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But I wouldn’t be so sure. True, a new president who looked at the evidence and listened to the experts wouldn’t go down that path. But evidence and expertise have a well-known liberal bias.

The interesting question is what will happen to monetary policy if a Republican wins next year’s election. As best as I can tell, most economists believe that it’s all talk, that once in the White House someone like Mr. Rubio or even Mr. Cruz would return to Bush-style monetary pragmatism.

Financial markets seem to believe the same. At any rate, there’s no sign in current asset prices that investors see a significant chance of the catastrophe that would follow a return to gold.

this hard-money orthodoxy is relatively new. Republicans used to base their monetary recommendations on the ideas of Milton Friedman, who opposed Keynesian policies to fight depressions, but only because he thought easy money could do the job better, and who called on Japan to adopt the same strategy of “quantitative easing” that today’s Republicans denounce.

George W. Bush’s economists praised the “aggressive monetary policy” that, they declared, had helped the economy recover from the 2001 recession. And Mr. Bush appointed Ben Bernanke, who used to consider himself a Republican, to lead the Fed.

The idea that the Wall Street crash caused the depression has also gone out of favour in recent years.

As with the rise of protectionism, it seems that the Wall Street crash was a symptom of problems in the global economy, rather than the underlying cause of them.

Economic historians now focus on a different candidate to take the blame for the sudden economic collapse of the 1930s: the structure of the world financial system before 1929. In particular, the work of the economic historians such as Mr Eichengreen and Peter Temin has recently stressed the importance of the malfunctioning of the gold standard currency system as the cause of the Depression, as well as its severity.

This system came to a head when the global economy started what, at first, seemed to be a very ordinary business cycle downturn in the late-1920s. When the drop in global demand caused balance-of-payments crises in countries around the world due to gold outflows, they were forced to use fiscal and monetary means to deflate their economies to protect the fixed value of their currencies (they also resorted to tariffs).This amplified the recession into a depression.

According to some monetarist historians, the four waves of banking crises in the 1930-33 period that bankrupted half of America’s banks were caused by the Federal Reserve tightening monetary policy in response to gold outflows.

According to research by Mr Eichengreen, countries that escaped the gold standard and changed to floating exchange rates first, such as Britain in 1931 and America in 1933, tended to recover earlier and far faster. The critique of monetary policy as a conduit of Depression dates back to Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's "Monetary History of the United States", first published in 1963

Policy-makers have drawn some lessons from the 1930s. Unlike in the Depression, central banks in Britain and America avoided unnecessary monetary tightening. Instead, they slashed interest rates and used unconventional monetary stimulus such as quantitative easing in an effort to fend off deflation (a scourge of the Depression). The role of banking crises in turning a normal recession into a deep depression has also been recognised. Governments pulled out the stops to prevent the Lehman failure from generating a global financial meltdown, keenly aware of the role of financial contagion in the 1930s. 

lessons from the Great Depression for Europe's current problems may be more difficult to discern than one might assume. The euro zone is a fixed-exchange-rate system, with elements similar to those of the gold standard. But the political and economic constraints holding back policy-makers are different from those that prevailed in the 1930s. Economists now say that the higher level of financial integration in Europe today makes leaving the euro-zone a much riskier prospect than was leaving the gold standard was back in the 1930s. And the euro zone has a central bank that can print euros—something the gold-standard system lacked.

Perhaps economic historians can make a better contribution by ensuring the past is not abused in debates about modern-day crises. For instance, putting all the blame on Wall Street for the Great Depression—or on bankers in the current crisis—does not stand up to historical scrutiny. The responsibility may more properly lie in a complex combination of factors, like how global financial systems are structured. But this still needs be interpreted from modern day evidence rather than in over-simplistic “lessons” from the past

At one point Mr. Ryan got quite specific about his intellectual roots, declaring that he always goes back to “Francisco d’Anconia’s speech on money” — one of the interminable monologues in Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” — “when I think about monetary policy.” And that speech is a paean to the gold standard and a denunciation of money-printing as immoral.

Yes, Mr. Cruz portrays himself as an outsider, and has managed to make remarkably many personal enemies. But while his policy ideas are extreme, they reflect the same extremism that pervades the party’s elite. 629 Comments There are no moderates, or for that matter, sensible people, anywhere in this story.

In 2011, Mr. Bernanke, a staunch proponent of transparency as a tenet of monetary policy, gave the first scheduled news conference by a chairman in Fed history. His comments to reporters went beyond mere openness; he expressed remarkable candor and established, albeit tentatively, the basis for a regular rapport with the public.

By the late 1990s a vast majority of the central banks had begun to incorporate elements of inflation targeting. The aim is to shape the expectations around the most fundamental dynamic of market economies: the evolution of prices. The experiments relied on theories going back decades. As far back as the 1930s, the economists Knut Wicksell, Irving Fisher and John Maynard Keynes proposed that price behavior was based in large part on expectations.

A senior official of the European Central Bank, Benoît Coeuré, said in a speech last year that monetary stability was “a cornerstone of the social contract.” Fed officials who remember the high inflation of the 1970s, brought under control by Mr. Greenspan’s predecessor, Paul A. Volcker, pretty much agree.

Why can’t Europeans enjoy the conveniences of a common currency?Two reasons. First, unlike Europe, the United States has a fiscal union in which prosperous regions of the country subsidize less prosperous ones. Second, the United States has fewer barriers to labor mobility than Europe. In the United States, when an economic downturn affects one region, residents can pack up and find jobs elsewhere. In Europe, differences in language and culture make that response less likely.

As a result, Mr. Friedman and Mr. Feldstein contended that the nations of Europe needed a policy tool to deal with national recessions. That tool was a national monetary policy coupled with flexible exchange rates. Rather than heed their counsel, however, Europe adopted a common currency for much of the Continent and threw national monetary policy into the trash bin of history.

The motive was more political than economic. Europeans believed that their continent, once united with a common market and currency, would provide a better counterweight to American hegemony in world affairs. They also hoped that a united Europe in the 21st century would damp down the nationalist sentiments that led to two world wars in the 20th.

Flash-forward to today. Greece finds itself overwhelmed by its accumulated debts. To be sure, it bears primary responsibility. The Greek government borrowed too much, and for years it hid its fiscal problems from its creditors. Once the truth came to light, a large dose of austerity was the only course left. The result was an economic downturn with a quarter of the Greek labor force now unemployed. Continue reading the main story 136 Comments Making matters worse, however, was the common currency. In an earlier era, Greece could have devalued the drachma, making its exports more competitive on world markets. Easy monetary policy would have offset some of the pain from tight fiscal policy. Mr. Friedman and Mr. Feldstein were right: The euro has turned into an economic liability that has exacerbated political tensions. For this, the European elites who pushed for the currency union bear some responsibility

“Governments have lost their fear of debt,” says Karen Ward, chief market strategist for EMEA at JPMorgan Chase’s asset-management arm. “They were terribly worried about bond markets and investors punishing them. What they saw last year was record high levels of debt at record low levels of interest rates.”

