The structure of the corporation is a telling case in point—and it is no coincidence that the first major joint-stock corporations in the world were the English and Dutch East India companies, ones th...
The reasons why anthropologists haven’t been able to come up with a simple, compelling story for the origins of money is because there’s no reason to believe there could be one. Money was no more ever...
The most remarkable thing is that even in Adam Smith’s examples of fish and nails and tobacco being used as money, the same sort of thing was happening. In the years following the appearance of the We...
Still, Lincoln went on to insist, what made the United States different from Europe, indeed what made its democracy possible, was
Recall an idea from earlier in the book: exchange, unless it’s an instantaneous cash transaction, creates debts. Debts linger over time. If you imagine all human relations as exchange, then insofar as...
Part of the problem is the extraordinary place that economics currently holds in the social sciences. In many ways it is treated as a kind of master discipline. Just about anyone who runs anything imp...
ON AUGUST 15, 1971, United States President Richard Nixon announced that foreign-held U.S. dollars would no longer be convertible into gold—thus stripping away the last vestige of the international go...
Looking over world literature, it is almost impossible to find a single sympathetic representation of a moneylender- or anyway, a professional moneylender, which means by definition one who charges in...
Jim Cooper, a former LAPD officer turned sociologist, has observed that the overwhelming majority of those who end up getting beaten or otherwise brutalized by police turn out to be innocent of any cr...
In most important ways, this world is explicitly antibureaucratic: that is, it evinces an explicit rejection of virtually all the core values of bureaucracy.
In fact, it often happens that, at the very top of organizations, apparently crucial positions can go unfilled for long periods of time without there being any noticeable effect—even, on the organizat...
In a broader sense, the value of heirlooms is always, as I have said, an historical value, derived from acts of production, use, or appropriation that have involved the object in the past. The value o...
In English, thank you derives from think. It originally meant, I will remember what you did for me—which is usually not true either—but in other languages (the Portuguese obrigado is a good example) t...
If we let everyone decide for themselves how they were best fit to benefit humanity, with no restrictions at all, how could they possibly end up with a distribution of labor more inefficient than the...
If being forced to pretend to work is so infuriating because it makes clear the degree to which you are entirely under another person's power, then bullshit jobs are...entire jobs organized on that sa...
How vain the opinion is of some certain people of the East Indies, who think that apes and baboons, which are with them in great numbers, are imbued with understanding, and that they can speak but wil...
How are workers supposed to find meaning and purpose in jobs where they are effectively being turned into robots? Where they are actually being told they are little better than robots, even as at the...
Here we come to the central question of this book: What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal? What does it mean when we...
Even until quite recently, many of the world’s inhabitants were not quite sure of what country they were citizens, or why it should matter. My mother, who was born a Jew in Poland, once told me a joke...
Credit money is based on trust, and in competitive markets, trust itself becomes a scarce commodity.