The Nature of Money: The History of the Social Accounting System Approach
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| Year of publication | 2010 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The aim of this paper is to map the early history of the social accounting system approach to the nature money, identify its individual expositions and to try to find possible connections between them. The social accounting system is a mechanism which monitors participations of individual agents in the economic processes: takes care of individuals' contributions to the social economy and the benefits drawn by them from it and imposes the logic of budget constraints. It is not a mere theoretical concept but rather the real implementation of the mechanism of budget constraints into the actual social economy. According to the social accounting system approach to the nature of money, here rests the ontology of money: the nature and necessity of money (what money is and why does it exist) consists in this practical implementation, money is the social accounting system. Ideas near to this approach may be found in works of some anti-metalists (e.g. John Law), authors who identified money with tickets (e.g. Berkeley), proponents of the "income approach" to price level (e.g. Tooke, J. S. Mill). First genuine exposition of the approach was fund in Bastiat, further are in Macleod, Wicksell, Wieser, Mitchell-Innes, Schumpeter and Hawtrey. Social accounting approach to the nature of money did not constitute a coherent track of thoughts in the second half of 19th century and beginning of 20th century, nevertheless some monetary theorists of high repute individually came out with similar ideas about the nature of money and its major role in the social accounting processes, leaving clear hints for further development of the approach by future generations of economists. |