Central banks that had struggled for a decade to boost inflation using monetary tools found that fiscal tools were far more powerful. Government spending does far more for inflation than quantitative easing, it turns out, and central-bank calls for more fiscal action to boost the economy are more likely to be accepted next time deflation looms.

the MMT critique of the status quo, where the central bank modulates the number of unemployed people to control inflation, hit a nerve. The Federal Reserve shifted in favor of running the economy hot to reduce inequality. Employment has become more important in its thinking, and its move to a target of average inflation means it is willing to accept higher inflation than previously.

Other MMT ideas have infiltrated their way into the heart of the establishment, but the idea that the government should raise taxes on ordinary Americans, let alone that it should do so to control inflation, is exceptionally unlikely to be accepted.

In the next downturn it is going to be very difficult for governments to resist calls to provide huge support, now that it has been shown that bond markets don’t care.

That should mean recessions are shallower, debt is higher, the government is more involved in the economy and, assuming the Fed doesn’t accept that its tools are useless, interest rates are higher on average than in the past

Under full-blown MMT, payfors would be ditched for a mix of micro-planning of the resources needed for new projects, and an assessment of the overall impact on the economy—and potentially, higher taxes.

MMT is both right and wildly optimistic that higher taxes could slow an overheated economy and bring down inflation. The flip side of last year’s demonstration of the power of fiscal policy is that higher taxes can suck demand out of the economy much more effectively than the Fed’s interest-rate tools.

Still, the Fed is (rightly) worried about inflation and is tweaking its tools to try to influence the economy with monetary policy, something MMTers think just doesn’t work. As Mr. Wray points out, it wasn’t when trillions in benefit checks landed in bank accounts last year that inflation went up; prices went up when the recipients went out and spent the money. “Money doesn’t cause inflation,” Mr. Wray argues, a view that infuriates monetarist economists. “Spending causes inflation.”

That is a bad thing, because MMT’s ideas encourage more spending, and if that results in more inflation in the longer run, MMT is right that higher taxes are the simplest way to reduce demand and prevent a surge in prices.

Then, in March 2022, the Fed changed course, first tightening the money supply by increasing the federal-funds rate and then introducing quantitative tightening. Between July 2022 and August 2023, the M2 supply contracted by 3.9%, the most extreme contraction since 1933.

The first factor contributing to the contraction of the money supply is the Fed’s quantitative tightening

Quantitative tightening has already produced a dramatic selloff in the bond market. But just as they did ahead of the September 2019 crunch in the repurchase-agreement market, Fed officials keep repeating their mistaken mantras that quantitative tightening can operate “in the background” and “on autopilot,” implying minimal market effect

But basic balance-sheet accounting shows that unless commercial banks are creating enough “new money” through their lending activity to offset the Fed’s balance-sheet shrinkage, quantitative tightening has a contractionary effect on the money supply.

The second factor contributing to shrinking M2 is the decreased availability of commercial bank credit—the sum of loans and bank holdings of securities. With the steep rise in rates, bank lending has slowed, and banks have been selling off securities.

This brings us to the stock-market crash of 1987. In that year the key 10-year bond yield rose steeply from January onward (from 7% in January to 10% by Black Monday in October) and the money supply slowed sharply.

In 1987 growth of M2 declined by almost half, from 9.7% year-on-year in January to 4.9% in September, while M3—no longer published by the Fed—slowed from 8.7% to 3.6% over the same period

A bond-market crunch and monetary squeeze together led to a sudden, drastic reassessment of equity-market valuations. The same could happen today, particularly since the current jump in bond yields and monetary squeeze are much more pronounced than in 1987.

So far, only the remaining excess money the Fed created between 2020 and 2021—the cumulative excess savings from the Covid handouts—has been keeping businesses hiring and consumers spending. The effects of the excess money are still giving the economy a lift, but that extra fuel is almost exhausted. When it dries up, the economy will run on fumes.

In all of this, an appreciation for time lags is critical. The Fed ignored the huge acceleration in the quantity of money and thus failed to anticipate the ensuing inflation. When inflation struck in early 2021, Fed officials tried to argue it was “transitory,” caused by supply-chain disruptions.

The Fed continues to ignore the money supply, and we now face the opposite problem. The money supply has been contracting for 18 months, and soon, after the overhanging extra money from 2020-21 has been used up, spending will plunge and inflation will fall, not simply to 2%, but below—and perhaps even into deflation in 2025.

Since Fed officials pay no attention to either monetary aggregates or their credit counterparts, they are overlooking these signals

Monetary analysis tells a very different story than the measures the Fed follows. The first effect of a monetary contraction is higher market interest rates for a brief period. Then comes an economic slump. The economy goes into recession and inflation falls. This results in a second and more permanent effect of subpar money growth, namely lower interest rates and a weaker currency.

at the street level in Greece, there is little debate anymore, if there ever was. The images of suffering here have not been that different from the grainy black and white photos of the United States in the 1930s. Suicides have shot up. Cars sit abandoned in the streets. People sift garbage looking for food.

But the failures have been striking, leaving millions of Greeks baffled and angry as their lives disintegrated while the elite often escaped, untaxed and unbothered,

Even if more recent optimistic projections are to be believed, and a steady rate of growth can be expected, it would take Greece perhaps 15 years to regain the jobs it has lost,

Now, Greece is no longer spending far more than it receives, when debt payments are excluded, its officials say. It has remained in the European Union, and can again borrow in the bond markets, t

“The mix was not right,” Mr. Liargovas said of the austerity measures. “It was a cure that has almost killed the patient.”

In a wide-ranging review of the Greece program last year, the I.M.F. found that many of its predictions had failed. There was a sharp fall in imports, but little gain in exports. Public debt overshot original predictions. Predicted revenues from selling public assets were way off. The banking system, perceived as relatively sound at the beginning of the bailout, began having problems as the economy soured.

the I.M.F. concluded that many errors had been made, including too much emphasis on raising taxes instead of cutting expenses. In addition, the monetary fund overestimated the ability of the government to deliver the changes it was demanding — because they were proving politically unpopular and because Greek institutions were far weaker that anyone understood.

Administering these changes would have been difficult in a country with sound institutions, but Greece’s were filled with poorly qualified political appointees and were undergoing hiring freezes and budget cuts even as they were supposed to be managing a huge overhaul: a large assortment of new taxes, the opening of closed professions and the sale of state-owned assets.

“If the world is to cope with climate change, policymakers will need to pull every lever at their disposal,” he writes. “Faced with this threat, to indulge in the idea that central banks, as key agencies of the state, can limit themselves to worrying about financial stability … is its own form of denial.”

In England, by contrast, Carney has convened 33 central banks to investigate how to “green the financial system.” According to Axios, every powerful central bank is working with him—except for Banco do Brasil and the Fed.

Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, in 2015, in a speech which has subsequently received massive coverage—and he is a man, after all, absolutely of the global financial establishment—coined the idea of a climate Minsky moment. [Editor’s note: A Minsky moment is when an asset’s price suddenly collapses after a long period of growth.]

We would need [fossil-fuel assets] to be on the balance sheet of actors who were under huge pressure in a fire-sale situation and who couldn’t deal with a sudden revaluation. We would need an entire network of causation to be there, which is what produced the unique crisis of 2007 to 2008.

