A close reading of the text of Karl Marx's Capital in free video lectures by David Harvey. Start here

David Harvey is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), Director of The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, and author of numerous books. He has been teaching Karl Marx's Capital for over 40 years. Read his CV.

The aim of this report is to assess the state of Islamic banking in North Africa, examine why it has failed to take-off and consider its future potential and how it can contribute to the economic development. The rationale for Islamic finance is explained and its essential features described. Once shari’ah compliant financing facilities become available, funds that otherwise might not be available can be harnessed for both commercial and development projects. In addition to diversifying funding sources, Islamic finance can ensure better monitoring of how funds are deployed, improving the effectiveness of financial intermediation

The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. This project was completed as part of my thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. For more on my broader thesis work exploring the use of new media to make sense of a increasingly complex world, visit my website here. or email me at: jonathan.jarvis@gmail.com

Writing, direction, animation & sound by Jonathan Jarvis
Narration by John Levoff
Music by DJ Sol Rising

Article from 23rd Nov 2011 in wired magazine.

I am a professional singer, singing teacher and image consultant. In this blog, however, I talk about anything and everything that interests me - and there are a lot of things that interest me! I may or may not know anything about the things I blog about but I promise I will try to make them interesting for you too. Some of my blogs will be finance and banking related. I really DO know something about that as I spent 17 years of my life working at a senior level in banks and I have a Finance MBA. Everything else is just fun though.... I also blog about singing as singingiseasy and about image consultancy as francescoppolaimage.

This new Vox eBook presents a collection of essays by leading European and US economists that offer solutions to the crisis and proposals for medium- to long-term reforms to the regulatory framework in which financial institutions operate.

Speech by Andrew Haldane - executive director for financial stability- at the future of finance conference, London 2010

My name is Isaac Marmolejo and I currently study Economics and Political Science at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

This blog contains my opinions on philosophy, politics, government, and economics. I consider myself an Austrian economist and I regard Ludwig Mises and Ludwig Lachmann as my main influences in economics, but I do not limit myself into just reading, or being influenced by, Austrian Economists. I like the UCLA economic school of thought at the moment, more specifically I do like the writings of Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz, and I also like the economics of Frank Knight and, to a lesser extent, Ronald Coase. I am also interested in Post-Keynesian economic and while I love the theory, I am skeptical of it’s applications.

The number one MMT site on the web!

The crisis and the blogosphere have opened mainstream economics up to new attack

I start my meditation with a true story that will serve as a parable. On his 21st birthday, the nature writer Francis Thompson was presented by his father with a bill for all the expenses of his upbringing including the costs of his birth and delivery. Francis paid the bill, but he never spoke to his father again. This story is recounted in David Graeber’s Debt: The First Five Thousand Years, an excellent account of the history of money. Yet Graber titled his book  “debt”; did he just get it wrong, or did he uncover the essential nature of money?

LONDON – Europe is now haunted by the specter of debt. All European leaders quail before it. To exorcise the demon, they are putting their economies through the wringer.

It doesn’t seem to be helping. Their economies are still tumbling, and the debt continues to grow. The credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s has just downgraded the sovereign-debt ratings of nine eurozone countries, including France. The United Kingdom is likely to follow.

detailed and regularly updated blog by the mysterious Lord Keynes. Engaged (sometimes vociferously) in the MMT vs Austrian debate. An excellent resource on the theories of the origin of money.

When I began blogging about Modern Monetary Theory, I knew I risked alienating or at least annoying some of my Austrian Economics friends. The Austrians are a combative lot, used to fighting on the fringes of economic thought for what they see as their overlooked and important insights into the workings of the economy.

