Conference Archives – Just Money

Podcast
MDM 2018: Welcoming Remarks

Podcast: Christine Desan opens the first Money as a Democratic Medium conference.

Christine Desan, Harvard Law School

Recognizing money and credit as public projects exposes issues of democratic purpose and possibility. In a novel focus,

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Podcast
MDM 2018: Monetary Sovereignty, Democracy, and Economic Development

Recognizing the character of money as a sovereign project throws the complexity of economic development, especially in a globalized monetary system, into high relief. The hegemony of certain moneys as reserve currencies, the dense growth

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Podcast
MDM 2018: Financialization and Inequality

Over the past few decades, the advanced capitalist countries have become increasingly financialized against a backdrop of deepening wealth and income inequality. How do we conceptualize and analyze the distributive consequences of the

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Podcast
MDM 2018 Panel: Complementary Currencies

Communities for centuries have deployed tax anticipation credit enhanced with cash properties as money; arguably the practice defines what creates a viable unit of account. The contemporary issue is how communities may choose to facilitate

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Podcast
MDM 2018 Panel: Monies and the State in an Age of Empire

Is money a democratic medium in an age of empire? This panel explores the roles of conflicting and complementary forms of finance in the British and French empires during the Age of Revolution. Participant papers show how even within seemingly

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Podcast
MDM 2018 Panel: Money, Democracy, and Morality

The way we approach money shapes the moral implications that attach to its design and use. If money is a commodity or private trade credit that emanates from decentralized exchange, it might claim democratic legitimacy from its very genealogy.

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Podcast
MDM 2018 Panel: Behind the Green Curtain: Information Insensitivity, Information Encapsulation and the Democratic Project of Money

Money as a democratic project must engage with received economic thinking that underpins money creation and central banking design and practice. This thinking supports limiting the overt politics of the governance of money in the interest

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Podcast
MDM 2018 Panel: Democratizing Money’s Power & Protection

This panel explores the problems and possibilities for developing money as a vehicle that transforms existing pervasive inequality and insecurity. How can a democratic vision reimagine credit and liquidity as more than a means for measuring

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Podcast
MDM 2018 Panel: Economic Democracy through Monetary Design

Recognizing money as a public project necessarily leads to a re-examination of the types of economic institutions promoted by our monetary system. Throughout American history, both social movements and the US government have seen the potential

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Podcast
MDM 2018: History and Theory

If money is a complex collective enterprise, protean in design possibilities both in practice and conception, then it has a history of change, carries profound moral significance, and lays a rightful claim to the concern of citizens and political

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Podcast
MDM 2018 Plenary Session: The Public Option and The Narrow Bank (TNB)

Recent work identifies money as a utility or infrastructural service, suggesting the government’s obligation to provide access and to equalize compensation paid to those holding deposits. Innovative proposals for redesign argue that

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Podcast
MDM 2018 Keynote: The Color of Money: Banking and Racial Inequality

In the American tradition, commercial banking claimed public support in exchange for delivering public services. It has become increasingly clear that those services are both failing the poor and distributing resources, including access,

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Podcast
MDM 2018 Panel: The Monetary Case for a Job Guarantee

Significant evidence suggests that employment leads rather than trails economic growth. That conclusion supports programmatic initiatives to create jobs directly in the public sector. At issue here are models that identify sovereign

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Podcast
MDM 2018 Panel: The Public and its Money Problems

The title of this panel is a variation on John Dewey’s 1927 book “The Public and Its Problems” in order to direct attention to the political turmoil that is connected to the logic of capitalism. As it is less and less tenable for progressive analyses

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Podcast
MDM 2018 Panel: Monetary Politics in U.S. History

This interdisciplinary panel examines periods of transformative monetary change in the 19th and 20th century. Participants’ research revises conventional portrayals of antebellum banking and its political/legal legacies, financial

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Podcast
MDM 2018- Wrapping Up

We conclude with brief comments from participants on a small number of core questions, including (1) what themes emerged most powerfully across the conference sessions, and (2) what steps can we take to ensure that this conversation continues

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