Despite using it every day, and spending a lot of time thinking and worrying about it, nobody can quite agree on what money is, or why it so often seems not to do what we want it to. Even economic theory, which you would expect to have the answers, cannot decide whether money doesn’t matter at all, or whether it’s essential to economic life. Most economists agree on what money is for: It is a unit of account, a medium of exchange, and a store of value. Most textbooks claim that it emerged from barter as a private-sector way of making transactions easier, and the total absence of historical or anthropological evidence for this claim has hardly slowed it down. Yet this is where the agreement ends and the problems begin. For many economists, money is “neutral,” meaning that it simply represents a true underlying value and has no power of its own to shape anything. Some, like the early-20th-century economists Irving Fisher and John Maynard Keynes, even spoke of a “money illusion” that fools people into confusing the face value of money with its actual ability to command goods and services, like believing that a dollar in 1875 is the same as a dollar today. It’s not an accident that economists contrast the “nominal” monetary economy with what they call the “real” economy. Money is somehow less than—or at least distinct from—material reality itself.

In their new book, simply titled Against Money, the economists Arjun Jayadev and J.W. Mason set out to show that confusion about money and the peculiar role it plays in shaping human life are the result of confusion within the field of economics. “Money values,” the authors assert, “do not reflect any real things or quantities already existing in the world.” But at the same time, many familiar economic concepts like inflation, gross domestic product, debt, and credit only exist as money values. How, then, do these ideas have power in the world? Recognizing the actual autonomy of money reveals the hidden forms of social authority and, with them, new possibilities for using the systems of money and credit to produce better social outcomes.

An essential preliminary fact about Against Money is that Jayadev and Mason are heterodox economists, and this book is both a presentation of heterodox ideas and an extended critique of what the authors call “mainstream economics.” This fact will certainly shape the book’s reception: Readers invested in mainstream economics will likely dismiss it out of hand; readers skeptical of the mainstream will likely read it with sympathy; and orthodox Marxists will reliably be annoyed by the book, because it aims for radical conclusions that are still expressed in the idiom of traditional economics.

Heterodox economists such as Jayadev and Mason—as well as their teachers, James Crotty and Axel Leijonhufvud—reject the interpretation of Keynes at the heart of neoclassical and neo-Keynesian economics, which is exemplified by leading mainstream economists like Paul Samuelson. While mainstream economists argue that Keynes’s work provides the policy tools to achieve growth and equilibrium, their heterodox counterparts insist that economies do not tend toward stability, efficiency, or equilibrium. For them, economies are at least as likely to end up with monopolies as with competition, and crises are likely to happen even when the systems are working as intended, not just when there’s an outburst of fraud or irrationality. These heterodox economists further argue that their conclusions don’t stem from a rejection of Keynes but from a closer reading of his work, as well as that of his contemporaries Joan Robinson and Pierro Sraffa, who argued that most economic models do not accurately reflect an underlying reality and are therefore of limited explanatory power.

Heterodoxy plays a special role in the field of economics. Heterodox economists often read and respond critically to mainstream economists, who generally don’t return the favor except in moments of crisis, when the poverty of economic theory and policy is revealed and mainstream economists decide to raid the ideas of their heterodox colleagues. One such example: After decades of ignoring Hyman Minsky, mainstream economists finally started to take his theory of financial fragility—the idea that crises can result even from the normal, legal workings of the financial system—seriously after the 2008 subprime-mortgage crisis. Or another: In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic and vertiginous inflation, mainstream economists reluctantly began to listen to Isabella Weber’s arguments for price controls. Although Paul Krugman once dismissed her proposals as “truly stupid” (for which he later apologized), today Weber’s op-eds about “sellers’ inflation” appear regularly in places like The New York Times. Indeed, reality often weighs in on the heterodox side: To take but one example of sellers’ inflation, the three biggest egg producers in the United States just settled with the Department of Justice over their conspiracy to manipulate prices from 2022 to 2025.

This focus on both the limits of mainstream economics and the desire to change many of its presuppositions informs Against Money. Most mainstream economists, Jayadev and Mason note, operate on the assumption of monetary neutrality, meaning that there exists a world of nominal prices that can change without affecting the “real” economy, understood in terms of the people and resources employed making goods and services. Against Money wants to offer a different understanding of how money works. Money, the authors argue, does not float above the “real” economy but is itself real—a material and organizational economic force, separate from (and even independent of) the nonmonetary world, and that is capable of changing it as much as any other element of the economy.

For Jayadev and Mason, this argument has three implications: first, that “how easy it is to acquire money shapes real activity of production and social existence in general,” meaning that money is a motivator of economic activity and getting it allows other economic activities to happen. Second, that “money quantities do not reflect developments in an underlying real world,” meaning that incomes and wealth can change without anything new being made or exchanged. The obvious example here is paper-wealth accumulation: If the price of Tesla stock fluctuates just a few cents because Elon Musk tweeted something, his wealth balloons or contracts by billions of dollars despite no new goods or services being produced. Third, that “many economic quantities…are only meaningful in terms of money.” The “quantities” that the authors especially have in mind are debt, capital, interest, and prices: They seek to show that “debt is not simply a record of past consumption in excess of income; capital is not simply a mass of useful equipment and structures; the interest rate is not simply the price of stuff today in terms of stuff tomorrow.” Jayadev and Mason spend the rest of their time exploring these economic quantities and their relationship to money. 

Their chapter on capital alone is worth the price of the book, because capital is one of the most fiendishly difficult concepts in economic thought. Borrowing from the economist John Hicks’s 1974 writings on the history of capital-theory controversies, it becomes possible to group economic thinkers into two camps when it comes to the concept. Some think that capital is a mass of physical stuff—all the factories, buildings, machines, and tools that go into economic production. Others think that capital is a fund, an eternal pool of money (probably the result of past savings and abstention from spending) that gets transmuted constantly into different physical manifestations, each of which are epiphenomenal.

Jayadev and Mason do deft work navigating the complexities of this argument, and they show persuasively that holding both ideas at once is more analytically useful than adhering to one side or the other. The physical-asset idea can only be expressed through monetary quantities, and in any event much of it consists of land values, not past investment decisions. To take just one example, they cite several critics of Thomas Piketty’s U-shaped inequality curve who have shown that the rise in wealth concentration since the 1970s has been driven not by savings or the accumulation of productive capacity, but by price inflation in real-estate assets. Yet this purely fundist view overlooks the fact that what turns money into more money is its role in the production process. So what’s important in distinguishing capital from other kinds of money (or other assets) is that someone uses it as a source of authority. Capital is both a special kind of money and a set of material possessions that allows some people to command other people to do certain things.

Jayadev and Mason also show that debt is the production of new money, not a redistribution of money across time. We might think that getting a loan today is about financing current consumption or investment with future income, and that a fixed quantity of money is moved from savers to borrowers by some neutral intermediary like a bank. But in reality, they argue, a loan is money newly created by the bank, and the price doesn’t involve time but rather flexibility: The recipient of the loan gets a kind of money they can use for essentially anything right now, while the holder of the debt gets a kind of money that allows them a claim on future social production. A mortgage, then, is not the exchange of an IOU on property for cash, but rather the exchange of differently time-structured IOUs for each other. And the bank is not just an intermediary matching borrowers and savers, but an independent power—one with the ability to make new economic activity happen (or not) based on its willingness and ability to lend.