This is the English language version of the entry on ‘Money’ (‘Geld’) in the ‘Historisch Kritisch
Wörterbuch des Marxismus’, a comprehensive dictionary of Marxist terminology being produced as
an accompaniment to the Marx-Engels-Gesamt-Arbeite (Marx-Engels collected works), a
comprehensive critical edition of the works of Marx and Engels: Historisch Kritisch Wörterbuch
des Marxismus, Band 5: Gegenöffentlichkeit–Hegemonialapparat. Hamburg: Argument-Verlag,
ISBN 3-88619-435-

libcom.org is a resource for all people who wish to fight to improve their lives, their communities and their working conditions. We want to discuss, learn from successes and failures of the past and develop strategies to increase the power we, as ordinary people, have over our own lives.

Is the economy just in a recession or is their a bigger transformation afoot? Symbionomics is a media project about the new economy.

Just a couple of primates who figured that talking about math was a better use of their time than throwing their poo.  Podcasts will cover Mathematics Education, Evolutionary Game Theory, Mathematical Philosophy, Logic, Quantum nonsense, and anything else that seems even remotely tied to mathematics in science or society.

The personal site of Keith Hart. Also includes text of his book Memory Bank.

MMT: Taxes function to regulate aggregate demand, and not to raise revenue per se.

If this risks sounding metaphysical, so it should as the Euro faces its own existential crisis. A follow up to an earlier article on the perils of printing more and more money without the controlling influence of gold.

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

The reason I blog is because there are not many people writing about the topic I'd most like to engage people in. Specifically, it is about currencies as social DNA.

You see, corporations, institutions, governments, and nations are in fact living organisms. This is not a lofty metaphor, but literal truth.

They have a survival instinct to self-perpetuate, they breed new corporations and institutions, and even as the cells within them are replaced, their fundamental pattern continues. And we are their cells.

A fixture of online gaming, virtual currencies are moving into other digital markets and may break into the physical world. But will acceptance costs and regulatory concerns stymie their growth?

For more than a year, the American Bankers Association has pushed to limit the power and budget of the government’s newest consumer watchdog agency. The association, which includes the nation’s largest banks as members, is spending about $2 million every four months on lobbying, according to the Associated Press, most of it to limit the authority of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform act that created it.
But there’s at least one area where the ABA wants more regulation instead of less: FarmVille.
In a letter to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the bank association asked the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to consider regulating virtual currencies, like those used on FarmVille and Second Life.

Encouraged by the constructive spirit of the Occupy Wall Street movement, I have been keenly interested in the ways in which mental health professionals are helping us to understand the dynamics of our country's troubles.   For our country's problems not only involve the dynamics of economics, war, and politics, they involve the dynamics of human psychology.   We are lucky to have a number of Psychology Today bloggers weighing in on the subject.  Here's my two cents—a psychoanalyst's take on perhaps the most important issue in our day.

The great financial crisis has been marked by the failure of models both qualitative and quantitative. During the past two decades the United States has suffered the decline of manufacturing; the ballooning of the financial sector; that sector’s capture of the regulatory system; ceaseless stimulus whenever the economy has wavered; taxpayer-funded bailouts of large capitalist corporations; crony capitalism; private profits and public losses; the redemption of the rich and powerful by the poor and weak; companies that shorted stock for a living being legally protected from the shorting of their own stock; compromised yet unpunished ratings agencies; government policies that tried to cure insolvency by branding it as illiquidity; and, on the quantitative side, the widespread use of obviously poor quantitative security valuation models for the purpose of marketing.

I HAVE a solution for the problem of bankers who take risks that threaten the general public: Eliminate bonuses.
Related News
More than three years since the global financial crisis started, financial institutions are still blowing themselves up. The latest, MF Global, filed for bankruptcy protection last week after its chief executive, Jon S. Corzine, made risky investments in European bonds. So far, lenders and shareholders have been paying the price, not taxpayers. But it is only a matter of time before private risk-taking leads to another giant bailout like the ones the United States was forced to provide in 2008.

