A close reading of the text of Karl Marx's Capital in free video lectures by David Harvey. Start here

David Harvey is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), Director of The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, and author of numerous books. He has been teaching Karl Marx's Capital for over 40 years. Read his CV.

First chapter of his 1977 book in pdf

The incest taboo?
A reconsideration of Westermarck
Gregory C. Leavitt

Beyond the Taboo: Imaging Incest
Anna Meigs and Kathleen Barlow
American Anthropologist
New Series, Vol. 104, No. 1 (Mar., 2002), pp. 38-49
(article consists of 12 pages)

The aim of this report is to assess the state of Islamic banking in North Africa, examine why it has failed to take-off and consider its future potential and how it can contribute to the economic development. The rationale for Islamic finance is explained and its essential features described. Once shari’ah compliant financing facilities become available, funds that otherwise might not be available can be harnessed for both commercial and development projects. In addition to diversifying funding sources, Islamic finance can ensure better monitoring of how funds are deployed, improving the effectiveness of financial intermediation

Home: Where-ever I am now, United States
I've been totally without cents since Autumn of 2000 (except for a couple months in 2001). I don't use or accept money or conscious barter - don't take food stamps or other government dole. My philosophy is to use only what is freely given or discarded & what is already present & already running (whether or not I existed). I don't see money as evil or good: how can illusion be evil or good? But I don't see heroin or meth as evil or good, either. Which is more addictive & debilitating, money or meth? Attachment to illusion makes you illusion, makes you not real. Attachment to illusion is called idolatry, called addiction. I simply got tired of acknowledging as real this most common world-wide belief called money! I simply got tired of being unreal. Money is one of those intriguing things that seems real & functional because 2 or more people believe it is real & functional!

Alan Alves Fortes
Base: Amsterdam
Social Media trends follower
Sustainable futurist. Open source advocate. Welcoming the great shift in economy & society. Radical innovation admirer.

The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. This project was completed as part of my thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. For more on my broader thesis work exploring the use of new media to make sense of a increasingly complex world, visit my website here. or email me at: jonathan.jarvis@gmail.com

Writing, direction, animation & sound by Jonathan Jarvis
Narration by John Levoff
Music by DJ Sol Rising

Article from 23rd Nov 2011 in wired magazine.

I am a professional singer, singing teacher and image consultant. In this blog, however, I talk about anything and everything that interests me - and there are a lot of things that interest me! I may or may not know anything about the things I blog about but I promise I will try to make them interesting for you too. Some of my blogs will be finance and banking related. I really DO know something about that as I spent 17 years of my life working at a senior level in banks and I have a Finance MBA. Everything else is just fun though.... I also blog about singing as singingiseasy and about image consultancy as francescoppolaimage.

BLODGIAL has existed since January 2001.

There are over 16,000 posts.

Send Feedback or apply for a writhing position.

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. Perhaps that is why current discussions of the problem give it little attention or get it obviously wrong. The recent wave of reductionist euphoria has produced several analyses of mental phenomena and mental concepts designed to explain the possibility of some variety of materialism, psychophysical identification, or reduction.
1 But the problems dealt with are those common to this type of reduction and other types, and what makes the mind-body problem unique, and unlike the water-H2O problem or the Turing machine-IBM machine problem or the lightning-electrical discharge problem or the gene-DNA problem or the oak tree-hydrocarbon problem, is ignored

I design software and live in San Francisco, CA. My professional interests are in integration technologies applied the financial domain.

In my spare time, I research the future of money: how technology is changing not just the way we earn, manage and use our money, but how it is changing money itself and with it, our communities and society.

plainl english introduction to the ideas of Freud & Jung on Myth.

This new Vox eBook presents a collection of essays by leading European and US economists that offer solutions to the crisis and proposals for medium- to long-term reforms to the regulatory framework in which financial institutions operate.

Speech by Andrew Haldane - executive director for financial stability- at the future of finance conference, London 2010

My name is Isaac Marmolejo and I currently study Economics and Political Science at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

This blog contains my opinions on philosophy, politics, government, and economics. I consider myself an Austrian economist and I regard Ludwig Mises and Ludwig Lachmann as my main influences in economics, but I do not limit myself into just reading, or being influenced by, Austrian Economists. I like the UCLA economic school of thought at the moment, more specifically I do like the writings of Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz, and I also like the economics of Frank Knight and, to a lesser extent, Ronald Coase. I am also interested in Post-Keynesian economic and while I love the theory, I am skeptical of it’s applications.

