Advancing Money Talks

Money MesMeRizes a nd MysTifies. Its influence extends far beyond the steely confines of numbers, ledgers, and rational calculations. Yet, for a long time economists managed to keep monetary analysis safely constrained within technical territory. Coinciding with Gertrude Stein’s (1936: 88) sober dictum that “whether you like it or whether you do not, money is money and that is all there is about it,” economic analyses demystified money’s range. They did so by certifying that a dollar is a dollar, no matter how it is earned, who earns it, or how it is spent. In short, when it behaved, money functioned as an impersonal medium of exchange and, therefore, could move efficiently. But money has been escaping its narrow domain. At the start of the twentyfirst century, novel investigations challenge and reshape our understandings of how money works. Breaking down artificial barriers between the worlds of money and social life, analysts from multiple disciplines document money’s integration into the spheres of interpersonal relations, cultural practices, moral concerns, legal regulation, historical variation, religious meaning, and political disputes. Within economics itself, new analyses of money have reshaped the conversation. Most notably, the influential mental accounting theory developed in the late 1970s to early 1980s by Richard Thaler, Daniel Kahneman, and Amos Tversky, redirected economic thinking about money by introducing unexpected evidence about monetary differentiation. Monetary innovations transcend academia. In recent years, the surge of new currencies and payment systems has transformed how we use money and how we think about it. Along with cash, credit cards, debit cards, and checks, we can now pay with Square, Google Wallet, Apple Pay, Venmo, as well as with a multiplying set of cryptocurrencies, most notably Bitcoin. Or consider how inTRodUcTion advancing Money Talks