gwgundersen

This is a fair point, and rhymes with other commentators’ feedback. I could have started with `Obligation -> Debt -> Money`, for example, and that strikes me as a better beginning. People need money to pay their debts, and this theme would re-appear at various levels of the hierarchy: the villager needs stones to pay taxes, the village needs black money to pay tribute, and so forth. I think this would add meaningful nuance to the "just so" motivations; money isn't solely motivated by trade but also by social obligations and political power.

That said, I would not find a full Graeber-ization helpful. It wouldn't change the structure of the post, and I don't think Graeber's framework is useful for understanding much of the content, such as the Fed funds rate, the intra-bank clearinghouse, or correspondent banking.

I’m happy to hear criticism and to learn from that, but I wrote this myself. Took quite a while.

Re: why, I don’t think most people understand the very basics of the global economy in mechanical terms, and this was my attempt to explain those mechanics. I wanted the various pieces of the system to be motivated by understandable problems, hence the fable-like story.

I now see some folks were triggered by this stylized approach. Which is a pity. I think the simple setup is worth the payoff. My explanation of money creation, for example, matches the Bank of England’s whitepaper, and I am especially pleased with how the idea of a reserve currency both develops naturally and rhymes with earlier ideas lower in the hierarchy.

2) Thanks for pointing this out. I've fixed.

Thanks! I'll fix this.

I have a theory that whatever popularity my blog has comes from writing to the level of the reader. My favorite example of the opposite behavior is how every blog post on a topic involving Bayesian inference seemingly must start with Bayes’ formula.

I really like Katex. I used to use MathJax for my blog, but the page reflow was annoying. Now I use Katex with server-side rendering, and even pages with a lot of math load quickly and without reflow.

Thank you!