The number one MMT site on the web!

The psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan poses some particular problems for explication because it is primarily a synchronic scheme, while it must inevitably be explored diachronically. That is, while Lacan had increasing recourse to topologies depicting everything from the fundamental series of forces that shape and deform subjectivity to the core movement of desire which constitutes the essence of subjective being, even he had to supplement these often enigmatic diagrams with narrative commentary. This pressure is even more inevitable for the commentator at the second or third degree of remove from the original thought. Thus, in the absence of a sudden capacity to produce a full-blown and immediately comprehensible explication on the spot, I will simply begin my diachronic exploration of the fundamental structures of Lacan’s psychoanalysis with the caveat that unless otherwise explicitly stated, the phenomena I define are to be thought of first as structures and only secondarily (if at all) as processes.

The crisis and the blogosphere have opened mainstream economics up to new attack

I start my meditation with a true story that will serve as a parable. On his 21st birthday, the nature writer Francis Thompson was presented by his father with a bill for all the expenses of his upbringing including the costs of his birth and delivery. Francis paid the bill, but he never spoke to his father again. This story is recounted in David Graeber’s Debt: The First Five Thousand Years, an excellent account of the history of money. Yet Graber titled his book  “debt”; did he just get it wrong, or did he uncover the essential nature of money?

LONDON – Europe is now haunted by the specter of debt. All European leaders quail before it. To exorcise the demon, they are putting their economies through the wringer.

It doesn’t seem to be helping. Their economies are still tumbling, and the debt continues to grow. The credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s has just downgraded the sovereign-debt ratings of nine eurozone countries, including France. The United Kingdom is likely to follow.

detailed and regularly updated blog by the mysterious Lord Keynes. Engaged (sometimes vociferously) in the MMT vs Austrian debate. An excellent resource on the theories of the origin of money.

When I began blogging about Modern Monetary Theory, I knew I risked alienating or at least annoying some of my Austrian Economics friends. The Austrians are a combative lot, used to fighting on the fringes of economic thought for what they see as their overlooked and important insights into the workings of the economy.

My name is Zach Elwood. I’ve got a book on poker tells and live poker psychology coming out near the end of 2011. It will be called ‘Reading Poker Tells’. You can check out my Twitter account at @apokerplayer or email me at info (at) readingpokertells.com.

I’ve always been primarily interested in the psychological aspects of poker. I like studying people, figuring out their personal strategies and tendencies, and trying to use that knowledge to my advantage. I love calling a big bluff, betting someone off a hand when I sense weakness, and reading the psychological ebb and flow of individual players and the game as a whole. I think poker is a tremendously deep game; the more I have studied it, the more psychological complexity I find.

My old site was unceremoniously dumped when Geocities closed down, so I built this one purely as a stop-gap until I can be bothered to build a proper new one. However I'm starting to really like Google's authoring software, so it might stick around for quite a while! These pages contain the same snippets of home-spun software, science, literature and philosophy from the old site, plus some new stuff: my Ruby projects with source code to download.

There’s a page devoted to my ideas about minimal software user interfaces called Simpleware with a couple of sample programs to try, and a page of collected quotes and reflections I call Cool Quotes.

The Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions was set up in 2008 to bring together scholars, writers and artists exploring the ways our feelings have changed over time.

The idea for a blog arose because members of the Centre were keen to find a medium for sharing their ideas with a wider public, responding quickly to current events and inviting the contributions of others.

From reflections on contemporary politics of feeling (Cameron’s Happiness Index anyone?), to quirky microhistories in the Museum of the Emotions, this blog is a collective endeavour in which we put our attitudes towards emotions - and explanations for why we have them at all – into historical context.

We hope you enjoy reading and participating in it. If you would like to contribute, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Thomas Dixon and Tiffany Watt-Smith

This is the English language version of the entry on ‘Money’ (‘Geld’) in the ‘Historisch Kritisch
Wörterbuch des Marxismus’, a comprehensive dictionary of Marxist terminology being produced as
an accompaniment to the Marx-Engels-Gesamt-Arbeite (Marx-Engels collected works), a
comprehensive critical edition of the works of Marx and Engels: Historisch Kritisch Wörterbuch
des Marxismus, Band 5: Gegenöffentlichkeit–Hegemonialapparat. Hamburg: Argument-Verlag,
ISBN 3-88619-435-

In September 1981 the prestigious scientific journal Nature carried an unsigned
editorial (subsequently acknowledged to be by the journal’s senior editor, John
Maddox) titled ‘A book for burning?’ (Maddox, 1981). It reviewed and damned
Rupert Sheldrake’s then recently published book A New Science of Life: The
Hypothesis of Causative Formation (Sheldrake, 1981

The postings are meant to provide topical additions, comments, and reactions to relevant developments since the publication of The Imprinted Brain. They also provide an opportunity to answer critics, correct errors, draw attention to relevant research, and to post suggestions which may be important in the future.

