Volume II: History — book coverTHE ECONOMY HUBIIVOLUME TWOHistoryExchange and its institutions,from barter to the attention market.

Volume II

History

Exchange and its institutions, from barter to the attention market.

Available

History follows the institutions that carry economic life: money, banks, sovereign debt, the corporation, the stock market, the credit score, and the markets that grew up around finance and attention. Each chapter takes one of them and asks where it came from and what it was built to do.

The volume is complete, and every chapter is available below. Every concept is treated here once, and the other volumes point back rather than restate.

Contents

  1. Did money really replace barter?
  2. Where does new money actually come from?
  3. Why does every country have a central bank, and why do they all aim at 2% inflation rather than zero?
  4. Who is the national debt actually owed to, and how is it unlike a household’s?
  5. Is the corporation a technology?
  6. Why do stock markets exist?
  7. How did trust become a number?
  8. What does a bigger financial sector buy an economy?
  9. How did attention become a product?