Money The True Story Of A Made-up Thing Pdf Download

Goldstein is an executive producer at the audio production company Pushkin Industries, where he hosts the business and tech podcast, What's Your Problem? Prior to that, he spent 10 years as the co-host of the NPR program, Planet Money. His 2020 book, Money: The True Story of a Made Up Thing, traces the history and meaning of money, including the role of the Federal Reserve in regulating the U.S. economy.

I came to thinking about money pretty late in my life. I was an English major in college and a newspaper reporter. And it wasn't really until I got to Planet Money right after the financial crisis, that I really started studying money, thinking about money. ... I hadn't really thought about it, but it seemed like water or something. It just seemed like something that exists in the world and is subject to the laws of physics. And what I learned, what I realized as I started learning more about it, studying it is that is not true at all. Money doesn't exist in the world until people invent it. That is the fundamental idea of the made up thing. And moreover, people didn't just invent money once. People, we, have kept reinventing money and reinventing money in different ways with different rules. And all of those rules are really interesting and have interesting sort of social context and social consequences.

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By the time paper money shows up, coins have been around for well over 1,000 years. Paper money first shows up in China around 1000 A.D. and it shows up in a very particular place. It shows up in Sichuan province, and in Sichuan province, they used iron coins for money. In most of China, they used bronze coins, but in Sichuan they used a lot of iron. And this is the era when the value of a coin is based on the value of the metal it contains. In Europe they're using silver coins and gold coins, which are obviously worth a lot, Bronze is worth a fair bit. Iron then, as is now, is not worth very much. So you needed a lot of iron coins to buy anything you needed. For example, a pound and a half of iron coins to buy a pound of salt. I think of it like if you had to go to the grocery store and you could only use pennies. It's just a terrible thing to use for money.

So some merchant in Sichuan has this idea where he tells his customers, 'Look, it's terrible having to carry around all these iron coins. I'll tell you what let's do. You leave a bunch of your iron coins with me, leave, say 1,000 iron coins with me, and I'll write you a receipt like a claim check. This piece of paper is good for 1,000 iron coins at my shop,' and people start doing that and then when they want to buy something, instead of going back to get the 1,000 coins from the shop, they just give that claim check, that IOU, to the person they're buying from, and that piece of paper becomes money and everybody loves it. It's a great idea. The government sees that happening. The government soon takes over the business of printing paper money and it comes into the world.

There is this amazing moment in U.S. history that kind of peaks in the 1840s or so where there are thousands of different kinds of paper money. ... There was no central bank. There weren't even any national banks. There were lots of little banks given charters by their states, by the states they were in. In a lot of states, any bank that followed a few rules could print its own paper money. And if you can print paper money, why wouldn't you? And so there was this incredible proliferation of paper money. ... The idea was you could bring your paper dollars to the bank that issued them and redeem them for gold or silver whenever you wanted.

The cohost of the popular NPR podcast Planet Money provides a well-researched, entertaining, somewhat irreverent look at how money is a made-up thing that has evolved over time to suit humanity's changing needs.

At the heart of the story are the fringe thinkers and world leaders who reimagined money. Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor, created paper money backed by nothing, centuries before it appeared in the West. John Law, a professional gambler and convicted murderer, brought modern money to France (and destroyed the country's economy). The cypherpunks, a group of radical libertarian computer programmers, paved the way for bitcoin.

One thing they all realized: What counts as money (and what doesn't) is the result of choices we make, and those choices have a profound effect on who gets more stuff and who gets less, who gets to take risks when times are good, and who gets screwed when things go bad.

Lively, accessible, and full of interesting details (like the 43-pound copper coins that 17th-century Swedes carried strapped to their backs), Money is the story of the choices that gave us money as we know it today.

In Money: the True Story of a Made-Up Thing, journalist and podcaster Jacob Goldstein charts the history of a commodity, exploring its origins and ubiquity before looking at a potentially radical future. Money works, he points out, because we all agree to believe in it. In the future, however, we might be prepared to look at money in a very different way.

For Kelton and her colleagues, the implications were huge. They shouted from the rooftops that we could worry about deficits much less, and much less often. With this abundance, they said, the government could do much more. Perhaps most important, they argued, the government could and should offer a job to any American who wanted one. If inflation starts to rise, the government can cool things off by raising taxes to take money out of the system.

But no politician really seemed to go all the way with MMT. That would mean not only saying the government should spend a lot more money, it would mean saying that if too much spending does create inflation, Congress should raise taxes to pull money out of the system and cool things down.

Money, a made-up thing that holds immense power and influence over our lives, is a complex and ever-evolving concept. From its humble origins in bartering to the rise of digital currencies, the history of money is a testament to human ingenuity and societal progress. As we navigate the intricate world of money, let us remember that its true value lies not in the physical currency, but in how we choose to utilize it for the betterment of ourselves and society as a whole.

As it evolved, money became increasingly symbolic. Early paper money acted as an IOU and could always be exchanged for metallic coins of various values. In the late 13th century, however, the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan invented paper money that was not backed by anything. It was money because the emperor said it was money. People agreed. In the intervening centuries, money has conjured more fantastic leaps of faith with the invention of the stock market, centralized banking and, recently, cryptocurrencies.

The mine owner then gathered the unemployed miners and asked if they would go back to work, not for legal tender, but for this new currency. They agreed that any money was better than no money. The mine owner purchased food, clothing and household goods from warehouses that were already using the Wra currency. The miners, now back digging coal, used their wages to buy these goods from the mine owner. Soon, other businesses in town wanted to use the currency to benefit from the sudden influx of cash. Because the currency depreciated at 1% per month, everyone was eager to part with it and it circulated rapidly throughout the economy. Soon, in whole districts, the Wra currency replaced the Reichsmark, which alarmed the bigger banks and the government. Finally, the Reichsbank ended the experiment by banning the currency.

Roman Mars:

In the early 1990s, a block of European countries embarked on a pretty wild experiment. They decided to get rid of all their money and replace it with a single common currency. Today, the Euro is something we take for granted, but 30 years ago, it was an extraordinary and risky idea. Twelve different countries, who spoke different languages, with different cultures and economies, all using the same paper money. Nobody was sure if it would work.

And so there you have. It may not be as cute and dramatic as panicked soldiers or desperate plantation cooks trying to silence a pack of dogs, but the true story of hushpuppies has more than enough twists and turns to be compelling.

The mass production of electric lights is its own story of money thanks to all the patents Edison was filing for. GE is the 33rd largest company in America for a reason. But as journalist Jacob Goldstein writes in Money: The True Story of a Made-up Thing, darkness reveals an even more informative history of money.

Thanks to affordable artificial light, medicine and public health were dramatically improved. Humans gained not only money and time, but positive health outcomes as well. Everything you see around you right now would likely not have been possible without artificial light.

Humans invented money from nothing, so why can't we live without it? And why does no one understand what it really is? In this lively tour through the centuries, Jacob Goldstein charts the story of this paradoxical commodity, exploring where money came from, why it matters and whether bitcoin will still exist in twenty years.Full of interesting stories and quirky facts - from the islanders who used huge stones as a means of exchange to the merits of universal basic income - this is an indispensable handbook for anyone curious about how money came to make the world go round.

Doescher: Milton Friedman talks about how inflation is political. How it doesn't just happen. These are choices made by government officials saying, "Okay, well we need to subsidize first time house buyers," kind of a thing. So they inject more in. Or, "We need to do whatever policy that we need to do. We can't cut unemployment. So we have to print more money to pay for that." These are political choices that they make and he referred to it, Milton Friedman referred to it as a disease. So my question to you is how do you cure this disease? e24fc04721