ServiceSpace is an all volunteer-run organization that leverages technology to inspire greater volunteerism. It's a space to explore our own relationship with service and our interconnection with the rest of the world. ServiceSpace allows our inherent generosity to blossom out into small acts of service for the community around us. It's a space to learn how outer change is closely tied to our own inner transformation. It's about changing ourselves, to change the world.

Regenerosity is a system for recognition of voluntary service, philanthropy & gift, civic engagement, trade, commerce, work, and any other contributions to the health and wealth of our communities. If you are a member of any community, whether as a person, as a non-profit organization, or as a for-profit business, there is something in it for you. As a person, you receive recognition for voluntarism, philanthropy, civic service, and many other types of community-building participation. As a non-profit organization, you receive tools for volunteer & donor recognition and access to untapped sources of support. As a for-profit business, you receive tools for customer loyalty & econometrics and access to untapped sources of working capital. As a school, you receive interactive tools for teaching economics & civics and for promoting community service. Everyone receives tools for measurement and analysis of social capital (their own and that of their communities) and practical tools to build community self-reliance and sustainable local economy, including community-based mutual credit systems.

libcom.org is a resource for all people who wish to fight to improve their lives, their communities and their working conditions. We want to discuss, learn from successes and failures of the past and develop strategies to increase the power we, as ordinary people, have over our own lives.

open source currency project

Is the economy just in a recession or is their a bigger transformation afoot? Symbionomics is a media project about the new economy.

Just a couple of primates who figured that talking about math was a better use of their time than throwing their poo.  Podcasts will cover Mathematics Education, Evolutionary Game Theory, Mathematical Philosophy, Logic, Quantum nonsense, and anything else that seems even remotely tied to mathematics in science or society.

The personal site of Keith Hart. Also includes text of his book Memory Bank.

MMT: Taxes function to regulate aggregate demand, and not to raise revenue per se.

Meet Fran Ilich, a media artist and activist who started his own investment bank six years ago with nothing more than server space. On the eve of Bank Transfer Day, he sits with me in the dimly lit kitchen of Eyebeam Art and Technology Center where he is a fellow, to discuss the Spacebank and how he ended up at Occupy Wall Street.

The bank is a complex nano-macro economy that includes funds and eleven virtual enterprises that can be traded in a stock exchange. Ilich has set a virtual currency, the Digital Material Sunflower, designed to help people achieve their goals.

The interpretation of dreams was the first text in which Freud referred to the system of two drives (drive of self-preservation and the sexual drive). In order to understand how this question was at work in Freud's mind, one has to go back to 1898, when Freud began to write the third chapter of The interpretation of dreams. One can then see, in contrast with Sulloway's assertions, how Freud was inspired by Schiller, whose shadow haunted his dreams between April and December 1898. The analysis of these dreams emphasizes how the references to Schiller's works and to the drive of self-preservation cover sexual impulses, in particular, those connected with the relationship to the father.

If this risks sounding metaphysical, so it should as the Euro faces its own existential crisis. A follow up to an earlier article on the perils of printing more and more money without the controlling influence of gold.

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

The reason I blog is because there are not many people writing about the topic I'd most like to engage people in. Specifically, it is about currencies as social DNA.

You see, corporations, institutions, governments, and nations are in fact living organisms. This is not a lofty metaphor, but literal truth.

They have a survival instinct to self-perpetuate, they breed new corporations and institutions, and even as the cells within them are replaced, their fundamental pattern continues. And we are their cells.

Freudian thought on origins translates an effort to think the extraindividual, in order to anchor the subject within the ancestral lineage and the history of the species as well as within biology. Several modalities can be discerned: the myth of origins; the genetic myth—the foundational role of the drives as a substrate of the psyche; and primal fantasies and/or fantasies of origins.

