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Before there was money, there was debt Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems—to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it.Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.  Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history—as well as how it has defined human history, and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy.

We’ve wasted a century looking at government as if it were a family or a business. It isn’t. As the monopolist controlling American currency, the government doesn’t ever have to worry about running out of money. It can always fund social security and Medicare, and many other programs besides. Instead of fiscal deficits, we should be looking at the deficits in society, because we can do everything to alleviate them with our currency power and expanded deficits. This is the essence of the powerfully shocking The Deficit Myth, economist Stephanie Kelton’s book on Modern Monetary Theory.Written without a mathematical formula or spreadsheets to bamboozle the reader, this most readable book lays out how America came to this point, and how very much more it could do for itself if it would just open its eyes to it. Kelton is a proponent of Modern Monetarist Theory, MMT. She learned from Warren Mosler, who pieced it together over a lifetime of observations. She has been researching and speaking about it for decades, with little evidence of success. Kelton says America does not use and does not need taxes to fund its operations. Taxes simply create demand for the sovereign currency. All Americans need dollars to pay taxes at all levels. Without that necessity, no one would care for American money. Taxes do allow governments to provision themselves without the use of force, she says. But if the government manufactures the currency, it doesn’t need the tax money to operate day to day. It just creates dollars as it goes. That’s how it works today, and taking things to the next level would create wealth and comfort for all. Here’s the part that requires rewiring brains: Fiscal surpluses suck money out of the economy. If surpluses persist for too long, eventually the economy will hit a wall, she says. Less money circulating means slower business, and added debt for non-government entities, which they can’t pay off. In six major recessions, each was preceded by a period of balanced budgets. If surpluses take money out of taxpayers’ hands, fiscal deficits spread the wealth outside the government to the private sector and to other countries. (Instead, current wisdom says government sending crowds out other investment.) Deficits naturally drive interest rates to zero, she says. While not an MMT economist, I learned this the hard way (is there any other) in the 2008 financial crisis. When the Fed pumped a then incredible seven trillion dollars into the economy by magically creating new dollars it handed out to banks, I reasonably figured this would dilute the currency and cause it to fall. Interest rates should therefore rise dramatically, because US money would be worth so much less. You can’t suddenly print seven trillion additional dollars without it affecting the currency, I believed. History shows the dollar has gone only one way – up, and interest rates have gone only one way – down. This is Alice in Wonderland, unfathomable and upside down. But it’s the way things really work, not the way things are taught. Our lying eyes are all that keep us from the safety, security and prosperity that the world’s most powerful currency provides in the form of expandable deficits. It didn’t always work this way. History demonstrates how constrained the country was under the gold standard, when money could only be issued if there was gold stored somewhere to back it. It made growth minimal, and recessions frequent. (It’s why kings of olde had to borrow from international financiers to fund their wars.) American banks used to issue their own dollars, and when they failed, the money disappeared. FDR broke away from the gold standard and Nixon killed it, freeing the Fed, which was only invented in 1913, to manipulate the dollar and interest rates as needed. The Fed was given the monopoly.The Fed has since learned it can inflate its own balance sheet without damaging the economy, which seems to have never occurred to anyone before. Or they would have used it instead of struggling with outdated tools in every recession. Monetarists claimed to be able to manage the economy and deficits by throttling or increasing the money supply. Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan thought unfettered capitalism would allow him to sit on the sidelines and watch the economy grow controllably forever. This creeping evolution of fiscality also incorporates monopoly power over the currency, but pathetically, no government has taken advantage of that power except in crisis.It’s not just the budget deficit, Kelton says. The trade deficit is only a negative factor if the government’s fiscal deficit is smaller than the trade deficit. Otherwise it is harmless. The business of the trade deficit shrinking the economy is a leftover from the gold standard constraints. The trade deficit not only loudly proclaims the wealth of the USA, but provides US dollars to exporting partners, raising their standard of living as well as America’s. Focusing on reducing the trade deficit is not only a waste of time, it is harmful, as tariffs hurt American exporters, importers, producers and consumers alike. It is tariffs that shrink economies, not trade deficits.All federal spending is done the same way – the Fed credits the appropriate bank accounts. Gold is not shipped, nor are hundred dollar bills. It’s all done on a keyboard at the New York Federal Reserve. Nobody waits for taxes to be paid first. It’s the same in most countries that have their own currencies. So Japan and the UK operate the same way, and could use their currencies to boost everyone if they chose to. Countries that are users don’t have that power. The most notable mess that creates can be seen in Europe, where euro nations cannot print their own money. Ironically, the euro itself is a solid candidate for enlarging fiscal deficits for the good of all, but the European Central Bank is totally unwilling, so the power goes unused, and all the countries suffer the austerity of trying to keep their deficits within 3% of GDP. With the coronavirus pandemic, they are desperate to spread some wealth, but they can’t. And America is afraid to do more than send a small check to everyone – one time only. Finally in 2015, Kelton was invited to be the chief economist for Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee. She was invited, almost of course, by Bernie Sanders, one of the few who gets it. Deficit spending has the power to change government completely, and by extension, the lives of all its citizens. And all at no additional cost. It is, or should be, the privilege of being American. But Democrats are as hard a sell as Republicans.Kelton knew she would have a hard time on the Senate Budget Committee, and she was right. Getting this message through the skulls of senators who were elected on budget slashing and deficit reduction platforms is no small task. Kelton and Mosler demonstrated the near impossibility with a Congressman.She and Mosler called in a favor and met for an hour with a member of Congress. He squirmed uncomfortably at the facts they presented, until 45 minutes in, when the light suddenly came on. He got it. But he said he could never say it himself. He couldn’t be the voice of reason, the man with the solution, who stood out from the consensus (even if the consensus was clearly taking the country in the wrong direction). He would rather fit in and live the lie. Is there anything else voters need to know about their political parties?Kelton says: balance the economy, not the budget. The fiscal deficit is not nearly as critical as the welfare deficit, the healthcare deficit, the education deficit, the infrastructure deficit…. Medicare for all would not bankrupt the country, it would free up trillions to be spent on other things, saving many individuals from personal bankruptcy and others from death. It would boost the economy.There is risk in spending more freely. The biggest risk is inflation. The economy must be monitored to ensure the spending doesn’t exceed the country’s capacity to produce. That would create an inflationary spiral, cheapening the currency and causing interest rates to rise. So leaving the spending part in the hands of the politicians is not viable. Kelton calls for an automated response, like unemployment insurance, which expands in hard times and contracts in good times, without interference from Capitol Hill. She prescribes a guaranteed federal job. Anyone who wants a job could work for the government at a livable wage, with benefits. This allows them to keep looking for other work while gainfully employed, a huge advantage. It lets the government build out infrastructure, community works, hospitals – anything that needs people power. And it keeps everyone employed. Because one of the more idiotic aspects of they way things run now is the NEED for unemployed people. The Fed maintains there is a natural level of unemployment which varies with inflation. In order to maintain proper inflation, the Fed wants to see a certain percentage unemployed. So America has never had real full employment, because it thinks that is bad. Some Americans need to suffer if the country is to prosper, is their modus operandum. Kelton says an “automatic stabilizer” of a guaranteed federal job will do far more for the economy and keep it going right, producing at full capacity.I was surprised she didn’t go farther and discuss a universal basic income, which has not only shown to stimulate business and lower poverty, but is also profitable to the government because all the entitlement programs would go away, with all of their applications, interviews, investigations, denials, prosecutions, appeals and bureaucracies. Maybe next book.The USA will stay mired in the doom and gloom of the current recession only because its leaders want to, not because it has to. There should be some advantage to being an American, and not have to suffer to the same extent as countries that don’t have powerful currencies. Expanding the budget deficit costs nothing and grows the economy positively. For all the decades of crying that deficits hamstring our children, no one is suffering from the record of deficits of World War II or Vietnam or the Reagan ballooning. The truth is federal deficits are not only good, they are important tools, and yet, we fight to avoid them.I can’t imagine a more exquisitely timed book. Just when the coronavirus pandemic has destroyed much of the economy, as unemployment soars, millions are behind on rent or mortgages, the government is fumbling around with squirts of help here and there, and mostly for giant corporations (again). Now is clearly the time for MMT to shine. A universal basic income will clearly not only not hurt the economy, it will demonstrably rev it up. A guaranteed federal job would do the same for working age Americans. Not using this no-cost advantage is criminal.The Deficit Myth is about the most hopeful book you can read right now. The more people who understand this, the sooner America can regain its world-beating stature.David Wineberg

