From The blog of the Journal of the History of Ideas:
In this interview, Daniel Judt speaks with Jonathan Levy, a renowned historian of economic life in the United States, about his recently published book, The Real Economy: History and Theory (Princeton University Press, 2025)....
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....DJ: I think it would be helpful to turn now to your picture of the real economy, and then to work our way back to the critiques and historical narratives that you offer in the first half of the book. Chapter 8, “The General Theory of the Economy,” builds on Keynes to advance a working definition of “the real economy”: “a bounded spatiotemporal order of demand-constrained production, determined by logical accounting relationships among the different stocks of wealth in the economy that generate the different flows of income over time in it.” Can you walk us through that construction? What is the real economy?
JL: Across the book, if there is one wellspring from which I draw, it is accounting. I really think that the economy comes from accounting. Accounting practices originated alongside human writing in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, where rulers developed accounting systems to account for how they stored wealth over time. What is the first act that creates the economy? It is neither production nor exchange (market or otherwise). It is the storing of wealth over time, with which I associate investment.
For me, investment is a broad category that has to do with how we relate ourselves to the future. That is a very important scene of action. What is unique about the rise of sedentary human civilization is their storage of things over time. We began to store things when we created the world’s first states and, I argue, the world’s first economies. How do we value, account for, distribute, and conceptualize what we store over time? The economy originates there.....
.....MUCH MORE
Which leads us to storage, a topic of abiding interest:
- "The Effect of Futures Markets and Corners on Storage and Spot Price Variability".
- Storage: Very Important To Roman Emperors and Commodities Market Manipulators
- To Create A "1%" In A Social Hierarchy You Don't Need An Economic Surplus, Just A Storable Form Of Wealth
- The Golden Age of Commodities Market Manipulation: Corners, Storage and Squeezes
These days however, to purloin that wealth, you don't even need to be dealing with storables:
How to Manipulate Non-storable Commodities Markets
Remember, the spectrum runs from storage to hoarding to market corners.
And corners in commodities refers to physical, you can't corner a commod
by simply buying futures or forwards, you also have to take up the
physical supply.
Conversely, squeezes are accomplished in the futures..
A couple decent papers on this aspect of the abundance theory are:
"Large Investors, Price Manipulation, and Limits to Arbitrage: An Anatomy of Market Corners" and
"Market Manipulation, Bubbles, Corners and Short Squeezes"
The only way to combat abundance is with artificial scarcity, i.e. manipulation....