So imagine that we stay on our current path, and we’re headed toward 3 or 4 degrees’ [Celsius] temperature change. And then imagine some of the nonlinearities kick in, which the climate scientists tell us about, and we face a Fukushima-style event.

What happens next? You then get nervous democratic politicians—and not necessarily those who are known for their populism, but just nervous democratic politicians—suddenly deciding that we have to stop doing one or another part of our carbon-based economy. It has to stop, and it has to stop immediately. And then you get big shocks. Then you get sudden revaluations.

In other words, the success of the delaying tactics of the carbon lobby create a situation in which we’re then faced with the possibility of a sudden regulatory shock

“One-third of equity and fixed income assets issued in global financial markets can be classified as belonging to the natural resource and extraction sectors, as well as carbon-intensive power utilities, chemicals, construction, and industrial goods firms.”

This is not simply a zero-sum game; this is a structural transformation that has many very attractive properties. There’s loads of excellent jobs that could be created in this kind of transition.There’s no reason why, even by conventional GDP-type metrics, it need even be associated with the kind of feel-bad factor of slow GDP growth. Then [you could] also link it to a revival of social democracy for the United States. From a progressive political point of view, that’s obviously extremely attractive.

Germany is far, far more exposed. A huge slice of their economy is basically all about internal combustion engines, and so that number includes all of those stocks, for sure.

If we saw a huge shock to, say, European equity [exchange-traded funds], which were heavily in German automotive, that’s the sort of trigger that we might be looking at.

Whether that will, in fact, ease the formation of majorities in Congress is another question. Because, after all, it does somehow have to get through the Senate, you know.

there’s also a deeper view: that climate change is the situation within which all other politics will happen for the next several generations, at least.

ever since the 1990s that’s been the logjam on any serious American commitment.

When you look at a third of securities tied up in the carbon economy and the evidence for decoupling GDP growth from carbon emissions maybe not being as strong as we’d like, do you think the change that needs to happen is realistic?

Tooze: Realistic? No. I mean, depends what you mean by realism. The scale of the challenge requires a boldness of action for which there is no precedent. That’s the only good purpose that the war analogies serve

Meyer: In your piece, you write: “Those in the United States who call for a Green New Deal or a Green Marshall Plan are, if anything, understating the scale of what is needed.”

Do you think climate action needs to be larger than, say, the U.S. mobilization for World War II?

Tooze: Well, less large in absolute terms. Because even the U.S. was spending almost 40 percent of GDP on World War II. And if you’re the Soviet Union, you’re spending 55 to 60 percent in 1940. We don’t need to do anything like that. It needs to be much bigger than the New Deal, which in fiscal-policy terms was really quite trivial.

Crucially, what makes it totally unlike the war is that there’s no happy end. There’s no moment where you win and then everything goes back to the way it was before, but just better. That’s a misunderstanding

This isn’t crash dieting; this is a permanent change in lifestyle, and we need to love that and we need to live it and we need to own it and we need to reconcile ourselves to the fact that this is for us and for all subsequent generations of humans.

furthermore—and much more fundamentally than any of those things—this isn’t really about America. I mean, America can be an obstacle and get in the way, but none of the really hard choices needs to be made by Americ

all the really hard choices need to be made by people like China and India and Pakistan and Bangladesh and Indonesia

You don’t have that very much in Germany. There isn’t anyone in Germany saying, “Which bit of mid-20th-century history is this most like?,” mercifully. The one analogy that has popped up in Germany is reunification, which I actually think is quite a good one, because that’s still an ongoing problem

in the American case, it would be civil rights and Reconstruction, which isn’t a particularly optimistic comparison to draw. It’s an ongoing problem, it’s a deep historic problem, it only happened once, we still haven’t fixed it, and we’re not at peace.

Meyer: There’s a kind of shallow view of climate change: that it is something we need to avert or stop. And that’s somewhat true

It isn’t just the oil and gas majors, because they wouldn’t get you to 30 percent. Exxon isn’t big enough to get you to that kind of percentage. It’s Exxon, and [the major automakers] Daimler and BMW, and the entire carbon-exposed complex.

like Reconstruction or the civil-rights movement, it needs to be something that people take on like a moral commitment, in the same way they take on genocide prevention as a moral commitment

problems that we thought we’d fixed, like the Green Revolution and the feeding of the world population, for instance—totally not obvious that those fixes cope with the next 20 years of what’s ahead of us. The food problem that was such an oppressive issue globally in the 1970s may resurge in an absolutely dramatic way.

Meyer: Given all that, if Jerome Powell decided that he wanted to intervene on the side of climate action, what could he do? What could the Fed do?

Tooze: What I think the Fed should announce is that it enthusiastically supports the idea of a bipartisan infrastructure push focused on the American electrical network, first and foremost, so that we can actually hook up the renewable-generating capacity—which is now eminently, you know, realistic in economic terms. Setting a backstop to a a fiscal-side-led investment push is the obvious thing.

It is indeed a highly appropriate response to an environment of extremely low interest rates, and [former Treasury Secretary] Larry Summers & Co. would argue that it might help, as it were, to suck us out of the state of secular stagnation that we’re in.

another avenue to go down—for the Fed to take a role in helping develop a classification of green bonds, of green financing, with a view also to rolling out comprehensive demands for disclosure on the part of American firms, for climate risks to be fully declared on balance sheets, and for due recognition to be given to firms that are in the business of proactively preparing themselves for decarbonization.

You could, for instance, declare that the Fed views with disfavor the role of several large American banks in continuing to fund coal investment. Some of the carbon-tracking NGOs have done very good work showing and exposing the way in which some of the largest, the most reputable American banks are still in the business of lending to Big Coal. Banking regulation could be tweaked in a way that would produce a tilt against that.

the classic role of the Fed is to support government-issued debt. Insofar as the Green New Deal is a government-issued business, the Fed has just an absolutely historical warrant for supporting fiscal action.

with regards to the broader economy, the entire federal-government apparatus essentially stood behind the spread of home ownership in the United States and the promotion of suburbanization through the credit system. And kind of what we need is a Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the energy transition.

if the question is, Is there historical warrant for the financial agencies of government in the United States biasing the property structure in the economy in a certain way?, the answer is emphatically yes—all the way down to the grotesque role of the New Deal financial apparatus in enshrining the racial segregation of the American urban space, with massive effects from the 1930s onward.

The idea of neutrality should not even be allowed in the room in this argument. It’s a question of where we want to be biased. If you look at QE, especially in the U.K. and the EU, it was effectively fossil-biased.

monetary policy is not neutral with regards to the environment. There’s no safe space here. The only question is whether you’re going to lead in the right way

Meyer: Last question. With any of this, is there a role for interested Americans to play if they are not particularly tied to the financial- or monetary-policy elite?

Tooze: Support your congressperson in doing exactly what AOC did in the hearings with Powell a couple of weeks ago

[Editor’s Note: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked Powell whether inflation and unemployment are still closely connected, as the Fed has long argued.]

Applaud, follow with interest, raise questions. That’s exactly what needs to be happening. The politicization of monetary policy is a fact.

