API Blog

In light of my recent episode at the Hospital I jotted this down 
As a philosopher it appeared a smart thing to do, living in the kingdom of my mind 
… Very thoughtful, analytical and deep …. Above all very dependable 

In the process of all these ‘doings’ that I am so engrossed by ..... Living by the calendar… like clockwork 
... I have been absent and missing 
Just standing by …. From actually living

In the 1950s, Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) was already a well-respected intellectual, with important contributions to monetary theory, the theory of business cycles, the methodology of economics, and capital theory. Furthermore,
he had already begun his contributions to epistemology, psychology, and moral and political philosophy that went well beyond the narrow confines of political economy.

THERE IS GENERAL AGREEMENT AMONG THE PUBLIC THAT
much of the infrastructure of the country is in need of improvement.  The  nation  feels  the  burden  of  overworked

There is a schism in the contemporary scholarship in law and economics. The field that decades ago helped revive the classical liberal tradition for law and lawyers continues to advance its project of studying legal incentives at the level of the individual—but it sidesteps monetary questions, approaching money only as a measuring rod to solve the barter problem.

In a recent article on “How to Pay for the Green New Deal”, professors Yeva Nersisyan and Randall Wray mimic Keynes’ 1940 “How to Pay for the War” in order to explain how the State theory of money, nowadays known as “Modern Monetary Theory,” or MMT, would pay for the interventionist proposals advanced under the pretense of environmental concerns that have come to be called the “Green New Deal” (GND).

Calls for the Federal Reserve (Fed) to consider a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) gained steam after the release last year of a white paper by Facebook and associates proposing to create a stablecoin called Libra. The Fed has obliged, having now partnered with MIT to research technological and policy implications of a CBDC. But, create a CBDC with what purpose?  

I closed my last post to the API blog by suggesting that an historical study of the social ontology of money should pay attention to the contexts in which theoreticians of money write. Think about the present day. It should be no surprise in the wake of the Financial Crisis of 2008, with the rise of cryptocurrencies, and in the midst of increasing wealth disparity that we see theoreticians wondering anew about the nature of money.

This is a brief passage from Jorge Luis Borges’s short story Zahir, which appeared

appeared in his collection Labyrinths:

… I turned back. The dark window told me from a distance that the shop was now

closed. In Belgrano Street I took a cab. Sleepless, obsessed, almost happy, I reflected

Ten Philosophical Mistakes: Basic Errors in Modern Thought – How They Came About, Their Consequences, and How to Avoid Them is the title of a book published 35 years ago by Mortimer J. Adler. Adler (1902–2001) was a well-known philosopher, educator, and popular author.

In my previous post to the API blog, I closed by raising some questions about the relevance of history to the study of money’s ontology. I drew a comparison with chess. If you want to understand what chess is and how to play it, you study its constitutive rules. Its history might be interesting, but it doesn’t seem like you need to know anything about this history to understand the ontology of the game. The same line of thinking would seem to apply to pieces of mechanical technology, such as an automobile engine.