Quotes from “Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money: A Review Article for Economists”

By David Laidler & Nicholas Rowe (1980)

• If we take the view that money is best understood “as if” it were one among a complex of social institutions, then we would expect the consequences of anticipated inflation to be not just an increase in the consumption of shoe leather, but an adaptation of the social order away from money and markets towards a greater reliance on one form or another of command organization. That would inevitably involve an increase in the dependence of individuals upon other “specific personalities,” and hence a diminution of freedom.#
  EconomicsMoney
• The principal authors of the “shoe leather” approach to analyzing the costs of inflation such as Friedman have expressed far more concern about the importance of controlling or avoiding inflation than their theories could possibly justify, as their opponents have been quick to point out. In this their instincts have, in our view, run far ahead of their analysis.#
  Economics
• The bulk of the General Theory is devoted to showing how monetary instability, in the absence of price level flexibility, will lead to determinate fluctuations in real income and employment, and these are at least as destructive of trust in the individualistic socioeconomic order as price level fluctuations.#
  Economics
• Keynes, being a good Marshallian, had considerable faith in the capacity of an essentially Fabian state to carry out discretionary policy in the public interest, and he advocated that it do so. The modern monetarist believes that the aggregate demand for money function is rather stable and that other sources of macro- instability are hard to predict, and opts for a k percent growth rule. The gold standard advocate distrusts the abilities and the motives of bureaucrats and perhaps also doubts the stability of the demand for money function; hence he prefers to peg the price of money in terms of gold and to rely on the stability of the relative price of that commodity in terms of goods in general.#
  Economics