If we don’t raise these questions, the de facto politics is, more often than not, conservative and status quo–oriented. So this, like any other area, is one where citizens—whether they’re educated and informed or not—need to wise up, get involved, and follow the arguments and develop positions.

So applaud your congresspeople when they do exactly what AOC was doing in that situation. In many ways, I thought it was one of the most hopeful scenes I’ve seen in that kind of hearing in a long time.

He tries to break free of narrow specialization and cross the boundaries between scientific disciplines. Expeditions beyond economics’ borders and its connection to history, philosophy, psychology, and ancient myths are not only refreshing, but necessary for understanding the world of the twenty-first century.

Reality is spun from stories, not from material. Zdeněk Neubauer

“The separation between the history of a science, its philosophy, and the science itself dissolves into thin air, and so does the separation between science and non-science; differences between the scientific and unscientific are vanishing.”

The study of the history of a certain field is not, as is commonly held, a useless display of its blind alleys or a collection of the field’s trials and errors (until we got it right), but history is the fullest possible scope of study of a menu that the given field can offer.

History of thought helps us to get rid of the intellectual brainwashing of the age, to see through the intellectual fashion of the day, and to take a couple of steps back.

That is the reason for this book: to look for economic thought in ancient myths and, vice versa, to look for myths in today’s economics.

stories; Adam Smith believed. As he puts it in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “the desire of being believed, or the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires.”

“The human mind is built to think in terms of narratives … in turn, much of human motivation comes from living through a story of our lives, a story that we tell to ourselves and that creates a framework of our motivation. Life could be just ‘one damn thing after another’ if it weren’t for such stories. The same is true for confidence in a nation, a company, or an institution. Great leaders are foremost creators of stories.”

contrary to what our textbooks say, economics is predominantly a normative field. Economics not only describes the world but is frequently about how the world should be (it should be effective, we have an ideal of perfect competition, an ideal of high-GDP growth in low inflation, the effort to achieve high competitiveness …). To this end, we create models, modern parables,

I will try to show that mathematics, models, equations, and statistics are just the tip of the iceberg of economics; that the biggest part of the iceberg of economic knowledge consists of everything else; and that disputes in economics are rather a battle of stories and various metanarratives than anything else.

Before it was emancipated as a field, economics lived happily within subsets of philosophy—ethics, for example—miles away from today’s concept of economics as a mathematical-allocative science that views “soft sciences” with a scorn born from positivistic arrogance. But our thousand-year “education” is built on a deeper, broader, and oftentimes more solid base. It is worth knowing about.

is a paradox that a field that primarily studies values wants to be value-free. One more paradox is this: A field that believes in the invisible hand of the market wants to be without mysteries.

mathematics at the core of economics, or is it just the icing of the cake, the tip of the iceberg of our field’s inquiry?

we seek to chart the development of the economic ethos. We ask questions that come before any economic thinking can begin—both philosophically and, to a degree, historically. The area here lies at the very borders of economics—and often beyond. We may refer to this as protoeconomics (to borrow a term from protosociology) or, perhaps more fittingly, metaeconomics (to borrow a term from metaphysics).

The more important elements of a culture or field of inquiry such as economics are found in fundamental assumptions that adherents of all the various systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming, because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them, as the philosopher Alfred Whitehead notes in Adventures of Ideas.

I argue that economic questions were with mankind long before Adam Smith. I argue that the search for values in economics did not start with Adam Smith but culminated with him.

We should go beyond economics and study what beliefs are “behind the scenes,” ideas that have often become the dominant yet unspoken assumptions in our theories. Economics is surprisingly full of tautologies that economists are predominantly unaware of. I

argue that economics should seek, discover, and talk about its own values, although we have been taught that economics is a value-free science. I argue that none of this is true and that there is more religion, myth, and archetype in economics than there is mathematics.

In a way, this is a study of the evolution of both homo economicus and, more importantly, the history of the animal spirits within him. This book tries to study the evolution of the rational as well as the emotional and irrational side of human beings.

I argue that his most influential contribution to economics was ethical. His other thoughts had been clearly expressed long before him, whether on specialization, or on the principle of the invisible hand of the market. I try to show that the principle of the invisible hand of the market is much more ancient and developed long before Adam Smith. Traces of it appear even in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Hebrew thought, and in Christianity, and it is expressly stated by Aristophanes and Thomas Aquinas.

This is not a book on the thorough history of economic thought. The author aims instead to supplement certain chapters on the history of economic thought with a broader perspective and analysis of the influences that often escape the notice of economists and the wider public.

Progress (Naturalness and Civilization)

The Economy of Good and Evil

from his beginnings, man has been marked as a naturally unnatural creature, who for unique reasons surrounds himself with external possessions. Insatiability, both material and spiritual, are basic human metacharacteristics, which appear as early as the oldest myths and stories.

the Hebrews, with linear time, and later the Christians gave us the ideal (or amplified the Hebrew ideal) we now embrace. Then the classical economists secularized progress. How did we come to today’s progression of progress, and growth for growth’s sake?

The Need for Greed: The History of Consumption and Labor

Metamathematics From where did economics get the concept of numbers as the very foundation of the world?

All of economics is, in the end, economics of good and evil. It is the telling of stories by people of people to people. Even the most sophisticated mathematical model is, de facto, a story, a parable, our effort to (rationally) grasp the world around us.

idea that we can manage to utilize our natural egoism, and that this evil is good for something, is an ancient philosophical and mythical concept. We will also look into the development of the ethos of homo economicus, the birth of “economic man.”

The History of Animal Spirits: Dreams Never Sleep

Masters of the Truth

Originally, truth was a domain of poems and stories, but today we perceive truth as something much more scientific, mathematical. Where does one go (to shop) for the truth? And who “has the truth” in our epoch?

Our animal spirits (something of a counterpart to rationality) are influenced by the archetype of the hero and our concept of what is good.

The entire history of ethics has been ruled by an effort to create a formula for the ethical rules of behavior. In the final chapter we will show the tautology of Max Utility, and we will discuss the concept of Max Good.

The History of the Invisible Hand of the Market and Homo Economicus

We understand “economics” to mean a broader field than just the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. We consider economics to be the study of human relations that are sometimes expressible in numbers, a study that deals with tradables, but one that also deals with nontradables (friendship, freedom, efficiency, growth).

When we mention economics in this book, we mean the mainstream perception of it, perhaps as best represented by Paul Samuelson.

By the term homo economicus, we mean the primary concept of economic anthropology. It comes from the concept of a rational individual, who, led by narrowly egotistical motives, sets out to maximize his benefit.

the Epic of Gilgamesh bears witness to the opposite—despite the fact that the first written clay fragments (such as notes and bookkeeping) of our ancestors may have been about business and war, the first written story is mainly about great friendship and adventure.

Even today we live in Gilgamesh’s vision that human relations—and therefore humanity itself—are a disturbance to work and efficiency; that people would perform better if they did not “waste” their time and energy on nonproductive things.

is a story of nature and civilization, of heroism, defiance, and the battle against the gods, and evil; an epic about wisdom, immortality, and also futility.

