So the same, there's no such thing as the interest rate. There's only the relative price of different promises, different assets. And in some sense the comparison between any two assets could be called the interest rate. Which again is sort of what Keynes says. But from our point of view, he doesn't really follow through on that insight and it has to be kind of pulled out in a way. But yes, that's another reason why that distinction is important to us.

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[E]

I want to go back to something that you said a little while ago, Josh, about the banks creating money. And, and I think it's, and especially in terms of the, the home mortgage which I think is where a lot of us issues for whatever reason. And this is probably my own sort of bias. All I could see in my head during this chapter was that scene from It's a Wonderful Life where Jimmy Stewart is explaining to all of these people who are desperate to get their money out of the building and loan that no, your money is over there in Bob's house and someone else.

[D]

Right.

[E]

And not that idea of the banks creating money but instead sort of just moving it around. Does that?

[D]

Yes, that's, it's, you know we actually, in an earlier draft of the book we quoted that, we referred to that scene and quoted some of the dialogue there. So on the one hand it's true that this is suggesting a sort of non monetary vision of what a bank does because you somebody depositor had to put something in first before it. So that's wrong. On the other Hand, what we thought was interesting about that is that it really foregrounds the transformative role of finance, that this is not just a passive intermediary. In a quote from Mankiw textbook that we do have in the book he says Gregory Mankiw, our newly very prominent economist, author, textbook author, Harvard guy, now just appointed to some advisory role at the Fed anyway, very much an embodiment of mainstream economic thought. He basically says you've got a process where savings gets, gets used for investment and it really doesn't matter if that gets intermediated through banks or not. Banks really aren't adding anything to what's fundamentally happening here. But clearly if you watch It's a Wonderful Life, the bank is adding a lot. Because when you see the world where the guy commits suicide, Potterville or whatever it's called is very different from the actual town. Clearly. In fact this lending activity carried out by the bank is, has transformed real activity in some quite far reaching ways. So it may be a bad illustration of the fact that banks create money, but it's a very good illustration of the non neutrality of money and credit that the terms on which credit is offered really do fundamentally reshape the actual real economy of production.

[E]

All right, so you mentioned again this is part of a pair of twin chapters on money for money. And in the next one you discuss liquidity and convention. And here you make the important point that money is never neutral. We've been sort of talking about this for a while, but I think we can probably spell it out more succinctly here. What do you mean by this and why is it grounded in the notion of liquidity?

[D]

So again the idea, and we have been talking about this in different ways, but it's good to really foreground it. There's a very deep seated idea in economics that money is in some sense neutral. That you have a real set of physical resources, a real set of human capacities. People have so many hours, they have so much skills and those can meet basic human needs in different ways. And that that basic trade off how do we take these resources and best meet human needs is sort of in some sense already exists out in the world and is kind of knowable in advance and is not affected by the fact that we make payments in money or contracts in money. Money itself doesn't, is just a measurement. It doesn't change the real stuff available to us or the real needs that we're trying to meet with it. And so a lot of what we're arguing is that money is not neutral in that Sense that actually we are much more limited. And this goes back to what I was just saying about the interest rate being the price of promises. We're much more limited by the types of promises we can make to each other than simply by the real resources that are available. That the real constraint is coordination, not scarcity. And this is something I think on a certain kind of moral or emotional level is actually a really important motivation here, which is that there's enormous human capacities that are not getting used in this world. That the reason we have people who are poor, whose material needs are getting met, the reason we have real social problems like climate change that aren't getting solved, isn't just that there's not enough stuff, there aren't enough people. People's labor is being used the best it can be in other ways. It's because we have enormous capacities that are going to waste. We have enormous numbers of people who could be doing scientific and engineering work, who could be contributing in big ways to solve our collective problems, who are forced to do menial or degrading or socially useless work, or aren't able to work at all. And this is a coordination problem. It's a problem because people can't organize themselves to use the capacities that we have. This is really what we have in mind. We say money is not neutral, that money is a technology for allowing people to make promises, in particular to make promises to strangers. And our capacity to make promises is really shapes what kinds of collective activity we can carry out. So that's why when the savings and loan goes under, Potterville looks very different. Because again, we say it's not that people put their money in the bank and then they lent it out. But there are promises involved. Promises that go to the workers who are going to build the houses, who promises of repayment by the people who are going to live in the houses that are facilitated by the credit system. And if they can't make these promises to each other, the same capacity for labor is not going to meet those human needs as well, or at all. So when we say money is not neutral, we mean the terms on which money is available, the terms on which credit is available fundamentally shape the organization of production in far reaching ways. And this is an idea that we associate in part. I mean everybody. Anything interesting has been said by many different people, but I think this particularly clearly stated by Hyman Minsky, who we refer to a bit in this chapter.

