{"id":4472,"date":"2012-06-04T15:43:38","date_gmt":"2012-06-04T20:43:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/?p=4472"},"modified":"2012-10-17T14:40:01","modified_gmt":"2012-10-17T19:40:01","slug":"a-brief-history-of-money-ieee-spectrum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/?p=4472","title":{"rendered":"A Brief History of Money"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Kublai Khan was ahead of his time: He recognized that what matters about money is not what it looks like, or even what it\u2019s backed by, but whether people believe in it enough to use it. Today, that concept is the foundation of all modern monetary systems, which are built on nothing more than governments\u2019 support of and people\u2019s faith in them. Money is, in other words, a complete abstraction\u2014one that we are all intimately familiar with but whose growing complexity defies our comprehension.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>via <a href=\"http:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/at-work\/innovation\/a-brief-history-of-money\/0\">A Brief History of Money &#8211; IEEE Spectrum<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>There is, to be sure, something a bit eerie about all this, and periods like the recent housing bubble, when banks made an extraordinary number of bad loans, should remind us of the dangers of runaway credit. But it\u2019s a mistake to yearn for a more \u201csolid\u201d foundation for the monetary system. Money is a social creation, just like language. It\u2019s a tool that can be used well or poorly, and it\u2019s preferable that we have more freedom to use that tool than less.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kublai Khan was ahead of his time: He recognized that what matters about money is not what it looks like, or even what it\u2019s backed by, but whether people believe in it enough to use it. Today, that concept is &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/?p=4472\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[589,343,328],"class_list":["post-4472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","tag-economics","tag-ieee","tag-money"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4472"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7627,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4472\/revisions\/7627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}