Joakim Book

Research Fellow

Joakim Book is a writer, researcher and editor on all things money, finance and financial history. He holds a masters degree from the University of Oxford and has been a visiting scholar at the American Institute for Economic Research in 2018 and 2019.

His work has been featured in the Financial Times, FT Alphaville, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Svenska Dagbladet, Zero Hedge, The Property Chronicle and many other outlets. He is a regular contributor and co-founder of the Swedish liberty site Cospaia.se, and a frequent writer at CapXNotesOnLiberty, and HumanProgress.org.

  • The Ignorant World and What to Do About It

    “It’s a counterintuitive notion and a difficult thing to wrap one’s head around, that the world can both be better and is still in many respects bad. We do nobody any favors, least of all our children, by exaggerating one while forgetting how far we’ve come.” ~ Joakim Book

    The Ignorant World and What to Do About It
  • Playing Fast and Loose with Numbers

    “Journalists keep talking about a future without ice, about ice-free summers in the Arctic, and casually throwing in ‘sea level rise if x were to melt completely’ as if x was in any danger of melting away entirely over anything but geological time frames. This places the completely wrong ideas in their readers’ heads and…

    Playing Fast and Loose with Numbers
  • Is Opposing Lockdowns Seditious?

    “Instead of having the red-shirters and the blue-shirters (or climate activists and deniers, nationalists or open border-types, lockdowners and covidiots) having it out in every aspect of integrated life – in the office, at the supermarket, on the town square, in the football stadium, even over what they voluntarily read on the Internet, and what…

    Is Opposing Lockdowns Seditious?
  • The Geographic History of Us

    “Dartnell’s lesson isn’t that geography determines, but that geography shapes. It set the ground rules for how the climate behaves, how the currents run and the winds blow, and along those rules all human history progressed. ‘The Earth,’ he appropriately ends, ‘shaped our history.'” ~ Joakim Book

    The Geographic History of Us
  • Pandemic Policy Has Not Improved Our Lifestyles

    “We almost never know the full bundle of what we are giving up. Individual, social, and professional structures are evolving processes, trial-and-error, where we only find out what works over time. ‘The only effective judge of things is time,’ writes Nassim Taleb energetically in his excellent essay on the Lindy Effect – the tendency of…

    Pandemic Policy Has Not Improved Our Lifestyles
  • An Age of Patronage

    “If we widen our scope, large companies have long donated funds to support causes they think are important or channel the values they wish to portray, often entirely detached from their business. A twenty-first century age of patronage is here. Perhaps it will support the foundation for a twenty-first century Enlightenment too.” ~ Joakim Book

    An Age of Patronage
  • Where New Zealand Goes, the World Goes

    “In the 1990s New Zealand pioneered inflation targeting, an approach that every major country followed for the next three decades. In a few years we might look back at this fleeting Kiwi attempt at incorporating asset markets into monetary policy with the same admiring eyes that we now see their move to inflation targeting. Where…

    Where New Zealand Goes, the World Goes
  • MMT’s Inflation Battle Will End In A Draw

    “Maybe this time is different, and perhaps this is the turning point – for MMT or for inflation. More likely, the fears and the ebullient promises will converge in a middle-of-the-way third option similar to what we saw after 2008: Politicians, pundits, economists, and central bankers talk, yet nothing much happens.” ~ Joakim Book

    MMT’s Inflation Battle Will End In A Draw
  • Tell Me Again How Governments Are Essential

    “I’m still routinely shocked that people think governments are essential to the operating of civilized life and crucial for our well-being. The more interactions like these that I have, the more confused I am that not everyone jumps ship and embraces a smarter world. So: tell me again, why do we need governments?” ~ Joakim…

    Tell Me Again How Governments Are Essential
  • Bitcoin Bros Rediscovering Our Monetary Past

    “For all the revolutionary creed that surrounds the emerging monetary commodity that is bitcoin, it seems that its future more and more resembles the past it tried to escape. Happy times for us monetary nerds.” ~ Joakim Book

    Bitcoin Bros Rediscovering Our Monetary Past