[E]

Arlene, do you want to add it? You're good?

[C]

Yeah, I think we.

[E]

Okay. All right. So the Sixth chapter you introduced. And this was, I'll be honest, my favorite of the book, the Fetish of the Real. Here I'd like you to read, if you would. I don't remember if we decided who was going to take this on. Looks like Arjun.

[C]

Okay, I. I'll. I'll read it.

[E]

This is on page 222. This is subtitled the Mirage of the Real.

[C]

All right. The term real is one of many in economics that functions to link theory to observable reality by a confusion of language, a sort of argument by homonym in which an everyday meaning is more or less deliberately mixed up with a technical one. There is a long list of such terms, including what the legal scale scholar Sanjukta Paul calls the foundational Baukian hominins of law and economics, competition, welfare and efficiency. Real to an economist means a money quantity that has been divided by a price index, but it also means implicitly a physical material quantity. There is a reason why the term real is used and not something more neutral like inflation adjusted. It is value in some sense as distinct from mere price. It is also used to refer to the fundamentals of the economy, the technical possibilities of production and human needs to be satisfied, imagined in biophysical terms, and definitely excluding money and credit. Real to an economist is the antonym of nominal, of monetary, of financial, and also of unreal or at least unimportant.

[E]

So I think that does a beautiful job of summarizing what's going on in this chapter. I liked it because the focus, the idea of language is having this sort of shaping power over our perceptions of these things that are supposed to be very concrete and very material. So let's talk a little bit about this problematic concept of the real.

[D]