A fixture of online gaming, virtual currencies are moving into other digital markets and may break into the physical world. But will acceptance costs and regulatory concerns stymie their growth?

For the aspiring long-term winner – aka the advantage player – it goes something like this. First you memorize Basic Strategy: whether to hit, split, double down, or stand, based solely upon the value of your hand and the dealer’s upcard. Hit sixteen versus seven. Always split aces, never fives. Double ten against nine or less. And so on. In a single deck game, well-executed basic strategy brings you neck-and-neck with the house, advantage-wise.

Then, as seen in the movies, you learn to count cards.

For more than a year, the American Bankers Association has pushed to limit the power and budget of the government’s newest consumer watchdog agency. The association, which includes the nation’s largest banks as members, is spending about $2 million every four months on lobbying, according to the Associated Press, most of it to limit the authority of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform act that created it.
But there’s at least one area where the ABA wants more regulation instead of less: FarmVille.
In a letter to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the bank association asked the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to consider regulating virtual currencies, like those used on FarmVille and Second Life.

Encouraged by the constructive spirit of the Occupy Wall Street movement, I have been keenly interested in the ways in which mental health professionals are helping us to understand the dynamics of our country's troubles.   For our country's problems not only involve the dynamics of economics, war, and politics, they involve the dynamics of human psychology.   We are lucky to have a number of Psychology Today bloggers weighing in on the subject.  Here's my two cents—a psychoanalyst's take on perhaps the most important issue in our day.

As email, documents, and almost every aspect of our professional and personal lives moves onto the “cloud”—remote servers we rely on to store, guard, and make available all of our data whenever and from wherever we want them, all the time and into eternity—a brush with disaster reminds the author and his wife just how vulnerable those data can be. A trip to the inner fortress of Gmail, where Google developers recovered six years’ worth of hacked and deleted e‑mail, provides specific advice on protecting and backing up data now—and gives a picture both consoling and unsettling of the vulnerabilities we can all expect to face in the future.

Recent contributions to the study of the evolution of early human society from its prehuman primatepredecessors make it possible to reassess Freud’s theory of the ‘‘primal crime’’ put forward in the fourthessay of 
Totem and Taboo 
. Shorn of its antiquated language, and of its unnecessary ‘‘Lamarckism,’’ Freud’spicture of the transition from prehuman to early hominid social structure turns out to have been remarkably plausi-ble and prescient. [psychoanalytic anthropology, Freud’s cultural theory, ‘‘
Totem and Taboo 
,’’ human evolution,egalitarianism

The great financial crisis has been marked by the failure of models both qualitative and quantitative. During the past two decades the United States has suffered the decline of manufacturing; the ballooning of the financial sector; that sector’s capture of the regulatory system; ceaseless stimulus whenever the economy has wavered; taxpayer-funded bailouts of large capitalist corporations; crony capitalism; private profits and public losses; the redemption of the rich and powerful by the poor and weak; companies that shorted stock for a living being legally protected from the shorting of their own stock; compromised yet unpunished ratings agencies; government policies that tried to cure insolvency by branding it as illiquidity; and, on the quantitative side, the widespread use of obviously poor quantitative security valuation models for the purpose of marketing.

I HAVE a solution for the problem of bankers who take risks that threaten the general public: Eliminate bonuses.
Related News
More than three years since the global financial crisis started, financial institutions are still blowing themselves up. The latest, MF Global, filed for bankruptcy protection last week after its chief executive, Jon S. Corzine, made risky investments in European bonds. So far, lenders and shareholders have been paying the price, not taxpayers. But it is only a matter of time before private risk-taking leads to another giant bailout like the ones the United States was forced to provide in 2008.

I am Sustainability Manager within the think tank of the Institute of Chartered Accounts in England and Wales.

I am one of four co-founders of The Finance Innovation Lab, the largest social innovation project in Europe focused on finance.

I am also and one of five co-founders of UnLtd*Future, a programme of support for social entrepreneurs with sustainable and disruptive business models in partnership with WWF, Nesta, UnLtd*, Shirlaws and Imperial College.

Can the psychology of scarce attention help explain why nobody saw the
financial crisis coming? And does cognitive science suggest that economists’
assumption of rational decisions is fundamentally flawed?
At a recent workshop at the Toulouse School of Economics, researchers
described the phenomenon of ‘inattentional blindness’, whereby people
looking at a scene fail to see the obvious. ‘Seeing’ is not a matter of looking
at an internal representation of the outside world, but rather depends on an
active cognitive process of paying attention to certain things. The structure
of the brain, whereby neurons at different levels compete with each other to
move up to higher levels of the brain, determines what we pay attention to.

