A wonky parallel of Rome’s Third-Century Crisis and the Perma-Crisis of Western Democracy There is a question that haunts every serious observer of contemporary Western politics, though it is rarely asked with the directness it deserves: why does it not matter who wins? Leader after leader is elected on a platform of change, governs for…
Category: Economic institutions
Superpower Suicide: The Threat to Dollar Dominance
There’s a story economics textbooks have been telling for over two centuries. It goes like this: once upon a time, people bartered. A farmer traded wheat for shoes. A cobbler swapped boots for bread. But bartering was awkward — what if the shoemaker didn’t want wheat that day? So clever humans invented money. Gold coins….
Economic Mythology: What Money Is Not
A response to Paul Krugman’s column “The Dollar’s Special Status: Sources and Threats” April 2026 Paul Krugman’s recent column on the international role of the US dollar is an accomplished piece of applied economics. He marshals a great deal of evidence efficiently, his empirical command is not in question, and his conclusion — that dollar…
The Weight of Tomorrow: How Debt Was Born
The transformation of human trust and obligation from sacred bond to invisible chain Written with Origin Story Book by Claude In the time before time had weight, when promises were as light as morning mist and disappeared with the same ease, there lived a people who knew only the present moment. The great rivers of…
Thoughts on the UK’s “Day of Brexit”
Today, on 31 December 2020, at 23:00 local London time, the UK will formally leave the international socio-economic space created by European nation-states through a number of international treaties since the end of the second world war. It is a turning point in the sense that the UK deliberately diminishes its reach in the global…
Commodities: I―What are they?
Recently the world was confronted with the phenomenon that oil had a negative price due to the tremendous drop in demand for oil due to the worldwide Corona crisis lockdown, as widely reported in the media. From an economist’s perspective this should be quite shocking and worrying, since traditional market theory does not really allow…