Yeah, you know, I think this is one of these things. I mean, a lot of this book is about a critique of economics, but I think, you know, I think we're not just doing this because we are economists and we're annoyed by, you know, the way our colleagues think. I think a critique of economics has a different kind of importance than maybe a critique of a lot of other academic fields because economics is in some sense as kind of distillation or formalization of the common sense of capital. It's, it's a kind of ideology that is, really corresponds to one of the main axes of power in the world that we live in. So, so I think there's. There's a sense in which a critique of economics is also a critique of sort of the common sense of life under the rule of capital. And I think that's particularly true in this case because I think almost everybody, even people who wouldn't think of themselves as being particularly influenced by academic economics, who've never taken an economics class, anybody who thinks about the economy at all tends to assume there is such a thing as the real economy, that you can measure real gdp, real living standards, in some way independent of the value that is assigned to them in terms of currency. Right now we're seeing a lot of this discourse because of the World cup around the relative GDPs of the United States and Europe, where people are trying to make comparisons, oh, the GDP of Texas is greater than the GDP of France, or whatever. The assumption. People argue one side of this, they argue the other side, but the assumption is that there is some actual fact of the matter, that there is some meaningful sense in which you could actually measure real living standards or real levels of output in different times and places that would be independent of the money that they are measured in. And so what we're really trying to say in this chapter is that is just not the case. The only thing a measure like GDP or per capita income measures is the sum of a particular set of money payments. We have decided, our national accountants have decided, and there's a lot of specific decisions that go into this to measure, to add up a particular set of payments and call that GDP again. And then you can take another set of payments and create a price index and you can divide one by the other, but there's no object underneath that you're measuring. And the more different, the farther apart the places that you're comparing are, the less meaningful this gets, the more it becomes a matter of arbitrary assumptions and decisions that could just as easily be made another way. And so now this is obviously, this is not just. We don't want to be just making a negative critique here. So the other sort of things that we say in this chapter are, first, that this is not just a neutral process. It's not just that people are confused, but that the choices actually inscribe a certain kind of vision of normative vision of how society should be organized. So one example that we use, one of the biggest components of GDP in the United States and many other countries is what's called owner equivalent rent. The. The idea, the concept of GDP is you're only supposed to be measuring transactions that happen in the market. Purchases of newly produced goods and services. If you live in a rental apartment, if you live in rental housing, then you have a purchase of a service. The Service of the house, you pay your monthly rent, you're purchasing a service, the rental, the housing services provided by the apartment. If you live in a house that you own, there's no equivalent payment. But, but the national accountants say, well, but it's really the same thing, you know, the same fundamental services. The same real thing is going on. So we're going to impute, we're going to essentially make up or calculate what you rent, you would pay to live in that house that you owned if you were renting it. And we're going to call that owner's equivalent rent a payment that you are supposedly making to yourself as a landlord. And again, this is one of the biggest items in consumption in many countries. All right, so we can argue, does this make sense? Does this not make sense in isolation? But the interesting thing that we point to is that childcare, where you could logically say exactly the same thing, well, if you hire somebody, pay somebody to look after your children, that shows up in gdp, there's a payment for a service. The same service, when you provide it for your own children, doesn't show up in gdp. We could make the same imputation. And historically people have argued that we should, but we don't. And I think if you ask why that is, there is a very specific idea underlying that, which is that housing is and ought to be a commodity, that a house that is being lived in is going to be sold, or at least that is the natural state of a house is to be rented for money by somebody. And the national statistics should be constructed on that basis. Whereas childcare, the natural default normal thing is for people to do that outside of the sphere of the market, for women to provide that within the domestic sphere. And so we should not be treating the market provision as the default natural case. And that's a very definite decision that was made in the construction of national accounts. So this is not just neutral, it is embodying. And you can, you can. Another interesting case is imputed financial services, which are really there in order to make incomes in the financial sector look like income from producing something of value. So a lot of these choices. So that's point one, sort of positive point one, that we have to not just say, well, these numbers don't really tell us anything. They do tell us something, but not what we think they tell us. They don't tell us about some real quantity of output. They tell us about a specific vision of what kind of the normative vision about that's embodied in the national accounts about how society should Be organized. And two, there are alternatives. There are other ways. If you want to make a comparison between living standards in Texas and France, you can do that. You can look at life expectancy, you can look at how many hours a week people work. You can look at surveys of happiness. You can look at a lot of things. And this is why we call these measurements of real GDP a kind of anti knowledge. Because in many cases there's an enormous effort underlying them to collect genuine statistics and information about the world. And then they're all blended together along with a bunch of assumptions in a way that produces a non, you know, that doesn't tell us anything about the world. So I think Arjun's line in there was, you know, it's like you're keeping the bathwater and throwing out the baby when you construct these statistics. And so it's really a plea to try to, if we want to make comparisons of alcorder living standards over long time periods or between very different countries, to measure the things we actually can measure and try to learn the things that we can know and not be kind of blinded by these. The anti knowledge of these statistics.

