If there exist no incentive or selective mechanisms that make cooperation in large groups incentive-compatible under realistic circumstances, functional social institutions will require a divergence between subjective preferences and objective payoffs – a “noble lie”. This implies the...

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...

The notion of savings in economics has a variety of mutually incompatible meanings. This paper goes through various interpretations of the term and argues that, for the sake of clarity, it can and should be replaced with more precise terms. In order to show the significance of doing so, the...

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...

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...

Since Bitcoin's invention in 2009, permissionless blockchain technology has gone through several waves of interest and development. While applications related to payments have advanced at breakneck speed, progress in financial and nonmonetary applications have largely failed to live up to...

This paper draws a distinction between ‘communitarian' and ‘rationalist' legal orders on the basis of the implied political strategy. We argue that the West's solution to the paradox of governance – that a government strong enough to protect rights cannot itself be restrained from...