Weber provides an economic analysis of current, post-crash monetary reform proposals, including Bitcoin, sovereign money, regional money and modern monetary theory. The book critically examines these reform concepts, exposing their flaws and fallacies, guiding the reader towards a contemporary understanding of what money is and how it works today.

What if our financial system were organized to the benefit of the many rather than simply empowering the few? Robert Hockett and Fred Block argue that an entirely different financial system is both desirable and possible. They outline concrete steps that could get us there. Financial systems move the worlds savings from investment to investment, chasing the highest rates of return. They run on profit. But what if investment went to the enterprises or institutions that provided things that the majority of people would prioritize? Democratizing Finance includes six responses that seek to amend, elaborate, and challenge the arguments developed by Hockett and Block. Some of the core arguments put forward by other contributors include calls for the rapid elimination of private financial entities, the dilemmas of the politics associated with financial reforms, and the fate of parallel proposals advanced in the US in the 1930s.

The process of user-centered innovation: how it can benefit both users and manufacturers and how its emergence will bring changes in business models and in public policy. Innovation is rapidly becoming democratized. Users, aided by improvements in computer and communications technology, increasingly can develop their own new products and services. These innovating users—both individuals and firms—often freely share their innovations with others, creating user-innovation communities and a rich intellectual commons. In Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel looks closely at this emerging system of user-centered innovation. He explains why and when users find it profitable to develop new products and services for themselves, and why it often pays users to reveal their innovations freely for the use of all.The trend toward democratized innovation can be seen in software and information products—most notably in the free and open-source software movement—but also in physical products. Von Hippel's many examples of user innovation in action range from surgical equipment to surfboards to software security features. He shows that product and service development is concentrated among "lead users," who are ahead on marketplace trends and whose innovations are often commercially attractive. Von Hippel argues that manufacturers should redesign their innovation processes and that they should systematically seek out innovations developed by users. He points to businesses—the custom semiconductor industry is one example—that have learned to assist user-innovators by providing them with toolkits for developing new products. User innovation has a positive impact on social welfare, and von Hippel proposes that government policies, including R&D subsidies and tax credits, should be realigned to eliminate biases against it. The goal of a democratized user-centered innovation system, says von Hippel, is well worth striving for. An electronic version of this book is available under a Creative Commons license.

The tensions between democracy and justice have long preoccupied political theorists. Institutions that are procedurally democratic do not necessarily make substantively just decisions. Democratizing Global Justice shows that democracy and justice can be mutually reinforcing in global governance - a domain where both are conspicuously lacking - and indeed that global justice requires global democratization. This novel reconceptualization of the problematic relationship between global democracy and global justice emphasises the role of inclusive deliberative processes. These processes can empower the agents necessary to determine what justice should mean and how it should be implemented in any given context. Key agents include citizens and the global poor; and not just the states but also international organizations and advocacy groups active in global governance. The argument is informed by and applied to the decision process leading to adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals, and climate governance inasmuch as it takes on questions of climate justice.

This book is the first of its kind in several overlapping and rapidly developing fields that now dominate news headlines – among them the fields of crypto-currency, digital payments platforms, ‘fintech,’ and central bank digital currencies (‘CBDCs’). With crypto and fintech now threatening to transform finance in destabilizing and anti-democratic ways, and with China and other nations now digitizing their national currencies in the form of CBDCs that make the US dollar and national payments infrastructure look ever more quaint and outmoded, this book shows both why the US and other democratic commercial societies must, and how they can, democratically digitize their currencies, their national payments systems, and the authorities that respectively issue and administer them – in the US, the Federal Reserve System (‘the Fed’).

Money in the history of political thought, from ancient Greece to the Great Inflation of the 1970s In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, critical attention has shifted from the economy to the most fundamental feature of all market economies—money. Yet despite the centrality of political struggles over money, it remains difficult to articulate its democratic possibilities and limits. The Currency of Politics takes readers from ancient Greece to today to provide an intellectual history of money, drawing on the insights of key political philosophers to show how money is not just a medium of exchange but also a central institution of political rule. Money appears to be beyond the reach of democratic politics, but this appearance—like so much about money—is deceptive. Even when the politics of money is impossible to ignore, its proper democratic role can be difficult to discern. Stefan Eich examines six crucial episodes of monetary crisis, recovering the neglected political theories of money in the thought of such figures as Aristotle, John Locke, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes. He shows how these layers of crisis have come to define the way we look at money, and argues that informed public debate about money requires a better appreciation of the diverse political struggles over its meaning. Recovering foundational ideas at the intersection of monetary rule and democratic politics, The Currency of Politics explains why only through greater awareness of the historical limits of monetary politics can we begin to articulate more democratic conceptions of money.