Can the psychology of scarce attention help explain why nobody saw the
financial crisis coming? And does cognitive science suggest that economists’
assumption of rational decisions is fundamentally flawed?
At a recent workshop at the Toulouse School of Economics, researchers
described the phenomenon of ‘inattentional blindness’, whereby people
looking at a scene fail to see the obvious. ‘Seeing’ is not a matter of looking
at an internal representation of the outside world, but rather depends on an
active cognitive process of paying attention to certain things. The structure
of the brain, whereby neurons at different levels compete with each other to
move up to higher levels of the brain, determines what we pay attention to.

We spend a lot of time thinking about money, one way or another. We think about how to get our hands on it, how to keep it safe and how to spend it. When we aren't asleep, there's a good chance that we're paying attention to money. But while money is never far from our thoughts, there is something curious about our relationship with it. For all that we use it to get through the day, most of us don't know what it is.

From last night’s GA [Occupy Wall Street "General Assembly"] meeting: “Work began today on a proposal trying to implement a currency for this movement. The Wall Street banks and their best customers, the multinational corporations control the source and flow of $$$$. This is an open invitation for you to join us in this process! We will be meeting at 11am every day, every week, until we’re done, at the red cube in the Southeast corner of Liberty Park.”

David Graeber and Robert Murphy have been debating the validity of the monetary regression theory.  They seem to be talking past one another.  Graeber is assuming that Austrian theory agrees with neo-classical theory in areas where it does not, and Murphy is assuming that Graeber is substantially more familiar with Austrian ideas than he seems to be.  To clear up the confusion, we need to take a step back and start at the beginning.


Like all theoretical sciences, economics is concerned with the identification of invariants.  Austrian theory and the more mainstream neo-classical theory agree on this much, but strongly disagree on methodology.

In this groundbreaking work, first published in 1976, Friedrich von Hayek argues that the government monopoly of money must be abolished to stop recurring bouts of inflation and deflation. Abolition is also the cure for the more deep-seated disease of the recurring waves of depression and unemployment attributed to 'capitalism'.

The first mathematically and scientifically stable currency standard,
That can be deployed by anyone, any time, any place and for any transaction. Bibocurrency shows that for currency stability, there is absolutely no mathematical or scientific reason for making currency scarce on the basis of past economic performance. just like there is no logical reason to limit the ability to score points in today’s tennis game on the basis of
How well or poorly one played yesterday.

Nearly £13 billion worth of bank notes were destroyed by the Bank of England last year, either by being burned or turned into compost.

a graphical representation of banking consolidation in the US since 1990

I work as a researcher at the Network Society research programme at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Finland. Since January 2010, I am a Visiting Scholar at the Interfaculty Initiative for Information Studies at the University of Tokyo.
In my research, I examine the social and economic impact of new information technologies, especially online games, social networks and mobile phones. My particular area of expertise is the materialistic side of digital environments: how people's behaviour is shaped by virtual currencies, game items and digital work.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) was created to broaden and accelerate the development of new economic thinking that can lead to solutions for the great challenges of the 21st century.

The havoc wrought by our recent global financial crisis has vividly demonstrated the deficiencies in our outdated current economic theories, and shown the need for new economic thinking – right now.

INET is supporting this fundamental shift in economic thinking through research funding, community building, and spreading the word about the need for change. We already are a global community of thousands of new economic thinkers, ranging from Nobel Prize winning economists to teachers and students who have emerged out from the shadows of prevailing economic thought, attracted by the promise of a free and open economic discourse.

Hector Rufrancos is an economist. His research interests are wide and varied. They mainly relate to labour economics, inequality, debt, financial economics.

michaeljhamilton has yet to write his blurb. He prefers it that way (for now). You’re invited to take his word for it that he knows his onions. Vegetables aside, you should view with considerable scepticism his ramblings about money, finance and geopolitics.

