But his illustration is still an exercise in clear thinking. Free banking, notes Horwitz, has built-in safeguards against excessive note issuance, as the clearing system internalizes the costs of overissuing notes to the specific offending bank. Small-denomination clearing certificates, cashier's checks, bearer paychecks, and other notes circulated as currency. The informational content of money was enhanced by endorsements, advertisements, editorials, store acceptance policies, and note discounts and premiums. For a work based on a doctoral dissertation, Monetary Evolution is remarkably clear and accessible, even to monetary- theory neophytes.
Readers encounter only a few minor problems.
Horwitz did not distinguish clearly these differing phenomena. Otherwise, readers familiar with some economics will have few problems. It's a great book for any economist, banker, or investor, if they like thinking theoretically or if they seek real-world examples of spontaneous monetary order. Monetary Evolution is highly-interdisciplinary, focusing, on social science, economics, evolution, history, and language. Horwitz moves easily among the stylings of Menger, Hayek, Mises, Gadamer, Polanyi, and even Marx, Lange, and Keynes.