The term “economics imperialism” has been coined in recent decades to describe a tendency of economists to meddle with such seemingly non-economic aspects of life as crime, the family, irrational behavior, politics, culture, religion, and war. Mine is an attempt to invade the world of music.

The history of Georgian tea began in 1897 when Lao Cheng Zhao came from China to the imperial estate in the village of Chakvi.

End of the week –and a fresh serving of interesting links from economist bloggers and blogging economists. 1.  Joe Weisenthal from the Business Insider tells us how Ben Bernanke murdered the gold standard – and good riddance too! 2.  Nice infographics from Turbotax on the history of taxes in the US. 3.  Econbrowser discusses the prospects of the Eurozone crisis. 4.  Michael Sandel talks about market thinking from an unusual point of view. Quite illuminating, in a way. 5.  The Free Exchange blog explains (or tries to explain) several of America’s macro puzzles. As usual, excellent read. 6.  Noahpinion talks about an interesting model of asset bubbles. 7.  A very nice piece on heterogeneity from the Minneapolis Fed. 8.  Some stabs in the back of libertarianism from Noahpinion again. Couldn’t agree more, really. 9.  Witty counterfactual from our old friend, Worthwhile Canadian Initiative. 10. And from him again, something useful for those who like myself teach macro – problems with teaching SRAS shocks

I know. I know that I know. For as long as the human race existed, knowledge embodied power. In the life of a society, however, what becomes even more important is the fact that we share certain knowledge with fellow human beings, and that we, moreover, are aware of each other’s knowledge.

We all know how inventive (and sometimes devious) the human mind can be in inventing different kinds of mediums of exchange – which we simply call money. Everybody has heard of cigarettes or cowrie shells, used by people in different economic situations as a replacement for all so familiar gold coins or Ben Franklin portraits in green.