But it is in friendship where—often by-the-way, as a side product, an externality—ideas and deeds are frequently performed or created that together can altogether change the face of society.19 Friendship can go against an ingrained system in places where an individual does not have the courage to do so himself or herself.

started with Babylonians—rural nature becomes just a supplier of raw materials, resources (and humans the source of human resources). Nature is not the garden in which humans were created and placed, which they should care for and which they should reside in, but becomes a mere reservoir for natural (re)sources.

To be human seems to be somewhere in between, or both of these two. We

The entire history of culture is dominated by an effort to become as independent as possible from the whims of nature.39 The more developed a civilization is, the more an individual is protected from nature and natural influences and knows how to create around him a constant or controllable environment to his liking.

The epic captures one of the greatest leaps in the development of the division of labor. Uruk itself is one of the oldest cities of all, and in the epic it reflects a historic step forward in specialization—in the direction of a new social city arrangement. Because of the city wall, people in the city can devote themselves to things other than worrying about their own safety, and they can continue to specialize more deeply.

“The chief thing which the common-sense individual wants is not satisfactions for the wants he had, but more, and better wants.”47

If a consumer buys something, theoretically it should rid him of one of his needs—and the aggregate of things they need should be decreased by one item. In reality, though, the aggregate of “I want to have” expands together with the growing aggregate of “I have.”

the Old Testament, this relationship is perceived completely differently. Man (humanity) is created in nature, in a garden. Man was supposed to care for the Garden of Eden and live in harmony with nature and the animals. Soon after creation, man walks naked and is not ashamed, de facto the same as the animals. What is characteristic is that man dresses (the natural state of creation itself is not enough for him), and he (literally and figuratively) covers52 himself—in shame after the fall.53

Nature is where one goes to hunt, collect crops, or gather the harvest. It is perceived as the saturator of our needs and nothing more. One goes back to the city to sleep and be “human.” On the contrary, evil resides in nature. Humbaba lives in the cedar forest, which also happens to be the reason to completely eradicate it.

Symbolically, then, we can view the entire issue from the standpoint of the epic in the following way: Our nature is insufficient, bad, evil, and good (humane) occurs only after emancipation from nature (from naturalness), through culturing and education. Humanity is considered as being in civilization.

The city was frequently (at least in older Jewish writings) a symbol of sin, degeneration, and decadence—nonhumanity. The Hebrews were originally a nomadic nation, one that avoided cities. It is no accident that the first important city57 mentioned in the Bible is proud Babylon,58 which God later turns to dust.

is enough, for example, to read the Book of Revelation to see how the vision of paradise developed from the deep Old Testament period, when paradise was a garden. John describes his vision of heaven as a city—paradise is in New Jerusalem, a city where the dimensions of the walls(!) are described in detail, as are the golden streets and gates of pearl.

Hebrews later also chose a king (despite the unanimous opposition of God’s prophets) and settled in cities, where they eventually founded the Lord’s Tabernacle and built a temple for Him. The city of Jerusalem later gained an illustrious position in all of religion.

this time Christianity (as well as the influence of the Greeks) does not consider human naturalness to be an unambiguous good, and it does not have such an idyllic relationship to nature as the Old Testament prophets.

If a tendency toward good is not naturally endowed in people, it must be imputed from above through violence or at least the threat of violence.

If we were to look at human naturalness as a good, then collective social actions need a much weaker ruling hand. If people themselves have a natural tendency (propensity) toward good, this role does not have to be supplied by the state, ruler, or, if you wish, Leviathan.

How does this affect economics?

us return for the last time to the humanization of the wild Enkidu, which is a process we can perceive with a bit of imagination as the first seed of the principle of the market’s invisible hand, and therefore the parallels with one of the central schematics of economic thinking.

Sometimes it is better to “harness the devil to the plow” than to fight with him. Instead of summoning up enormous energy in the fight against evil, it is better to use its own energy to reach a goal we desire; setting up a mill on the turbulent river instead of futile efforts to remove the current. This is also how Saint Prokop approached it in one of the oldest Czech legends.

Enkidu caused damage and it was impossible to fight against him. But with the help of a trap, trick, this evil was transformed into something that greatly benefited civilization.

By culturing and “domesticating” Enkidu, humanity tamed the uncontrollable wild and chaotic evil

Enkidu devastated the doings (the external, outside-the-walls) of the city. But he was later harnessed and fights at the side of civilization against nature, naturalness, the natural state of things.

A similar story (reforming something animally wild and uncultivated in civilizational achievement) is used by Thomas Aquinas in his teachings. Several centuries later, this idea is fully emancipated in the hands of Bernard Mandeville and his Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. The economic and political aspects of this idea are—often incorrectly—ascribed to Adam Smith.

Here the individual does not try anymore to maximize his goods or profits, but what is important is writing his name in human memory in the form of heroic acts or deeds.

immortality, one connected with letters and the cult of the word: A name and especially a written name survives the body.”77

After this disappointment, he comes to the edge of the sea, where the innkeeper Siduri lives. As tonic for his sorrow, she offers him the garden of bliss, a sort of hedonistic fortress of carpe diem, where a person comes to terms with his mortality and at least in the course of the end of his life maximizes earthly pleasures, or earthly utility.

In the second stage, after finding his friend Enkidu, Gilgamesh abandons the wall and sets out beyond the city to maximalize heroism. “In his (…) search of immortal life, Gilgamesh

The hero refuses hedonism in the sense of maximizing terrestrial pleasure and throws himself into things that will exceed his life. In the blink of an eye, the epic turns on its head the entire utility maximization role that mainstream economics has tirelessly tried to sew on people as a part of their nature.81

today remember Gilgamesh for his story of heroic friendship with Enkidu, not for his wall, which no longer reaches monumental heights.

the eleventh and final tablet, Gilgamesh again loses what he sought. Like Sisyphus, he misses his goal just before the climax

The very existence of questions similar to today’s economic ones can be considered as the first observation. The first written considerations of the people of that time were not so different from those today. In other words: The epic is understandable for us, and we can identify with it.

We have also been witnesses to the very beginnings of man’s culturing—a great drama based on a liberation and then a distancing from the natural state.

Let us take this as a memento in the direction of our restlessness, our inherited dissatisfaction and the volatility connected to it. Considering that they have lasted five thousand years and to this day we find ourselves in harmony with a certain feeling of futility, perhaps these characteristics are inherent in man.

with the phenomenon of the creation of the city, we have seen how specialization and the accumulation of wealth was born, how holy nature was transformed into a secular supplier of resources, and also how humans’ individualistic ego was emancipated.

For small acts (hunting together, work in a factory), small love is enough: Camaraderie. For great acts, however, great love is necessary, real love: Friendship. Friendship that eludes the economic understanding of quid pro quo. Friendship gives. One friend gives (fully) for the other. That is friendship for life and death,

less a civilized, city person is dependent on nature, the more he or she is dependent on the rest of society. Like Enkidu, we have exchanged nature for society; harmony with (incalculable) nature for harmony with (incalculable) man.

human nature good or evil? To this day these questions are key for economic policy: If we believe that man is evil in his nature, therefore that a person himself is dog eat dog (animal), then the hard hand of a ruler is called for. If we believe that people in and of themselves, in their nature, gravitate toward good, then it is possible to loosen up the reins and live in a society that is more laissez-faire.

