Iran's uprising began over the price of a dollar on 28 December and was shot to pieces on the nights of 8 and 9 January, behind a switched-off internet. Nobody serious disputes that thousands died. The government says 3,117. A rights group lists about 7,000 confirmed dead. A broadcaster in exile says 36,500, and an American president said 32,000 eight days before going to war. Only one of those numbers comes with a list that gives places and dates. We counted it.
By Raphael Bauer33 min read
On Sunday, 28 December 2025, the traders who sell mobile phones in two shopping centres in central Tehran went on strike. That day the rial fell to 1.42 million to the dollar; when the nuclear deal was signed in 2015 it had been 32,000. A …
Carl Menger came to economics through the newspapers, tutored a crown prince, fought the most famous battle over method in the history of economics, and left a body of work you could read in a fortnight. It contains the idea that value is a judgment people make, not a property of things, and an account of how money comes into being that economics had to rediscover a century later.
By Raphael Bauer39 min read
Between the eighth and the seventeenth of March 1892 a commission sat in Vienna to decide what the money of Austria-Hungary should be made of. Its most eminent member was a fifty-two-year-old professor of political economy who had spent the …
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