The emergence and collapse of money

Abstract Since all biological and social systems have their birth and death, we must study not only emergence or self-organization but collapse or self-disorganization to understand such systems. In this paper we discuss this problem through a study of Money. Money is the most popular system to evade the difficulty of exchange under the division of labor. It emerges autonomously from exchanges among selfish agents with bounded rationalities. And such emergent money collapses autonomously. We describe money as a structure in economic space, explaining its autonomous emergence and collapse as two phases of the same phenomenon.