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This article focuses on an analysis of chapter 4 of Lavoie's magnus opus, Post-Keynesian Economics: New Foundations. It is the opening chapter of the macroeconomic section of the book. As we argue, following Keynes's 'monetary theory of production', but also in line with Schumpeter, starting the discussion over macroeconomics with money makes sense. It is impossible, in post-Keynesian economics, to discuss the real economy independently of the monetary side of the analysis. In this sense, money and production, and debt, are linked within an endogenous money framework. This article covers and discusses all aspects of this chapter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a survey of the recent literature that evaluates, in an empirical way, the distributional impacts of monetary policy. In the first two sessions, we discuss, respectively, the transmission channels of monetary policy to income distribution and the empirical strategies used to measure it. The majority of surveyed papers find that a contractionary monetary policy worsen the income distribution, and that an expansionist policy tends to improve it. Moreover, several papers found that the higher is the redistributive impact of fiscal policy, the lower is the impact of monetary policy on inequality. Another outcome with empirical support is the role of the labor share on total income: the higher is this share, the higher is the impact of monetary policy on inequality. The last point discussed is the asymmetric effects of contractionary and expansionary monetary policy. There is evidence that increases in interest rates have statistically significant effects on income distribution, whereas the effects of reductions in interest rates are not statistically different from zero. This empirical finding goes against the conventional view that the distributional effects of interest rate changes are temporary and likely to net out over the business cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many archaeologists do not realize that their commonsense assumptions about what constitutes money naturalize orthodox (neoclassical) economic theory. Rather than the orthodox view of money as primarily a medium of exchange, this paper presents the heterodox claim of money as primarily a unit of account imposed by those with political power. This heterodox understanding casts money as the mechanism at the heart of ancient states' political economies. A brief history of heterodox chartalist macroeconomics is followed by eight starting points from which archaeologists can explore the operation of state money using the material remains of past societies. Ancient Mesoamerica provides a case study that developed independently of better-known monetary histories from ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek, Indus, and Chinese civilizations. Monetized state economies date back to at least AD 600 in Mesoamerica and possibly as early as 300 BC. Cacao beans, standard lengths of cotton cloth, and shell and greenstone beads functioned as the currencies of taxation that underwrote political economies across ancient Mexico and Central America. I conclude that similar organizing principles, by which elites in hierarchical pluralities have extracted and deployed surplus production, resulted in the independent invention of money as an accounting system among unrelated ancient societies the world over. My primary argument is that money—understood as a politically controlled system of accounting—is largely missing from our analysis of ancient complex societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]