THE VEIL OF MONEY by Michael Churchill There is a concept called “the veil of mo

THE VEIL OF MONEY
by Michael Churchill

There is a concept called “the veil of money” which is that money is the means of exchange (and/or unit of account) but that that’s basically all it is. You change the number of zeros on the currency but it doesn’t really change anything. Somebody still has to make widgets. And each widget will have a certain value relative to a bushel of corn etc etc

MONEY IS A VEIL IN THE LONG RUN
The veil of money and, as a related issue, the quantity theory of money have special importance in economic theory throughout the 20th century. Actually, 20th century economics can be interpreted as a sequence of theoretical answers to the question whether money is only a veil or not. Different theories can be judged by their implied ideas as to the neutrality of money. In the simplest models and in the simplest form of the quantity theory of money, money is completely neutral, that is, changes in the money supply do not affect anything real. However, in the more elaborated models the neutrality theorem was applied rather to long-run considerations. For both Milton Friedman and Robert E. Lucas money was not a mere veil in the short run, so money was assumed to have real effects in the short run. The mechanisms through which money could exert these real effects were radically different and so were the sets of assumptions these authors created to establish their models. For example, Friedman postulated adaptive expectations, while Lucas assumed his economic agents to be able to form rational expectations. For both of them, money was only neutral in the long-run – that is, money was not just a veil in the short-run – but the scope of countercyclical economic policy was radically curtailed in new classical macroeconomics. In the case of rational expectations the monetary authority is not able to carry out systematic countercyclical economic policy – that is, it cannot exploit the existing short-run Phillips curve. However, it can be realized that if any of the conditions necessary to the ineffectiveness of systematic economic policy is not met, economic policy can be effective again, so, money is not only a veil.