After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, films, fiction, work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience. But it will also show that, because of a number of inconsistencies and glitches internal to the capitalist reality program capitalism in fact is anything but realistic.

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Pode is a co-operative puzzler by Norwegian indie developer Henchman & Goon. It was released for the Nintendo Switch on June 21, 2018 and for the PlayStation 4 on February 19, 2019. The game's story centers around a rock trying to help a fallen star work its way back home.The game was nominated for "Original Score" at the 9th Hollywood Music in Media Awards, and for "Best Original Soundtrack Album" at the 2019 G.A.N.G. Awards.

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The extracurricular king of Rushmore Preparatory School is put on academic probation.

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A washed-up superhero actor attempts to revive his fading career by writing, directing, and starring in a Broadway production.

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When one of their own is kidnapped by an angry gangster, the Wolf Pack must track down Mr. Chow, who has escaped from prison and is on the run.

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The neuropeptide S receptor (NPSR) is a member of the G-protein coupled receptor superfamily of integral membrane proteins which binds neuropeptide S (NPS). It was formerly an orphan receptor, GPR154, until the discovery of neuropeptide S as the endogenous ligand. Increased expression of this gene in ciliated cells of the respiratory epithelium and in bronchial smooth muscle cells is associated with asthma. This gene is a member of the G protein-coupled receptor 1 family and encodes a plasma membrane protein. Mutations in this gene have also been associated with this disease.

Point of Inquiry is the radio show and flagship podcast of the Center for Inquiry (CFI), "a think tank promoting science, reason, and secular values in public policy and at the grass roots". Started in 2005, Point of Inquiry has consistently been ranked among the best science podcasts available in iTunes. It has been celebrated for its guests and for the quality of its interviews. Former guests include leading scientists, writers and public intellectuals such as Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Paul Krugman, Lisa Randall, Brian Greene, Oliver Sacks, Susan Jacoby, David Brin and Temple Grandin.

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American drama television series about New York City's drag ball culture during the 1980s and 1990s

A group of vigilantes set out to take down corrupt superheroes who abuse their superpowers.

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