what resources and methods would you recommend if someone wants to understand money , how it functions? don't want to understand it for the personal financial purposes but just for the sake of understanding.
I'm assuming you mean that want to understand monetary policy, what makes money trustworthy/valuable, inflation, etc. Here are a few books that I thought were good, but I also wish I knew about a single better resource:<p>- The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson (This also has a documentary)<p>- Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed or Fail by Ray Dalio (not directly about money but does a good job at explaining reserve currencies, types of currencies, debt cycles, inflation, all of which are related)<p>- What is Money, anyway? [0]<p>[0] <a href="https://www.lynalden.com/what-is-money/" rel="nofollow">https://www.lynalden.com/what-is-money/</a>
The problem with this topic is that it's highly contested. Be prepared for foundational and often ideological controversies. You know, a lot's at stake.<p>To get an idea of the mainstream and where the general mood is, I'd start from Wikipedia.<p>For bank money:<p>- <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_money" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_money</a><p>- <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_circuit_theory" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_circuit_theory</a><p>For central bank money (basically cash):<p>- <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_creation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_creation</a><p>- <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartalism" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartalism</a><p>Note that both monetary circuit theory and chartalism are considered _heterodox_ economics. Yes, "regular" economics is called _orthodox_!<p>I personally think Modern Monetary Theory nails it. The MMT Podcast (<a href="http://themmtpodcast.com/" rel="nofollow">http://themmtpodcast.com/</a>) is accessible, entertaining, and non-dogmatic. A beautiful introductory book is "1000 Castaways: Fundamentals of Economics" by Clint Ballinger.
In what way do you mean "how money works?" Do you mean it from a technical standpoint, like "how a bank transfers money?" Do you mean it in the "how things like the stock market work" sense? Do you mean it in the "how money is printed" sense?<p>Point being that "money" is a large set of topics. It would be helpful to narrow that down a little bit.
Read Keynes' "general theory of employment interest and money" and Silvio Gesell's "natural economic order".<p>After that you will have to update your understanding of money to the modern system of deposits being created through debt which is a simple result of money being equivalent to accounting aka MMT. I recommend reading Wolfgang Stützel's "balance mechanics" just to get a basic understanding about global mathematical identities in accounting and dividing the economy into large sectors that interact with each other and "Money Syndrome" by Helmut Creutz.<p>If you are lazy and don't have time you can also watch the root bug videos on YouTube. <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xkQn56Dtslk" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xkQn56Dtslk</a>
Check this out: <a href="https://youtu.be/puIAG8ienB8" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/puIAG8ienB8</a>
Economics of Money and Banking | Coursera
I think it as basic and as deep as it gets and a great teacher Perry Mehrling
There are no right answers.. My personal understanding is that any economic activity is directly proportional to energy spent and no of operations or movements... To explain with example.. Aws has many cloud services sql, ai, networking, etc... All of which can run on x86 arc.. All of x86 instruction set can be replaced as set of x86 MOV operations so only diff between different services is no of MOV instructions executed and how much energy it took to execute the operations... In conclusion you could say value = total no mov ops * energy consumed
What has Government Done to Our Money - Murray Rothbard.<p>Read it and you will understand money better than 99.9% of the population, including most economists.
To truly "understand" money is not just about economics, but political philosophy. What used to be termed "political economy".<p>At a very very high level you can think of money as a promise of labour. Having it allows society to cooperate asynchronously. But there are all manner of scenarios where promises break down.
I think Fed reports and papers are both good sources. All major central banks and IMF publish numerous reports and papers every year.<p>Other than that, books about economic history e.g. how Gold Standard worked could also be interesting.