Recent contributions to the study of the evolution of early human society from its prehuman primatepredecessors make it possible to reassess Freud’s theory of the ‘‘primal crime’’ put forward in the fourthessay of 
Totem and Taboo 
. Shorn of its antiquated language, and of its unnecessary ‘‘Lamarckism,’’ Freud’spicture of the transition from prehuman to early hominid social structure turns out to have been remarkably plausi-ble and prescient

Hackers' virtual currency and favoured means of exchange drops from $33 high in August to below $2 as cost of 'mining' coins falls below real-world exchange rate

We spend a lot of time thinking about money, one way or another. We think about how to get our hands on it, how to keep it safe and how to spend it. When we aren't asleep, there's a good chance that we're paying attention to money. But while money is never far from our thoughts, there is something curious about our relationship with it. For all that we use it to get through the day, most of us don't know what it is.

From last night’s GA [Occupy Wall Street "General Assembly"] meeting: “Work began today on a proposal trying to implement a currency for this movement. The Wall Street banks and their best customers, the multinational corporations control the source and flow of $$$$. This is an open invitation for you to join us in this process! We will be meeting at 11am every day, every week, until we’re done, at the red cube in the Southeast corner of Liberty Park.”

David Graeber and Robert Murphy have been debating the validity of the monetary regression theory.  They seem to be talking past one another.  Graeber is assuming that Austrian theory agrees with neo-classical theory in areas where it does not, and Murphy is assuming that Graeber is substantially more familiar with Austrian ideas than he seems to be.  To clear up the confusion, we need to take a step back and start at the beginning.


Like all theoretical sciences, economics is concerned with the identification of invariants.  Austrian theory and the more mainstream neo-classical theory agree on this much, but strongly disagree on methodology.

In this groundbreaking work, first published in 1976, Friedrich von Hayek argues that the government monopoly of money must be abolished to stop recurring bouts of inflation and deflation. Abolition is also the cure for the more deep-seated disease of the recurring waves of depression and unemployment attributed to 'capitalism'.

“When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss money.” – Oscar Wilde

During today’s financial crisis, art has been frequently cited as an advantageous alternative asset class. But do the millions of dollars that might buy you a Koons or a Picasso speak about the social and spiritual value?

This Art-as-Money-blog will explore the connections and frictions between money and art. Where do those two worlds meet? And where do they clash? Or is it actually one big world with various perspectives? And last but not least: What are your thoughts about those topics? Get involved in the discussion and don’t hesitate to share your thoughts and ideas by giving your comments!

The first mathematically and scientifically stable currency standard,
That can be deployed by anyone, any time, any place and for any transaction. Bibocurrency shows that for currency stability, there is absolutely no mathematical or scientific reason for making currency scarce on the basis of past economic performance. just like there is no logical reason to limit the ability to score points in today’s tennis game on the basis of
How well or poorly one played yesterday.

This page shows the value and market cap of Bitcoin and some of its clones.

My latest book, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, is now available.

Order it from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookstore. You can also read a preview containing several chapters at http://books.google.com/.

My latest book, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, is now available.

Order it from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookstore. You can also read a preview containing several chapters at http://books.google.com/.

Nearly £13 billion worth of bank notes were destroyed by the Bank of England last year, either by being burned or turned into compost.

a graphical representation of banking consolidation in the US since 1990

I work as a researcher at the Network Society research programme at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Finland. Since January 2010, I am a Visiting Scholar at the Interfaculty Initiative for Information Studies at the University of Tokyo.
In my research, I examine the social and economic impact of new information technologies, especially online games, social networks and mobile phones. My particular area of expertise is the materialistic side of digital environments: how people's behaviour is shaped by virtual currencies, game items and digital work.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) was created to broaden and accelerate the development of new economic thinking that can lead to solutions for the great challenges of the 21st century.

The havoc wrought by our recent global financial crisis has vividly demonstrated the deficiencies in our outdated current economic theories, and shown the need for new economic thinking – right now.

INET is supporting this fundamental shift in economic thinking through research funding, community building, and spreading the word about the need for change. We already are a global community of thousands of new economic thinkers, ranging from Nobel Prize winning economists to teachers and students who have emerged out from the shadows of prevailing economic thought, attracted by the promise of a free and open economic discourse.

