# Money * Author: [Geoffrey Ingham](https://www.amazon.comundefined) * ASIN: B083Q4HS8T * ISBN: 1509526811 * Pages: 155 pages * Publication: January 8, 2020 * Publisher: Polity; 1st edition (January 8, 2020) * Reference: [[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083Q4HS8T]] * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B083Q4HS8T) --- Money is not merely Hume’s ‘oil’ for economic ‘wheels’; it is, rather, the ‘social technology’ without which the ‘classical’ economists’ physical capital cannot be set in motion and developed. — location: [222](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B083Q4HS8T&location=222) --- Only ‘real’ forces of production – technology, labour – create new value, and their input cannot be increased simply by injections of money. Consequently, if monetary expansion runs ahead of these ‘real’ forces, inflation inevitably follows. On the other hand, the broadly Keynesian and heterodox tradition continues to argue that money is the vital productive resource – a ‘social technology’ – that can be used to create non-inflationary economic growth and employment. — location: [259](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B083Q4HS8T&location=259)These both seem true to me. Why do they have to be mutually exclusive? --- However, the centuries-old persistence and intensity of the unresolved disputes tells us that money is not merely this technical device to be managed by economic experts. Rather, it is also a source of social power to get things done (‘infrastructural power’) and to control people (‘despotic power’) (Ingham, 2004, 4). The ‘money question’ lies at the centre of all political struggles about the kind of society we want and how it might be achieved. — location: [286](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B083Q4HS8T&location=286) --- Although the equation is a logical identity in which each side equals the other, it was generally assumed that MV determines PT: that is, the quantity of money is the causal factor in price inflation. In chapter 4, we will see that ‘quantity theory’ lay behind the ‘monetarist’ attempts in the 1970s and 1980s to control inflation. — location: [490](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B083Q4HS8T&location=490) --- states also became issuers of IOUs as payment for goods and services which were redeemed, in turn, by their acceptance as payment of taxes imposed by the state. Both developments replaced the fragile personal trust in the IOUs, based on the viability of the merchants in the networks, with impersonal trust in the issuing bank and state authority. — location: [690](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B083Q4HS8T&location=690) --- If the state does not adopt self-imposed restrictions such as a gold standard on the supply of money, MMT contends that the state – as the sovereign money power – can simply spend money into existence. — location: [780](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B083Q4HS8T&location=780)An independent central bank would also constrain the government's ability to expand the money supply