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Against Money

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A powerful deconstruction of humanity’s most influential invention, from the acclaimed economists J. W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev.

Money is everywhere in our daily lives. It lurks in the swipe of a card at the grocery store, in looming student-loan debts, in the prices of things we want, and in our subconscious navigation of the modern world. Money is an invisible convenience that saves us, as a society, the hassle of bartering for goods and services―a reflection, in our pockets and on our phones, of the hard facts of scarcity and desire. Or is it something more?

In this revelatory book, economists J. W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev explain how and why money is so deeply misunderstood by the world it dominates―as well as the dangerous social implications of this misunderstanding. Against Money tackles the most dearly held “truths” of economics, arguing that the world of money has never been an impartial representation of the world of things. Instead, its existence in different forms―debt, capital, liquidity, and interest―increasingly shapes events in the real world rather than just reflecting them. Sometimes money enables new forms of cooperation; more oftenit facilitates domination. Human existence is not just facilitated by money but also governed by it.

In the tradition of works by Thomas Piketty and David Graeber, Against Money is an erudite, disruptive exposé of the illusions and tyrannies of money. Mason and Jayadev present a radically different way of thinking about money―imagining a hopeful future in which it no longer dictates the possibilities of our collective existence.

352 pages, Hardcover

Published May 5, 2026

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J. W. Mason

3 books4 followers

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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
Profile Image for K— H..
223 reviews
July 8, 2026
“If we close our eyes to what is tangible and knowable in the world in favor of a hallucinatory grid of monetary quantities, we should not be surprised that we so often run into walls” (p. 265).

This is a book from a university press, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that it had a lot of technical jargon. I could see sections of it being read in an undergraduate economics degree or a graduate seminar focusing on the book. It would have helped me if the authors had summarized each section with more accessible language to help me carry ideas through each section.

The blurb really gets at their thesis that money isn’t a neutral arbiter of the world but actively shapes the world though things like debt, capital, liquidity, and interest rates. As the authors briefly note, most laypeople probably understand money like this but apparently a lot of economic theory does not.

In addition to the main point that money shapes the world, the authors provide several examples showing how the metrics of economy are typically obscuring the full picture. In this vein, they focus on interest rates and national accounting metrics, and they discuss how these measures attempt to aggregate very diverse economies and heterogenous items. Still, they say something like GDP can show how much capital is available to be wielded, even if it fails to capture something like human wellbeing.

The authors reference Amartya Sen’s ‘capabilities’ as an example of non-monetary measurement. They use poverty as an example: poverty could mean lack of monetary resources, or lack of “substantive capacities required for a decent life” (p. 260).

Definitions I jotted down:
Interest rate is the price of liquidity
GDP is “an aggregate of money payments” (p. 259), so it measures what capital was available for use…the measure of business activity (and capacity of the system to produce ~things~)
Price indexes try to capture utility—how far does your money get you

I think so much of it just felt unnecessarily difficult to figure out, so I don’t feel like I can rate it too highly. The voice of the writing was fine, but so many of the terms/references weren’t explained well for someone like me.

If you just accept the thesis that money shapes world (in sometimes concerning ways), you can skip to the last 20ish pages where they envision futures beyond money (but that were still a little difficult to parse what point the authors wanted to make).
Profile Image for Thomas Ray.
1,648 reviews552 followers
October 6, 2025
Against Money, J.W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev, 2026, 343 pages, ISBN 9780226842530, Dewey 332.4

J.W. Mason's summary: https://jwmason.org/slackwire/against...

Publisher's blurb and table of contents: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/...

This book is, in part, a review of Keynes's /The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money/.


INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND
The IMF is a creditors' cartel, forcing governments to enrich business owners at the expense of employees. p. 67.

FULL EMPLOYMENT?
A program of full employment would be resisted by business owners, who know that their authority rests on the threat of unemployment. p. 165.

HOUSING-BUBBLE COLLAPSE
Obama protected creditors, while the economy receded. p. 50. The Federal Reserve bought over a trillion dollars of mortgages in 2008. p. 157.


MONEY'S EFFECTS p. 27
1. How easy it is to acquire money shapes real activity. What exists depends on what can be financed. p. 41.
2. Money quantities don't reflect the real world.
3. Gross domestic product and interest rates have meaning only in terms of money.

MYTHS TO DEBUNK p. 9
1. Money doesn't affect economic reality.
2. The central bank has complete control over the money supply.
3. Optimal monetary policy is not a political issue but an objective, technical matter.
The 2007 Lehman Brothers collapse and ensuing global crisis debunked all that.

HOUSEHOLD DEBT
In the U.S., the debt/income ratio is highest for households around the 90th percentile of income; most households with income in the bottom 10% have zero debt. p. 57.

1965-1983, U.S. household debt was stable at 45% of GDP. p. 50. By 2007, it was 100%. p. 50. By 2024, back to 75%. p. 50. The rise in household-debt-to-GDP-ratio was entirely due to slower growth in nominal income and higher interest rates: both due to then-Fed-chair Paul Volcker's 1979-to-1982 shock treatment. Though the Fed lowered the federal funds rate once price-and-wage inflation dropped, interest rates on mortgages, auto loans, and credit-card debt remained high much longer. pp. 51, 53-54.

