The Origins of Money

Kanes is arguably the single most important economic thinker of the twentieth century, before or since. He spent several years in the 19 twenties studying mesopotamian cuneaform banking records to try to ascertain the origins of money. His babylonian madness, as he would later call it, his conclusion was more or less the only conclusion one could come to. For the last four thousand years, money has been effectively a creature of the state. The implications were radical, but kanes himself was not in the end careful to frame the problem in a way that could be re integrated into the main stream economics of his day.