In the parish of Catahoula, Louisiana, during the 1840s Samuel Miller lived on his plantation with Patsy, his mulatto slave and sexual partner. In 1843, as Miller fell ill with dropsy, he sold the land and his slaves to Hugh Lucas, settling for nine promissory notes of $3,000 each, to be paid yearly. In April 1844, Miller, who was in declining health, left Louisiana with Patsy for St. Louis, Missouri. Before leaving, Miller gave the promissory notes to William Kirk, asking him to "keep them for Patsy's benefit" since "he intended to have her emancipated, and that he wanted the notes to enure to her benefit" (Cole v. Lucas, 2 La. Ann. 1946, 1948 (1847)).1 The previous year, Miller had granted Kirk power of attorney, authorizing him to emancipate Patsy

A collection of links to sources from Roy Davies at Exeter

Then join the growing movement of academics, economists, and social activists advocating the institution of an Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) paid to every citizen without exception.

It would overcome the “poverty trap”. Conventional welfare schemes and unemployment benefits create perverse incentives that breed dependency. (Getting a job doesn’t sound like such a good idea if it means your welfare checks dry up!) Replace conditional welfare with a UBI and more people will want to work.

The UBI increases the real freedom and bargaining power of the worst-off, who can then afford to walk away from exploitative employers. With the security of a UBI, workers can negotiate fairer wages and working conditions. (Note that this relieves the need for minimum wage laws and labour regulations. We can free up the market and hence boost the economy, counterbalancing the taxes needed to fund the UBI.)

We are a global network of culture jammers and creatives working to change the way information flows, the way corporations wield power, and the way meaning is produced in our society.

While not enough people recognize it, the real purpose of copyright law is to provide an incentive for the creation of more content. The government felt that there was a market failure, where not enough "content" would be produced without a limited monopoly, and thus, copyright was born. However, that happened back in the day when creating content wasn't easy. You pretty much had to go through a professional process. These days, thanks to new technologies, creating content is exceptionally easy -- and thus, a big part of the very basis for copyright no longer makes sense. We're drowning in content -- and it's not because of the "incentive" of copyright. There are plenty of incentives for creating content these days and very few have anything to do with copyright

By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object of eminent possession. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being. It is therefore regarded as an omnipotent being. Money is the procurer between man’s need and the object, between his life and his means of life.

How many copyright violations does an average user commit in a single day? John Tehranian, a law professor at the University of Utah, calculates in a new paper that he rings up $12.45 million in liability (PDF) over the course of an average day. The gap between what the law allows and what social norms permit is so great now that "we are, technically speaking, a nation of infringers."

Before I was in the writing industry, I was in the music industry.
While the economics of journalism have changed a lot over the past 20 years — witness the demise of Times Select and the potential demise of the Wall Street Journal‘s pay site — many other aspects of the writing industry haven’t changed much at all. If you are a non-fiction writer who writes books, for instance, the economic setup is pretty much the same as it was, in large part because book publishers still primarily offer hard copies of books to people who pay money for them.

The goal of musicFIRST is to ensure that struggling performers, local musicians, and well-known artists are compensated for their music when it is played both today and in the future. Of all the ways we listen to music, corporate radio is the only one that receives special treatment. Big radio has a free pass to play music – refusing to pay even a fraction of a penny to the performers that brought it to life. musicFIRST (Fairness in Radio Starting Today) is committed to making sure everyone, from up-and-coming artists to our favorites from years-ago, is guaranteed Fair Pay for Air Play.

ABSTRACT: This article is an attempt to sketch a philosophical view of money as a social phenomenon. I show that the way to understand the substance of money is to analyze its meaning as a medium of exchange in connection with its meaning as a purpose of exchange, thereby providing an investigation of its social value. This approach has been used by many of the great philosophers and economists of the past, but not today. Modern economics is a policy oriented theoretical discipline and concentrates its efforts on solving practical tasks. I hope to contribute a philosophical approach to economic research.

WARWICK, England (CNN) -- A mathematical formula calculated by a British university professor has found that time actually is money.