[C]

I mean, I'd like to add a few things because I think this was again one of these chapters which are a lot of fun to write. We had a chapter which was substantially larger than this. Actually had to cut it down quite a bit. Many of the things that we had written about purchasing power, parity and so on, we had to really. So I guess at a very fundamental level, when someone's looking at gdp, you're asking, is there some reality that's independent of the money used to measure it? And our answer is no. And one of the things that I enjoyed really using was this metaphor of the periton. You know, it's a mythical creature. I believe it's from Borders. I don't believe it's an actual Greek Myth. We're not 100% sure about that. But it's a mythical creature that has a stag's body, but a human being's shadow. Right. And it's the name, I think, that astrophysicists give to some mysterious radio signal which turned out to actually come from a microwave oven nearby. So I think there's a lot actually how national accounts, our imagination of account, economic statistics work. You know, they look like they're pointing at some real physical quantity out there, but there's no object casting that shadow. It's just, you know, the sum of those payments. And one thing that I think it's important because GDP is such a big number and people have written so much just to remember that was not really invented to measure human welfare. You know, William Petty built the first version to figure out both times actually, you know, to figure out how much England could be taxed. I think to fight a war in the modern US Accounts came about I think again in the depression area again to look at what end fiscal policy. It's really useful for that. Can we afford this? Is the economy speeding up or slowing down in the production of this? Those things are really meaningful, but it's not meant to answer. Is 2020America richer than 1950s America by a certain fraction? Of course it's rich in some ways, but as Joshua was saying, so many judgment calls need to be made, and he said to different economies, so it's better not to, you know, project welfare and a kind of real quantity there, because you're really making sort of category error. I think that's what we would want to say about that. Not that normal numbers are meaningless, you know, they're really meaningful. But trying to strip away getting real quantities, it's okay. If you wanted to adjust for inflation, maybe at least call it inflation adjusted, you know, because that's the real meaning. Once you call it real, you're getting into sort of, as he said, you know, the problems of homonyms.

[A]

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[E]

So, and I think, and I just one last thing here. Cause you mentioned, Josh, the idea of homeownership. And when you compare, you know, you're really not comparing apples to apples. If this is where like the rates of homeownership are relatively low in Germany, but renters have more rights to that rental, if I remember correctly, than they do in other places. And so the drive towards owning the home is not as pronounced, right?

[D]

That's right. And that really illustrates the sort of. It's not explicitly about GDP in this case, but the more general principle that economic statistics have this sort of normative vision of the world embodied in them. Because the way this shows up in the case of Germany, and this I think we discussed in the chapter on capital, is that aggregate wealth looks lower in Germany than it does elsewhere in Europe. It's actually a very striking fact that if you look at average median household wealth, Germany has one of the lowest numbers in Europe, much lower than countries in Southern Europe that are much poorer by most statistics. And the reason for that is that if you are a homeowner, you have security of tenure, you have various rights and legal protections, and those are capitalized into the value of your house. You can sell those to somebody else who will enjoy them, and therefore the value of your house reflects them. If you are a tenant who enjoys security of tenure and other legal protections, that's not a right that has a market value. It's not something that you can sell. And in fact, it shows up as a lower market value for the property because it's less valuable to the landlord. So in the aggregate, people are not any worse off in a substantive sense. But because of where we draw this line between what can be marketized and what can't, and which of these implicit rights we choose to impute values for and which ones we don't, German wealth appears lower than the wealth in other countries. And this, I think, can really distort our thinking about the world.

[E]

Yeah, absolutely. So in the conclusion, you muse upon the ends of money. So what are the ends of money? And how would you like readers to perhaps reimagine our relationship to money?

[C]

Okay, I'll begin.

[D]

