The Monetary Lens: The Past, Present and Future of Humanity Through the Architecture of Money, Part III

Strange Bedfellows and the Return of Gravity Part I traced the long competition among monetary media, in which more integral monetary forms reliably defeated less integral ones across millennia of civilizational encounters, culminating in the gold standard of the nineteenth century. Part II examined how that standard was dismantled by political force rather than outcompeted … Continue reading The Monetary Lens: The Past, Present and Future of Humanity Through the Architecture of Money, Part III

The Monetary Lens: The Past, Present and Future of Humanity Through the Architecture of Money, Part I

The Natural Selection of Money There is a familiar way of narrating history. It features oppressors and victims, conquerors and the conquered, and it assigns moral valence to deeds and outcomes. This framework is not wrong — power has been wielded cruelly, and the suffering caused has been real. But it is incomplete in a … Continue reading The Monetary Lens: The Past, Present and Future of Humanity Through the Architecture of Money, Part I