According to the equation, the average British minute is worth just over 10 pence (15 cents) to men and eight pence (12 cents) to women.

The formula is: V=(W((100-t)/100))/C, where V is the value of an hour, W is a person's hourly wage, t is the tax rate and C is the local cost of living.

The True Story Behind the Oscar® Winning Film "The Counterfeiters"
Critical praise for the definitive new book about Operation Bernhard, the greatest counterfeit in history.
"The compelling story of the Third Reich's attempt to wreck the British economy by flooding Europe with millions of counterfeit British pounds....thorough research and authoritative voice enable this fascinating chapter of history to hold interest. Gripping proof that indeed all is fair in love and war."
--Kirkus Reviews

The number of fake £1 coins in circulation has doubled in the last five years and now stands at more than 30 million, the BBC has learned.
This means one in every 50 pound coins in circulation is counterfeit.
Experts believe the fakes are being produced by organised criminal gangs using specialist machinery.

The pound in your pocket may be worth even less than you thought. According to an investigation by the BBC, as many as one in 20 £1 coins may be a forgery – double the Royal Mint's estimate.
Willings, a company that specialises in detecting counterfeit coins for the banks and vending-machine industry, said that as many as 73 million may be circulating. The recession provides an additional incentive for people to turn to less legitimate methods of making money and the scale of forgery appears to be rising. In the last quarter of 2008, the Royal Mint removed 270,000 fake pound coins from circulation, compared with 97,000 for the whole of 2007. The Royal Mint said: "We are concerned at the apparent upward trend."

The U.S. Secret Service -- the federal department that cracks down on counterfeit currency -- is getting fresh ammunition in its war against illicit desktop publishers.

At the request of the Secret Service, the U.S. Sentencing Commission -- the agency that sets punishment guidelines for federal criminals -- is proposing stiffer penalties for counterfeiters who create cash on demand with computers and printers.

Hayek's proposal calls for privately issued, competing fiat currencies. That is, Hayek proposes that individual firms issue pieces of paper that are not backed up by any production or consumption good. In a sense, Hayek wants to privatize central banking.

Police are warning the public of high-value scams involving forged banknotes, cheques and bank drafts as figures reveal a surge in cases.
As the credit crunch forces people to part with items such as cars, crooks are taking advantage by paying with forgeries.

Counterfeit Bills Showing Up In Greater Numbers

A GANG of criminals who set up a forgery factory in an 83-year-old's living room to produce millions of pounds in counterfeit notes were jailed for a total of 14 years yesterday.
Pensioner Dennis Hancox's suburban flat in Chiswick, west London, was used to "foil" fake Bank of England £20 notes using a £12,000 industrial toner machine – a sophisticated piece of equipment never before used by crooks.

Stephen J. Dubner is an author and journalist who lives in New York City.
Bio | Contact
Steven D. Levitt is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago.
Bio | Contact
Their book Freakonomics has sold 3 million copies worldwide. This blog, begun in 2005, is meant to keep the conversation going. Recurring guest bloggers include Ian Ayres, Daniel Hamermesh, Eric Morris, Sudhir Venkatesh, and Justin Wolfers. Annika Mengisen is the site editor.

Why Revolution always Boils Down to Evolution
by Glyn Davies
This paper was given as the Keynote Address at the First Consult Hyperion Digital Money Forum 7th-8th October 1997, London, Digital Money: New Era or Business as Usual?

Money is apparently undergoing a revolutionary change with the introduction of e-money. Glyn Davies considered the significance of this transformation in the light of earlier "revolutions", as outlined in his book, A History of Money from Ancient Times to the Present Day.

the idea of a social currency. its worked on the basis of the value of your social media connections. 