For a concept of historical progress, for the undeification of heroes, rulers, and nature, mankind had to wait for the Hebrews.

Because nature is not undeified, it is beyond consideration to explore it, let alone intervene in it (unless a person was a two-thirds god like Gilgamesh). It

As early as the “dark” ages, the Jews commonly used economic tools that were in many ways ahead of their time and that later became key elements of the modern economy:

Gilgamesh’s story ends where it began. There is a consistency in this with Greek myths and fables: At the end of the story, no progress occurs, no essential historic change; the story is set in indefinite time, something of a temporal limbo.

For a nation originally based on nomadism, where did this Jewish business ethos come from? And can the Hebrews truly be considered as the architects of the values that set the direction of our civilization’s economic thought?

PROGRESS: A SECULARIZED RELIGION One of the things the writers of the Old Testament gave to mankind is the idea and notion of progress. The Old Testament stories have their development; they change the history of the Jewish nation and tie in to each other. The Jewish understanding of time is linear—it has a beginning and an end.

The observance of God’s Commandments in Judaism leads not to some ethereal other world, but to an abundance of material goods (Genesis 49:25–26, Leviticus 26:3–13, Deuteronomy 28:1–13) (…) There are no accusing fingers pointed at

There are no echoes of asceticism nor for the cleansing and spiritual effect of poverty. It is fitting therefore, that the founders of Judaism, the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, were all wealthy men.12

about due to a linear understanding of history. If history has a beginning as well as an end, and they are not the same point, then exploration suddenly makes sense in areas where the fruits are borne only in the next generation.

however, the idea of progress itself underwent major changes, and today we perceive it very differently. As opposed to the original spiritual conceptions, today we perceive progress almost exclusively in an economic or scientific-technological sense.

Because care for the soul has today been replaced by care for external things,

This is why we must constantly grow, because we (deep down and often implicitly) believe that we are headed toward an (economic) paradise on Earth.

Only since the period of scientific-technological revolution (and at a time when economics was born as an independent field) is material progress automatically assumed.

Jewish thought is the most grounded, most realistic school of thought of all those that have influenced our culture.17 An abstract world of ideas was unknown to the Jews. To this day it is still forbidden to even depict God, people, and animals in symbols, paintings, statues, and drawings.

economists have become key figures of great importance in our time (Kacířské eseje o filosofii dějin [Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History]). They are expected to perform interpretations of reality, give prophetic services (macroeconomic forecasts), reshape reality (mitigate the impacts of the crisis, speed up growth), and, in the long run, provide leadership on the way to the Promised Land—paradise on Earth.

REALISM AND ANTIASCETICISM Aside from ideas of progress, the Hebrews brought another very fundamental contribution to our culture: The desacralization of heroes, nature, and rulers.

Voltaire writes: “It certain fact is, that in his public laws he [Moses] never so much as once made mention of a life to come, limiting all punishments and all rewards to the present life.”21

As opposed to Christianity, the concept of an extraterrestrial paradise or heaven was not developed much in Hebrew thought.19 The paradise of the Israelites—Eden—was originally placed on Earth at a given place in Mesopotamia20 and at a given time,

The Hebrews consider the world to be real—not just a shadow reflection of a better world somewhere in the cloud of ideas, something the usual interpretation of history ascribes to Plato. The soul does not struggle against the body and is not its prisoner, as Augustine would write later.

The land, the world, the body, and material reality are for Jews the paramount setting for divine history, the pinnacle of creation. This idea is the conditio sine qua non of the development of economics, something of an utterly earthly making,

The mythology of the hero-king was strongly developed in that period, which Claire Lalouette summarizes into these basic characteristics: Beauty (a perfect face, on which it is “pleasant to look upon,” but also “beauty,” expressed in the Egyptian word nefer, not only means aesthetics, but contains moral qualities as well),

THE HERO AND HIS UNDEIFICATION: THE DREAM NEVER SLEEPS The concept of the hero is more important than it might appear. It may be the remote origin of Keynes’s animal spirits, or the desire to follow a kind of internal archetype that a given individual accepts as his own and that society values.

This internal animator of ours, our internal mover, this dream, never sleeps and it influences our behavior—including economic behavior—more than we want to realize.

Anthropology knows several archetypes of heroes. The Polish-born American anthropologist Paul Radin examined the myths of North American Indians and, for example, in his most influential book, The Trickster, he describes their four basic archetypes of heroes.

The Torah’s heroes (if that term can be used at all) frequently make mistakes and their mistakes are carefully recorded in the Bible—maybe precisely so that none of them could be deified.32

the Hebrew heroes correspond most to the Tricksters, the Culture Bearers, and the Twins. The divine muscleman, that dominant symbol we think of when we say hero, is absent here.

Undeification, however, does not mean a call to pillage or desecration; man was put here to take care of nature (see the story of the Garden of Eden or the symbolism of the naming of the animals). This protection and care of nature is also related to the idea of progress

For the heroes who moved our civilization to where it is today, the heroic archetypes of the cunning trickster, culture bearer, and sufferer are rather more appropriate.

the Old Testament strongly emphasizes the undeification of nature.37 Nature is God’s creation, which speaks of divinity but is not the domain of moody gods

in an Old Testament context, the pharaoh was a mere man (whom one could disagree with, and who could be resisted!).

RULERS ARE MERE MEN In a similar historical context, the Old Testament teachings carried out a similar desacralization of rulers, the so-called bearers of economic policy.

Ultimately the entire idea of a political ruler stood against the Lord’s will, which is explicitly presented in the Torah. The Lord unequivocally preferred the judge as the highest form of rule—an

The needs of future generations will have to be considered; after all humankind are the guardians of God’s world. Waste of natural resources, whether privately owned or nationally owned is forbidden.”39

Politics lost its character of divine infallibility, and political issues were subject to questioning. Economic policy could become a subject of examination.

44 God first creates with the word and then on individual days He divides light from darkness, water from dry land, day from night, and so forth—and He gives order to things.45 The world is created orderly— it is wisely, reasonably put together. The way of the world is put together at least partially46 decipherably by any other wise and reasonable being who honors rational rules.

THE PRAISE OF ORDER AND WISDOM: MAN AS A PERFECTER OF CREATION The created world has an order of sorts, an order recognizable by us as people,

From the very beginning, when God distances Himself from the entire idea, there is an anticipation that there is nothing holy, let alone divine, in politics. Rulers make mistakes, and it is possible to subject them to tough criticism—which frequently occurs indiscriminately through the prophets in the Old Testament.

Hebrew culture laid the foundations for the scientific examination of the world.

Examining the world is therefore an absolutely legitimate activity, and one that is even requested by God—it is a kind of participation in the Creator’s work.51 Man is called on to understand himself and his surroundings and to use his knowledge for good.