Ripplepay.com is a payment system where everyone is a banker. Connect to your friends, family, and associates and your credit with them becomes a fully-functional currency. Read more.

This magazine is run entirely by self-organised volunteers who want to see the disparate parts of the complementary currency movement acting more in concert.

With no resources, we aim to have a broad volunteer base, each contributing a little over a long period of time, and not stressing out.

We aim to publish articles which are

helpful to designers and implementers of community currencies,
of interest to specialists and newbies alike,
from a broad range of countries and language groups
You are invited to take the pdf and print it out for free. Later we may offer some sort of advertising / sponsorship arrangement if we decide it is appropriate to take money.

Venessa Miemis's blog

Hector Rufrancos is an economist. His research interests are wide and varied. They mainly relate to labour economics, inequality, debt, financial economics.

michaeljhamilton has yet to write his blurb. He prefers it that way (for now). You’re invited to take his word for it that he knows his onions. Vegetables aside, you should view with considerable scepticism his ramblings about money, finance and geopolitics.

In the parish of Catahoula, Louisiana, during the 1840s Samuel Miller lived on his plantation with Patsy, his mulatto slave and sexual partner. In 1843, as Miller fell ill with dropsy, he sold the land and his slaves to Hugh Lucas, settling for nine promissory notes of $3,000 each, to be paid yearly. In April 1844, Miller, who was in declining health, left Louisiana with Patsy for St. Louis, Missouri. Before leaving, Miller gave the promissory notes to William Kirk, asking him to "keep them for Patsy's benefit" since "he intended to have her emancipated, and that he wanted the notes to enure to her benefit" (Cole v. Lucas, 2 La. Ann. 1946, 1948 (1847)).1 The previous year, Miller had granted Kirk power of attorney, authorizing him to emancipate Patsy

A visualisation of spending in US dollars

What we commonly refer to as “the economy” can be understood on three levels:

Psychology – What do humans value, and therefore seek? Why?
Economics – How do humans behave in the domain of activities related to seeking value?
Technology – What mechanisms and systems are used to mediate economic behavior?
Mainstream coverage of “the economy” is myopically focused on the day to day details of one specific set of technologies – the markets and conventions that pervaded the industrial economy. But, these specific technologies and conventions represent only only a subset of the total universe of value exchange. The mainstream coverage has completely lost touch with the reasons why these technologies exist at all. What are the fundamental values that real people seek to satisfy?

Now a new set of technologies is emerging that threatens to disrupt the current paradigm, but that does not mean existing knowledge can be safely ignored. Those economic insights that describe fundamental human motivations will continue to be relevant in any technological environment. This blog addresses psychology, economics, and technology in an effort to better understand what will persist, what will be threatened by disruption, and what emerging technologies offer the most promise of producing real human value.

A collection of links to sources from Roy Davies at Exeter

The History of a Music Business Revolution by Roy Davies from Exeter

Every major label involved in the hunt for new bands now has on staff a high-profile point man, an "A & R" rep who can present a comfortable face to any prospective band. The initials stand for "Artist and Repertoire." because historically, the A & R staff would select artists to record music that they had also selected, out of an available pool of each. This is still the case, though not openly.
These guys are universally young [about the same age as the bands being wooed], and nowadays they always have some obvious underground rock credibility flag they can wave. Lyle Preslar, former guitarist for Minor Threat, is one of them. Terry Tolkin, former NY independent booking agent and assistant manager at Touch and Go is one of them. Al Smith, former soundman at CBGB is one of them. Mike Gitter, former editor of XXX fanzine and contributor to Rip, Kerrang and other lowbrow rags is one of them. Many of the annoying turds who used to staff college radio stations are in their ranks as well.

Then join the growing movement of academics, economists, and social activists advocating the institution of an Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) paid to every citizen without exception.

It would overcome the “poverty trap”. Conventional welfare schemes and unemployment benefits create perverse incentives that breed dependency. (Getting a job doesn’t sound like such a good idea if it means your welfare checks dry up!) Replace conditional welfare with a UBI and more people will want to work.

The UBI increases the real freedom and bargaining power of the worst-off, who can then afford to walk away from exploitative employers. With the security of a UBI, workers can negotiate fairer wages and working conditions. (Note that this relieves the need for minimum wage laws and labour regulations. We can free up the market and hence boost the economy, counterbalancing the taxes needed to fund the UBI.)