Episode 1 of Social Media Business: What is “the experience economy” – is it the next step on from agrarian, commodity, service…? How does value – and therefore money, currency – shift when people are more willing to pay for intangible experiences than physical goods? Can we monetize something in our minds? The first episode of my new podcast, Social Media Business, looks at revenue stream associated with providing your online community or social networks with a real world experience such as a meetup, conference or party.

I’ve started a new podcast called “Social Media Business” that will be a regular feature covering where the money is, in social networks. See end of post for more information! (RSS or iTunes)

Information, knowledge, and culture are central to human freedom and human development.
How they are produced and exchanged in our society critically affects the way we see the state of the world as it is and might be; who decides these questions; and how we, as societies and polities, come to understand what can and ought to be done.
For more than 150 years, modern complex democracies have depended in large measure on an industrial information economy for these basic functions.
In the past decade and a half, we have begun to see a radical change in the organization of information production.
Enabled by technological change, we are beginning to see a series of economic, social, and cultural adaptations that make possible a radical transformation of how we make the information environment we occupy as autonomous individuals, citizens, and members of cultural and social groups.
It seems passé today to speak of "the Internet revolution."
In some academic circles, it is positively naïve.
But it should not be.
The change brought about by the networked information environment is deep.
It is structural.
It goes to the very foundations of how liberal markets and liberal democracies have coevolved for almost two centuries.

excellent audio visual presentation on debt crisis

Whuffie is the ephemeral, reputation-based currency of Cory Doctorow's science fiction novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. This book describes a post-scarcity economy: All the necessities (and most of the luxuries) of life are free for the taking. A person's current Whuffie is instantly viewable to anyone, as everybody has a brain-implant giving them an interface with the Net.

We believe that everyone should be able to understand how the financial crisis came about, what it means for all of us, and what our options are for getting out of it. Unfortunately, the vast majority of all writing about the crisis - including this blog - assumes some familiarity with the world of mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and so on. You’ve probably heard dozens of journalists use these terms without explaining what they mean. If you’re confused, this page is for you. Over time, we will be adding more explanations and more links to external sources, so check back for updates. (Some of the explanations on this page are simplified and not 100% accurate; their goal is to explain the key concepts to a general audience.)

The Conscience of a Liberal

Here's the Economist rocking some hardcore 20th century thinking.

So what happens when every credit card company is exploiting every cognitive bias across markets? Simple: another credit meltdown, as nonpayment correlations spike.

Sound familiar? It should: it's the same systemic flaw in organization that is causing today's crisis.

The point is this. We cannot organize tomorrow's businesses - or economy - like yesterday's. What do I mean? Simple. How should we organize and manage how firms interact with consumers? The Economist thinks it's "creepy" but cool to trick consumers, because it's profitable.

Is it?

Over the past decade, we have built a country-sized economy online where the default price is zero -- nothing, nada, zip. Digital goods -- from music and video to Wikipedia -- can be produced and distributed at virtually no marginal cost, and so, by the laws of economics, price has gone the same way, to $0.00. For the Google Generation, the Internet is the land of the free.

Which is not to say companies can't make money from nothing. Gratis can be a good business. How? Pretty simple: The minority of customers who pay subsidize the majority who do not. Sometimes that's two different sets of customers, as in the traditional media model: A few advertisers pay for content so lots of consumers can get it cheap or free. The concept isn't new, but now that same model is powering everything from photo sharing to online bingo. The last decade has seen the extension of this "two-sided market" model far beyond media, and today it is the revenue engine for all of the biggest Web companies, from Facebook and MySpace to Google itself.

broadly libertarian and monetarist blog on the economy. detailed posts with many comments.

One of the prerequisites of wage labor, and one of the historic conditions for capital, is free labor and the exchange of free labor against money, in order to reproduce money and to convert it into values, in order to be consumed by money, not as use value for enjoyment, but as use value for money. Another prerequisite is the separation of free labor from the objective conditions of its realization — from the means and material of labor. This means above all that the workers must be separated from the land, which functions as his natural laboratory. This means the dissolution both of free petty landownership and of communal landed property, based on the oriental commune.