All right,

[C]

so I guess the last chapter is sort of perhaps the most speculative chapter of the lot. We are asking, how does money's rule over social life actually end? And, you know, I guess there are two answers people give. One is that it never ends. You know, in fact, everything gets monetized. Everything becomes, you know, a money economy that's, you know, this very wonderful economist in many other ways, Branko Milanovic has this book called Capitalism Alone, where he imagines families charging each other for child care, for sharing, that kind of thing. So everything becomes monetized. We think that that's A mistake because, you know, doing that really, that really depends on institutions functioning in different ways. And there's the other way where, you know, I guess the old, old Marxian theories and so on, saying that, you know, there are internal contradictions, falling profit rates, and so, you know, your capitalism ends, that we don't think that that works either. Right. I think what we, we would like to say is that money's role is transformative. It's essential, but it's not permanent. I think that's the key part. Right. We'd like to think of it as a solvent that dissolves old, you know, social relationships. And, you know, we use this line from the manifest. Everyone knows it, you know, about capitalism drowning everything in callous cash payment. But we also think there's a part that Marx and Engels underplayed, which is that it's a catalyst that helps build sort of new, larger, more complex forms of cooperation. And once these new forms exist, they don't necessarily need money to keep running. For example, early corporations, they kind of experimented with internal departments which fought against each other with, you know, like internal markets and abandoned in favor of sort of hierarchical authority as the organization matured. Because that was better. Money sort of got people there, but wasn't needed to stay there. Right. So our kind of hope is that we're able to see an economy which grows in this particular way and where the rule of money doesn't hold as much as it used to.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, to put it another way, we would like to imagine a world that is less organized by money, where we've freed ourselves and it doesn't. It's not an all or nothing thing, but increasingly from the rule of money. So what does that mean? Concretely? We like public libraries. Lots of other public services that are currently private could be organized by libraries. We like free public K to 12 education. We could have higher education that's free and universal. In the same way healthcare can be decommodified. It can be something that everybody gets as a human being and not something you have to, to purchase, you know, all sorts. Housing can be decommodified. We can have various forms of social housing where people's right to housing is not something that they purchase on the market. So this is a vision I think we share with a lot of people, probably most people who read the book. Not everybody reads the book because it's been actually nice to see people coming from rather different perspectives who've also found the book interesting and useful. But I think probably most of our readers but the thing we want to add to that is, is a couple of things. First of all, sort of two complementary things. First of all, to think more carefully about what money is actually doing in the world that we live in. And I think one thing that it's doing again is allowing promises between strangers. It's allowing coordination that couldn't otherwise take place. And I do think it's important to see that positive productive role of money and finance as a step towards building a different kind of world. That there is a genuine problem of coordination between people, that finance in many cases actually does solve, that there isn't a sort of spontaneous form of pre capitalist cooperation that can meet our real material needs and solve our collective problems in the way that the kind of larger scale cooperation that's been created in large part through finance can. And that also in many cases, honestly, we would like to be strangers. We don't, we, we don't want to have an intimate relationship with everybody that we have to interact with in the world. And money is a wonderful device if you want to go into the bookstore and buy just this book, because that's the book you want. You don't have to have a long conversation with the clerk and accept their point of view about what book you should be getting Instead. A lot of times that's actually what we want. So the facilitating cooperation between strangers who don't owe anything to each other except this one specific thing is actually a desirable thing in a lot of cases. So we understand that aspect of what money is doing better. But I think then we can also see that the problem of transcending money in the many cases where we don't want money to be structuring our lives is in some ways easier than people think. Because we have a vision of the world that we've been pushed on us. And many people who are again, who wouldn't think of themselves as being believing in economics nonetheless sort of believe this, that we live in a world that's organized by markets, it's organized by money payments, it's organized by the pursuit of profit. And our argument is that's much less true than people think. We cut a lot from this book and unfortunately one of the long chapters that we cut was on the corporation. But one of the sort of basic points that we make there is internally corporations are not organized as markets. Internally corporations are command economies. So the basic organization of production in the world we already live in is not really based in most ways on market exchange and the pursuit of profit. That's an extremely important Moment, but the concrete decisions about who is going to go where and perform what tasks and how materials are going to get from this place to that place. These things are planned already. It's not a matter of creating a new system of planning. It's about kind of democratizing or even just bringing into the visible daylight the kinds of planning that already take place. And that actually historically this is something that has expanded over time. We do have markets extending into new areas. But the analogy we use is like a forest fire, like a catalyst of a chemical reaction. You have a leading edge where money is breaking up. Old forms of local coordination, old kinds of relationships. But then that's just the starting point for those sort of freed up human beings. It's a very disruptive process. It's a process that people experience in many ways as, as a terrible intrusion onto their lives. But it doesn't stop there. People aren't left as these isolated monads, new forms of relationships come into existence, larger scale cooperation that don't depend on money. So in some sense this is a self limiting process. And I think here, I think this is the vision, I would say, of both Marx and Keynes. Keynes talks a lot in his writings from the twenties about the tendency of corporations to socialize themselves. He says at one point, I agree completely with the socialists in terms of their aims. Where I disagree with them is they fail to see the significance of what is already happening on the ground. The idea that forms of non monetary coordination, production carried out for use rather than for profit, is already gaining ground. Well, Keynes, I think imagine this is a smoother process than it actually was. And another thing we talk about in this excise corporations chapter that hopefully we will return to at some point is the conscious effort to roll that back by things like the shareholder revolution in the 1980s. But nonetheless the underlying tendency is there. And Marx also, if you read the penultimate chapter of Capital, he says the transition to socialism will be infinitely less violent than the transition from feudalism to capitalism. And why? Because so much of production has already been socialized. We already have large scale production that's organized in non commodified ways. We just have a few, you know, property owners sitting at the very top of the system. But private property has already been abolished throughout most of most of the system already. So I think again this, this sort of vision that the actual tendency towards a more planned, consciously organized economy is already out there. And we don't see it in part because of the kinds of illusions that we were just talking about in terms of this notion of the real economy, these illusions that markets are much more. More pervasive and ubiquitous and important than they actually are.

