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Bruce's point about money as a social constraint is a very good one. But I think it does not support the utility of his definition of social constraint. Some 30 years ago, Gurley and Shaw argued that some part of the money supply is endogenous in the sense that assets not issued by government or the banking system trade as means of payment. Trade credit is the prime example. When the money supply is insufficient to meet the demands of trade, individuals find alternative forms of money in its role as means of payment. In conditions of hyperinflation, there is a flight from the domestic currency. In Weimar Germany, indices of industrial production rose during the hyperinflation because, I understand, the flight from the Mark was to commodities which became money as a store of value. I also understand that the dollar became the preferred means of payment. Certainly that has happened in very rfecent history in countries with high rates of inflation. The point is that institutional forms change in response to emergent social phenomena and that a key goal in much human behaviour is actually to find ways of avoiding or eliminating the most binding constraints. The money example is that of agent behaviour modifying the nature and impact of the social constraint represented by some money supply thereby to change their own behaviour which affects the nature of the money supply and so on. "Society" does not create constraints but there are clearly constraints in the sense of limits on individual behaviour and therefore social outcomes which cannot be understood except in the context of the feedback relationship between individual behaviour and social consequences. yrs scott PS: Isn't that a feature of what Bruce calls social embeddedness? s. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%