Capital - it's going up in smoke, right? That's what, for example, Meredith Whitney - the analyst who predicted the banking meltdown - argued recently: that trillions in capital has been destroyed by the ongoing macro crisis.

It's more accurate to say that what's being destroyed never really existed in the first place. If my car's a Ford - but I call it a Ferrari - capital hasn't been formed, and value hasn't been created. I've simply created a fiction - like those we belatedly discovered Wall St was peddling.

The macro crisis tells us in no uncertain terms that we've got to shed the stale economic logic of the 20th century. Economies are powered by capital. Whitney, Bernanke, and the bankers of the universe are right about one thing: we've got to recapitalize a starving economy. But they're getting the bigger picture wrong: to power a wave of new industrial revolutions, we've got to seed it with newer, more valuable kinds of capital entirely.

Recently, I was sent an analysis of Radiohead's In Rainbows pay-what-you-like venture and Nine Inch Nails' digital giveaway of their album The Slip – including an account of how they fared against Torrent websites such as Pirate Bay. It was written by Will Page, chief economist for MCPS-PRS, with the help of Eric Garland who runs BigChampagne – a company that measures legal and illegal downloading – so it was quite heavy reading.

A few weeks back, as I was having dinner with a media-industry colleague at a trendy restaurant in a trendy New York neighborhood, I realized that the music coming over the sound system was transporting me to another time -- specifically, 1986. As song after song by various "it" bands of the moment, such as Black Kids and the Virgins, played, it was as if we were listening to a time-warped or parallel-universe version of the "Pretty in Pink" soundtrack. Because really, the "it" sound of the moment would work seamlessly in just about any John Hughes movie circa the mid-'80s.

our mission:

to widen the scope of financial, economic and political information available to the professional investing public.
to skeptically examine and, where necessary, attack the flaccid institution that financial journalism has become.
to liberate oppressed knowledge.
to provide analysis uninhibited by political constraint.
to facilitate information's unending quest for freedom.

The autism of orthodoxy stems from its treatment of the human agent, who is mindless and
does not interact with other agents. The broad solution then is to develop a framework in
which agents carry knowledge and interact with other agents to use and create knowledge.
This is the essence of the new evolutionary economics (e.g. Loasby, Knowledge, Institutions
and Evolution in Economics, 1999). In The New Evolutionary Microeconomics, Potts (2000)
argues that all heterodox thought shares a common ontological foundation in the view that
the dynamics of evolving economic systems are in the space of connections. An economy
is a complex system of interactions, and the dynamics of an economic system involve
change in the connective structure of the system.

How many currencies does Germany have? More than one, it turns out. In an effort to boost their local economies, 22 regions in the country have introduced their own alternative tender -- but are they worth the paper they're printed on?

The era of transition that we are entering will be disruptive—but it may bring a world where markets are servants, not masters

Prospect has acquired a reputation as the most intelligent magazine of current affairs and cultural debate in Britain. Both challenging and entertaining, the magazine seeks to make complex ideas accessible and enjoyable by commissioning the best writers, editing them vigorously and packaging their work in a well designed and illustrated monthly.

IN RECENT years, consumers have become used to feasting on online freebies of all sorts: news, share quotes, music, e-mail and even speedy internet access. These days, however, dotcoms are not making news with yet more free offerings, but with lay-offs—and with announcements that they are to start charging for their services.” These words appeared in The Economist in April 2001, but they’re just as applicable today. During the dotcom boom, the idea got about that there could be such a thing as a free lunch, or at least free internet services. Firms sprang up to offer content and services online, in the hope that they would eventually be able to “monetise” the resulting millions of “eyeballs” by selling advertising. Things did not work out that way, though, and the result was the dotcom crash. Companies tried other business models, such as charging customers for access, but very few succeeded in getting people to pay up.