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  Of all the axioms of utility theory, the completeness axiom is perhaps the most questionable.    - Robert Aumann, Nobel Prize Winner One of the reasons you keep a well-stocked wallet in your pocket is because you don't know very much about yourself. Know thyself , as the Greeks say, and you can skimp on the amount of media-of-exchange you keep on hand. Greater self-awareness leads to a cleaner "mapping out" of an individual's tastes and the preferred timetable for the enjoyment of those tastes. For instance, a moment of self reflection might lead you to conclude that pistachio ice cream at 8:31 PM next Friday is the best possible state of the world. If a complete set of futures markets exists, you can purchase a futures contract that is time stamped to deliver pistachio ice cream at 8:31 PM Friday, guaranteeing ahead of time that your tastes will be satisfied. The problem is that introspection is difficult. We simply don't have the time, knowledge, or energy to ...

I've been playing the game of Settlers of Catan for ages. Over time I've gotten less cutthroat and more philosophical about the game. What I've come to realize is that Settlers is a great tool for both thinking about monetary phenomena and building different sorts of monetary economies. In this post I'll assume a basic knowledge of Settlers—if you haven't played the game by now, you're living on the moon. 1. Catan isn't a barter economy The first thing worth noting is that Catan is not a barter economy—it's a monetary economy. This might seem like an odd thing to say . After all, the trades that we see in a typical Settlers game are all commodity-for-commodity trades. To see why it's a monetary economy, imagine the case of autarky , or a Catan in which trade is prohibited. Here, players can only build structures using cards earned from tiles on which they have a settlement. The value of a lumber card in an autarkical economy is derived solely from ...