The Wealth of Nations

I haven’t written in a while, as things have been getting sorted out from various other formats into this shiny new centralized site.  Here are a couple things that have caught my eye:

My favorite thing that I’ve read recently is this, from the intriguing online magazine Triple Canopy.  It’s a history of debt and credit as the basis for wealth creation and basic economic exchange; one fascinating bit of anthropological history that the article describes is the fiction of barter as a form of primitive economy – it makes intuitive sense, but, like so many other “common sense” assertions, has no basis in fact.

Also challenging to conventional wisdom: this essay, about the author’s experience as a black gentrifier in Washington, D.C.  Gentrification is almost universally discussed as a white phenomenon, and while it is largely so, it is most purely a class issue; race and class are highly correlated, but as the black middle class grows, the relationship between race and gentrification begins to break down, even if only at the edges.