The Book of Proverbs emphasizes specifically several times that it was wisdom that was present at the creation of the world. Wisdom personified calls out:

The last act, final stroke of the brush of creation, naming of the animals—this act is given to a human, it is not done by God, as one would expect. Man was given the task of completing the act of creation that the Lord began:

MAN AS A FINISHER OF CREATION The creation of the world, as it is explained in Jewish teachings, is described in the Book of Genesis. Here God (i) creates, (ii) separates, and (iii) names [my emphasis]:

Naming is a symbolic expression. In Jewish culture (and also in our culture to this day), the right to name meant sovereign rights and belonged, for example, to explorers (new places), inventors (new principles), or parents (children)—that is, to those who were there at the genesis, at the origin. This right was handed over by God to mankind.

The Naming itself (the capital N is appropriate) traditionally belongs to the crowning act of the Creator and represents a kind of grand finale of creation, the last move of the brush to complete the picture—a signature of the master.

Without naming, reality does not exist; it is created together with language. Wittgenstein tightly names this in his tractatus—the limits of our language are the limits of our world.53

Reality is not a given; it is not passive. Perceiving reality and “facts” requires man’s active participation. It is man who must take the last step, an act (and we

A real-ization act on our part represents the creation of a construct, the imputation of sense and order (which is beautifully expressed by the biblical act of naming, or categorization, sorting, ordering).

God connects man with the task of guarding and protecting the Garden of Eden, and thus man actually cocreates the cultural landscape. The Czech philosopher Zdeněk Neubauer also describes this: “Such is reality, and it is so deep that it willingly crystallizes into worlds. Therefore I profess that reality is a creation and not a place of occurrence for objectively given phenomena.”61

The Jews believed the exact opposite. The world is created by a good God, and evil appears in it as a result of immoral human acts. Evil, therefore, is induced by man.66 History unwinds according to the morality of human acts.

GOOD AND EVIL IN US: A MORAL EXPLANATION OF WELL-BEING We have seen that in the Epic of Gilgamesh, good and evil are not yet addressed systematically on a moral level.

the epic, good and evil are not envisaged morally—they are not the result of an (a)moral act. Evil was not associated with free moral action or individual will.

Hebrew thought, on the other hand, deals intensively with moral good and evil. A moral dimension touches the core of its stories.65

discrepancy between savings and investment, and others are convinced of the monetary essence

The entire history of the Jewish nation is interpreted and perceived in terms of morality. Morality has become, so to speak, a mover and shaker of Hebrew history.

sunspots. The Hebrews came up with the idea that morals were behind good and bad years, behind the economic cycle. But we would be getting ahead of ourselves. Pharaoh’s Dream: Joseph and the First Business Cycle To

It is the Pharaoh’s well-known dream of seven fat and seven lean cows, which he told to Joseph, the son of Jacob. Joseph interpreted the dream as a macroeconomic prediction of sorts: Seven years of abundance were to be followed by seven years of poverty, famine, and misery.

Self-Contradicting Prophecy Here, let’s make several observations on this: Through taxation74 on the level of one-fifth of a crop75 in good years to save the crop and then open granaries in bad years, the prophecy was de facto prevented (prosperous years were limited and hunger averted—through a predecessor of fiscal stabilization).

The Old Testament prophesies therefore were not any deterministic look into the future, but warnings and strategic variations of the possible, which demanded some kind of reaction. If the reaction was adequate, what was prophesied would frequently not occur at all.

If the threat is anticipated, it is possible to totally or at least partially avoid it. Neither Joseph nor the pharaoh had the power to avoid bounty or crop failure (in this the dream interpretation was true and the appearance of the future mystical), but they avoided the impacts and implications of the prophecy (in this the interpretation of the dream was “false”)—famine did not ultimately occur in Egypt, and this was due to the application of reasonable and very intuitive economic policy.

Let us further note that the first “macroeconomic forecast” appears in a dream.

back to Torah: Later in this story we will notice that there is no reason offered as to why the cycle occurs (that will come later). Fat years will simply come, and then lean years after them.

Moral Explanation of a Business Cycle That is fundamentally different from later Hebrew interpretations, when the Jewish nation tries to offer reasons why the nation fared well or poorly. And those reasons are moral.

Only in recent times have some currents of economics again become aware of the importance of morals and trust in the form of measuring the quality of institutions, the level of justice, business ethics, corruption, and so forth, and examining their influence on the economy,

it is not within the scope of this book to answer that question; justice has been done to the question if it manages to sketch out the main contours of possible searches for answers.

THE ECONOMICS OF GOOD AND EVIL: DOES GOOD PAY OFF? This is probably the most difficult moral problem we could ask.

Inquiring about the economics of good and evil, however, is not that easy. Where would Kant’s “moral dimension of ethics” go if ethics paid? If we do good for profit, the question of ethics becomes a mere question of rationality.

He remains righteous, even if his only reward is death. What economic advantage could he have from that?

morals cannot be considered in the economic dimension of productivity and calculus. The role of the Hebrews was to do good, whether it paid off or not. If good (outgoing) is rewarded by incoming goodness, it is a bonus,99 not a reason to do outgoing good. Good and reward do not correlate to each other.

This reasoning takes on a dimension of its own in the Old Testament. Good (incoming) has already happened to us. We must do good (outgoing) out of gratitude for the good (incoming) shown to us in the past.

So why do good? After all, suffering is the fate of many biblical figures. The answer can only be: For good itself. Good has the power to be its own reward. In this sense, goodness gets its reward, which may or may not take on a material dimension.

the Hebrews offered an interesting compromise between the teachings of the Stoics and Epicureans. We will go into it in detail later, so only briefly

constraint. It calls for bounded optimalization (with limits). A kind of symbiosis existed between the legitimate search for one’s own utility (or enjoyment of life) and maintaining rules, which are not negotiable and which are not subject to optimalization.

In other words, clear (exogenously given) rules exist that must be observed and cannot be contravened. But within these borders it is absolutely possible, and even recommended, to increase utility.

To Love the Law The Jews not only had to observe the law (perhaps the word covenant would be more appropriate), but they were to love it because it was good.

the principle of doing good (outgoing) on the basis of a priori demonstrated good (incoming) was also taken over by the New Testament. Atonement itself is based on an a priori principle; all our acts are preceded by good.

THE SHACKLES OF THE CITY Owing to the Hebrew’s liberation from Egyptian slavery, freedom and responsibility become the key values of Jewish thought.

Laws given by God are binding for Jews, and God is the absolute source of all values,

The Hebrew ideal is represented by the paradise of the Garden of Eden, not a city.116 The despised city civilization or the tendency to see in it a sinful and shackling way of life appears in glimpses and allusions in many places in the Old Testament.

The nomadic Jewish ethos is frequently derived from Abraham, who left the Chaldean city of Ur on the basis of a command:

This way of life had understandably immense economic impacts. First, such a society lived in much more connected relationships, where there was no doubt that everyone mutually depended on each other. Second, their frequent wanderings meant the inability to own more than they could carry; the gathering up of material assets did not have great weight—precisely because the physical weight (mass) of things was tied to one place.

One of Moses’s greatest deeds was that he managed to explain to his nation once and for all that it is better to remain hungry and liberated than to be a slave with food “at no cost.”

SOCIAL WELFARE: NOT TO ACT IN THE MANNER OF SODOM

regulations is developed in the Old Testament, one we hardly find in any other nation of the time. In Hebrew teachings, aside from individual utility, indications of the concept of maximalizing utility societywide appear for the first time as embodied in the Talmudic principle of Kofin al midat S´dom, which can be translated as “one is compelled not to act in the manner of Sodom” and to take care of the weaker members of society.

