Unenumerated

What do antiques, time, and gold have in common? They are costly, due either to their original cost or the improbability of their history, ...

Abstract money today primarily involves accounts and other computerized bits, but traditionally came in the form of paper. The Chinese, who...

Way back in 1994 I wrote the following (the "keys" here were envisioned as digital codes acting as car keys): If a loan was taken ...

There's a strong distinction to be made between "wet code," interpreted by the brain, and "dry code," interpreted by...

Genovese coat of arms with gryphons and cross of St. George. Genoa was the most commercially innovative city of premodern times. Insurance, ...

One of my main interests is the history of institutions, and in particular the patterns that recur in successful institutions. These organi...

Unenumerated is going into reruns season. For the next few weeks I will be reposting the best articles from this blog. These will mostly b...

James Hamilton (link below) commits an egregious, but all too common, error: Yet another example, and the one people often think of first, w...

I have a beautful private collection of bank notes from the Free Banking Era in the United States (1837-1863). During this era the U.S. had...

I have run some Monte Carlo simulations of hypothetical oil prices implied by long-term inflation expectations. Based on the Hotelling mode...

Besides the extraordinary rises in commodity prices and near-tripling of the U.S. federal government's default risk , another important...