[C]

So, yeah, I mean, I just want to put a slight gloss on that in the sense that people, you know, we've been criticizing rightly, for maybe being a little bit too sanguine about this. It doesn't mean that this will be easy. This transition is easy or automatic. Right. There's obviously elite interest in keeping money's rule intact. But I think what we're trying to do is maybe move one element which keeps the world at this, which is our own attachment to thinking about the world in this way that everything, as Josh was saying, everything's organized through money and markets, when in fact we fail to see all the kinds of ways in which it hasn't. It isn't, and which gives us great value. So I think that that's a very central element. And I mean, we end this book, I think, know, sort of without a how to guide. We can't obviously, you know, have that notion. But we do want to. We have this other metaphor of, of Prospect Park. Right. That, you know, again, you're talking about writing in, in, in New York, you know, where you have this place which is kind of socialized. Our kids played, everyone plays there. It belongs to us and to everybody else. And there's no need to have money through it. Of obviously there's some money payments behind, but really money's logic is already partly diminished in so many aspects of our lives. I think that would be what I would add as gloss.

[E]

Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for your time today. This was a wonderful discussion. Before I let you go, it sounds like there's a chapter writing around out there on corporations. Anything else that you're trying to put together for our listeners?

[D]

Well, we had another chapter on the history of thought around money and credit, which I would really love to come back to and do something with at some point. And then the other thing that's really not present in this book, and that one really, if one were going to continue this project, it would have to come back to at some point is the international dimension of all this. Because we don't live in a world of money. We live in a world of many monies. And we talk about this a little bit in the debt chapter. But there's really important ways in which the international monetary system does the same things we're talking about here. On the one hand, creates forms of cooperation or an international division of labor, but also structures that shapes that in a way that is far from neutral and that really becomes a vehicle for power and for coercion and violence. And then of course, there's simply the intellectual complexities that come with things like exchange rates and multiple denominations for contracts and so on. So in a world where we had world enough in time, I think that would be something we would have to come back to.

[E]

So once again, my thanks for your time today. Once again, my guests today have been J.W. mason and Arjun Jayadev, the authors of Against Money from the University of Chicago Press. My name is Tom Disena and you are listening to the New Books Network.

[B]

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