William Ridge

William Ridge (PhD in Philosophy, 2024), On the Evolution, Ontology, and Design of Retail Central Bank Digital Currencies

This thesis defends a novel ontology of money grounded in evolutionary functionalism. In particular, Richard Boyd’s notion of a homeostatic property cluster (HPC) is applied to make sense of money as an evolving cluster of functional roles. This view is supported by an extensive historical and conceptual analysis of monetary artefacts, ranging from ancient Mesopotamian clay debt tablets to modern internet-native crypto-currencies. Having established this conceptual scaffolding, normative principles regarding the design and implementation of a retail Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) are considered at length. It is argued that a good CBDC will be designed such that it can both fulfil the functional roles that comprise the monetary HPC, while also being constituted to outcompete rival monetary artefacts.

Supervisor: Dr Andrew Alexandra