GREAT DEPRESSION
Between 1929 and 1933, the U.S. household-debt-to-GDP-ratio rose from 25% to 35%--while the dollar amount of that debt fell by 25%. Nonfinancial corporations' debt-to-GDP-ratio rose from 50% to 80%. Dollar household income fell 35%, due to collapse of real activity and falling prices. p. 52. The rise of the debt-to-income ratio was entirely due to lower income (and destruction of savings by bank failures). p. 53.


ERRATA
p. 180 At 5% interest, "a promise to pay $100 ten years from now" is worth about $61. Not 61¢. And at 6% it's $56 not 56¢.




AUTHOR

J.W. Mason's web page https://jwmason.org shows his publications through 2023.

Mason's CUNY page https://www.jjay.cuny.edu/faculty/j-w... shows his publications through 2018.

J.W. Mason says he is "Associate professor of economics, John Jay College-CUNY. Senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. Thinking about economic policy in the spirit of Keynes and Marx." https://substack.com/@jwmason?utm_sou...

[The Roosevelt Institute lists him as a former senior fellow. https://rooseveltinstitute.org/our-pe... ]

He is not astronomer John W. Mason, nor 19th-century furniture maker Joel W. Mason. Goodreads lumps all together.

goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...


Profile Image for Kevin Wilson.
270 reviews10 followers
June 23, 2026
A must read for any serious thinker, whatever your discipline or research area. For any concerned citizen, even. A vital guide to understanding the world we live in.

I'll try to summarize what I read, but remember I'm not an economist and I only read this once, so I'll probably botch it in places:

Denaturalizing familiar economic terms and concepts, Mason and Jayadev give an account of money and monetary forms that they have developed in dialogue with Keynesian theory. Contrary to both nineteenth-century classical political economy as well as much contemporary economics, which reduce monetary forms to a representation of the relationship between finite quantities of useful objects and useful labor, Mason and Jayadev present a compelling case for treating money and finance as things unto themselves with their own composite properties, forms that tend to reference themselves and their own conventions, being in dialogue with, even directing and coordinating, production and the economy, but only indirectly, at best, representing it.

Mason's own summary is a lot better, to be sure: Against Money

This perspective seems to speak to the world I've lived through more meaningfully than dogmatic assertions of the "the labour theory of value" and the so-called "falling rate of profit." There are such deep philosophical implications to this discussion, I'd almost recommend non-economists like myself approach it partly as a conceptual exercise, an illustration of how to conceptualize difficult topics in which theory and practice interweave.

Chapter 5 is the most difficult chapter, so I'd say read on if you're struggling a bit, as it get easier.
Profile Image for Greg Brown.
424 reviews79 followers
May 25, 2026
Really interesting book with some deeper implications about economics.

Against Money isn’t an invective against money—no retvrn to bartering here—but instead a look at how it is understood (and often misunderstood) to function in our economy.

It’s the same idea as the map and the territory, where the abstraction and compression required to make it legible (and tractable for other calculations) means both baking in assumptions and stripping out a lot of the particular details. This is tremendously useful and in many ways necessary, but you can easily get into trouble if you use it for a different purpose or in ways that bump against the assumptions.

I found the more abstract stuff to be difficult, but it’s always clarified later by showing how simpler understandings lead you awry. By the end, a lot of finance economics feels like the model home in Arrested Development where you start to notice the bare shelves, plastic fruit, and cabinet doors that fall off.
2,950 reviews58 followers
January 23, 2026
This was a bit denser on the economic theory side of things than I was expecting, honestly, but it was a good stretch for my brain. May have also thought this was going to be more from a social pov than an economic and financial one, and I wish it had actually dived more into the actual effects than the theoretical. Then again, academic book, so maybe I should have expected that. Still a great look at why economic theory says our current money system may be kinda shitty, and why we should consider moving away from it.
184 reviews16 followers
July 10, 2026
An interesting and provocative take on money and its role in society from a lefty and macro perspective. The authors help fill what has always seemed to me a big gap in this space with this ambitious book, which includes critiques of mainstream macroeconomics and an alternative vision that draws onf Keynes, Marx, Mehrling, and their own research. The authors attempt a challenging balancing act of, on the one hand, writing something that is from first principles and, in principle, accessible to a general audience, and on the other hand does not spare the nitty gritty details or complex debates in the topic. In this sense it has some of the benefits and challenges of reading something like Keynes General Theory with its density and abstraction as well as its amibition. Such an undertaking is a real contribution.