In a jubilee year, debts were to be forgiven,125 and Israelites who fell into slavery due to their indebtedness were to be set free.126

Land at the time could be “sold,” and it was not sale, but rent. The price (rent) of real estate depended on how long there was until a forgiveness year. It was about the awareness that we may work the land, but in the last instance we are merely “aliens and strangers,” who have the land only rented to us for a fixed time. All land and riches came from the Lord.

These provisions express a conviction that freedom and inheritance should not be permanently taken away from any Israelite. Last but not least, this system reminds us that no ownership lasts forever and that the fields we plow are not ours but the Lord’s.

Glean Another social provision was the right to glean, which in Old Testament times ensured at least basic sustenance for the poorest. Anyone who owned a field had the responsibility not to harvest it to the last grain but to leave the remains in the field for the poor.

Tithes and Early Social Net Every Israelite also had the responsibility of levying a tithe from their entire crop. They had to be aware from whom all ownership comes and, by doing so, express their thanks.

“Since the community has an obligation to provide food, shelter, and basic economic goods for the needy, it has a moral right and duty to tax its members for this purpose. In line with this duty, it may have to regulate markets, prices and competition, to protect the interests of its weakest members.”135

In Judaism, charity is not perceived as a sign of goodness; it is more of a responsibility. Such a society then has the right to regulate its economy in such a way that the responsibility of charity is carried out to its satisfaction.

With a number of responsibilities, however, comes the difficulty of getting them into practice. Their fulfillment, then, in cases when it can be done, takes place gradually “in layers.” Charitable activities are classified in the Talmud according to several target groups with various priorities, classified according to, it could be said, rules of subsidiarity.

Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt.140 As one can see, aside from widows and orphans, the Old Testament also includes immigrants in its area of social protection.141 The Israelites had to have the same rules apply for them as for themselves—they could not discriminate on the basis of their origin.

ABSTRACT MONEY, FORBIDDEN INTEREST, AND OUR DEBT AGE If it appears to us that today’s era is based on money and debt, and our time will be written into history as the “Debt age,” then it will certainly be interesting to follow how this development occurred.

Money is a social abstractum. It is a social agreement, an unwritten contract.

The first money came in the form of clay tablets from Mesopotamia, on which debts were written. These debts were transferable, so the debts became currency. In the end, “It is no coincidence that in English the root of ‘credit’ is ‘credo,’ the Latin for ‘I believe.’”

To a certain extent it could be said that credit, or trust, was the first currency. It can materialize, it can be embodied in coins, but what is certain is that “money is not metal,” even the rarest metal, “it is trust inscribed,”

Inseparably, with the original credit (money) goes interest. For the Hebrews, the problem of interest was a social issue: “If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not be like a moneylender; charge him no interest.”

there were also clearly set rules setting how far one could go in setting guarantees and the nonpayment of debts. No one should become indebted to the extent that they could lose the source of their livelihood:

In the end, the term “bank” comes from the Italian banci, or the benches that Jewish lenders sat on.157

Money is playing not only its classical roles (as a means of exchange, a holder of value, etc.) but also a much greater, stronger role: It can stimulate, drive (or slow down) the whole economy. Money plays a national economic role.

In the course of history, however, the role of loans changed, and the rich borrowed especially for investment purposes,

In such a case a ban on interest did not have great ethical significance. Thomas Aquinas, a medieval scholar (1225-1274), also considers similarly; in his time, the strict ban on lending with usurious interest was loosened, possibly due to him.

As a form of energy, money can travel in three dimensions, vertically (those who have capital lend to those who do not) and horizontally (speed and freedom in horizontal or geographic motion has become the by-product—or driving force?—of globalization). But money (as opposed to people) can also travel through time.

money is something like energy that can travel through time. And it is a very useful energy, but at the same time very dangerous as well. Wherever

Aristotle condemned interest162 not only from a moral standpoint, but also for metaphysical reasons. Thomas Aquinas shared the same fear of interest and he too argued that time does not belong to us, and that is why we must not require interest.

MONEY AS ENERGY: TIME TRAVEL AND GROSS DEBT PRODUCT (GDP)

Due to this characteristic, we can energy-strip the future to the benefit of the present. Debt can transfer energy from the future to the present.163 On the other hand, saving can accumulate energy from the past and send it to the present.

labor was not considered degrading in the Old Testament. On the contrary, the subjugation of nature is even a mission from God that originally belonged to man’s very first blessings.

LABOR AND REST: THE SABBATH ECONOMY

The Jews as well as Aristotle behaved very guardedly toward loans. The issue of interest/usury became one of the first economic debates. Without having an inkling of the future role of economic policy (fiscal and monetary), the ancient Hebrews may have unwittingly felt that they were discovering in interest a very powerful weapon, one that can be a good servant, but (literally) an enslaving master as well.

It’s something like a dam. When we build one, we are preventing periods of drought and flooding in the valley; we are limiting nature’s whims and, to a large extent, avoiding its incalculable cycles. Using dams, we can regulate the flow of water to nearly a constant. With it we tame the river (and we can also gain

But if we do not regulate the water wisely, it may happen that we would overfill the dam and it would break. For the cities lying in the valley, their end would be worse than if a dam were never there.

If man lived in harmony with nature before, now, after the fall, he must fight; nature stands against him and he against it and the animals. From the Garden we have moved unto a (battle)field.

Only after man’s fall does labor turn into a curse.168 It could even be said that this is actually the only curse, the curse of the unpleasantness of labor, that the Lord places on Adam.

Both Plato and Aristotle consider labor to be necessary for survival, but that only the lower classes should devote themselves to it so that the elites would not have to be bothered with it and so that they could devote themselves to “purely spiritual matters—art, philosophy, and politics.”

Work is also not only a source of pleasure but a social standing; It is considered an honor. “Do you see a man skilled in his work? He will serve before kings.”170 None of the surrounding cultures appreciate work as much. The idea of the dignity of labor is unique in the Hebrew tradition.

Hebrew thinking is characterized by a strict separation of the sacred from the profane. In life, there are simply areas that are holy, and in which it is not allowed to economize, rationalize, or maximize efficiency.

the message of the commandment on Saturday communicated that people were not primarily created for labor.

This dimension has disappeared from today’s economics. Economic effort has no goal at which it would be possible to rest. Today we only know growth for growth’s sake, and if our company or country prospers, that does not…

the purpose of creation was not just creating but that it had an end, a goal. The process was just a process, not a purpose. The whole of Being was created so…

ancient Greek economic ethos, we will examine two extreme approaches to laws and rules. While the Stoics considered laws to be absolutely valid, and utility had infinitesimal meaning in their philosophy, the Epicureans, at least in the usual historical explanation, placed utility and pleasure in first place—rules were to be made based on the principle of utility.

CONCLUSION: BETWEEN UTILITY AND PRINCIPLE The influence of Jewish thought on the development of market democracy cannot be overestimated. The key heritage for us was the lack of ascetic perception of the world, respect to law and private…