We have our first guest! Artem is a philosopher of corporate ethics with an academic background in economics, and he’s helping us explore what money is.

How do we even go about answering this question? Money is magic, it’s invisible, Marx spoke of the “alchemy of money”. We can trace the history of money, but to do that we already need a theory of what money is so that we can identify it in the historical record. A better approach is to think about the function of money - people when they cooperate face a coordination problem, and they require a technology to solve this.

The standard theory is that money arose from barter, which eventually got intermediated for convenience by an easily-transportable non-perishable good like gold or salt. This, however, does not explain a lot of what money does.

Take the  ...