One area I would have liked to see more of is while the book engages and often critiques orthodox macroeconomics, they understand the importance of finance, but do not engage with some of the most relevant contributions in the field that could have advanced some of the conversation. For example, the authors, rightly in my opinion, frequently discuss the challenges of knightian uncertainty on investment and asset prices, but do not engage with much of the fascinating research on this topic (eg Sargent and Hansen). Another example is the book often discusses the role of finance as evidencing that real exchange markets cannot possibly be efficient if banks and financial market trading are consuming large parts of the economy to facilitate trade. Again, this *is* a very important observation, but its interpretation and implications have been explored in research on no trade paradoxes from difference of opinion (Milgrom and Stokey) and imperfect information (Grossman and Stiglitz).

Over all, this is an ambitious and fascinating book. It lives somewhere in the space between work like Keynes, Graeber, and Mehrling. We read it in a reading group and in generated a lot of debate and, perhaps susprisingly, a lot of agreement from unexpected corners. For those interested in these topics, its a big recommendation and I look forward to where they develop the conversation in future work.

8.5/10
Profile Image for Dora Okeyo.
Author 26 books209 followers
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
December 23, 2025
I read this book because I was curious about money- as an invention, like how did we sit and decide that we'd have this thing called money and every country can print their versions of it, you can have this amount of money and it can get you a house, a packet of milk, or you can owe this much and if you can't pay it all you can say you are bankrupt...all these questions around money that have had me asking so many questions.
Of course the other interest is that the globalization of it, and how it's affected relationships between countries for example when I hear the dollar versus the Kenyan shilling on the market, or that Kenya has all this debt it owes IMF, the World Bank and who decides at what rate and currency we pay for it, and finally why did we ever sit down and come up with the concept of poverty line?
I loved how in the very first chapter of this book the authors highlight the paradoxes of money. And the subsequent chapters explore the illusions we have created around money and how our relationship with money Is affected- even on the broader aspect exploring debt, capital, interest and GDP...this is an interesting book, and I would love to read it again, a paperback version that I can take notes in, highlight and reflect more on.

Thanks Netgalley for the eARC. I would say that one, this book doesn't read like a technical book, rather the tone is more inviting to explore and ask questions on money, and I would highly recommend it to anyone curious about money.
Profile Image for Jonas.
274 reviews12 followers
September 30, 2026
4,75/5- Ein sehr, sehr wichtiges Buch. Es packt die Neoklassik (und grundsätzlich Theorien, die einen realen Kern in geldlichen Dingen sehen wollen) an ihrer Prämisse, an der sine qua non, ihrer Theorie und arbeitet sich konsequent an diesem ab. Der didaktische Aufbau hat mir sehr gut gefallen, die kleinen Beispiele, die eingefügt wurden, haben das doch sehr abstrakte (und gleichzeitig konkrete) Thema, sehr konkret gemacht. Gerade die Kapitel 4 und 5 fand ich fantastisch und wahrscheinlich die stärksten. Aber auch 2. hat große Stärken und eine der wichtigsten Unterscheidungen, welche man in einem money view zu schaffen hat, der zwischen Überkonsum und Verschuldung.
2 kleine Kritiken: Ich fand einige der Widersprüche in 1. recht nichtssagend und mir hat eine wirkliche Klassenanalyse in dem Buch gefehlt. Aus der ebengenannten Unterscheidung hätte man dies sehr gut herausarbeiten können, leider wurde dies unterlassen und es wurde sich stattdessen an dem sehr naheliegenden Beispiel eines Hauskaufes länger abgearbeitet.
Trotzdem sehr wichtig und ein absoluter Must read.
Profile Image for Brodie.
140 reviews4 followers
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
January 3, 2026
A great, meaty, example of economists who understand that economics, at its core, is a social science. Rich with theory, this book was a really interesting read about the contradictions in orthodox economics and monetary policy. In an ideal world I would've had unlimited time to read it so I could fully absorb everything I was reading; but it's definitely one I'll go back to. It was certainly dense at times, but in a satisfying way. I think that could also be in large part due to the fact that I'm not an economist and new-ish to reading about economics. Some of the sentence structures didn't flow in a way that instinctively made sense to my brain, and required a little time parsing, but otherwise the authors did a great job simplifying complex ideas.

Frankly the craziest part was when the authors mentioned they wrote the book in GOOGLE DOCS. Surely the worst word processor to write a book in. Kudos to them!
Profile Image for Miguel.
979 reviews95 followers
May 24, 2026
Gegen Geld

Perhaps because I've been indoctrinated by years of listening to Macromusings, there were many cases where it was a step too far for me to nod along with here. Still, it was at times a thought-provoking, heterodox critique of mainstream economics, trying to push one to view money not as a neutral tool. That said, there weren't many "let's do this instead" approaches - it's definitely not the 'Abundance' of monetary guidance books.
Profile Image for John  Mihelic.
587 reviews25 followers
May 24, 2026
I like this in that it made me think as I was reading it - about what money is, what it isn't, and what it could be. I think I'm still chewing on it. It is what can be a dense topic but it is pretty well presented so that it should be accessible to an educated layperson.
13 reviews
June 27, 2026
This is the best book trying to make sense of the logic of money and monetary production that I have yet to read. I’ll probably need to keep coming back to this book to understand it’s insights since they feel so profound.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews