We believe that a major museum dedicated to the role of economics and finance in the development of modern civilization is long overdue. Given the growth of the web such a museum should have two components, a web museum and a physical museum. At Yale given the resource limitations we are concentrating on Stage One, a Web site or “virtual” museum attached to the School of Management’s International Center for Finance. There are now several “bricks and mortar” museums that fill in part the needs for a full fledged physical museum. These include several central bank museums and as well as several numismatic museums and in New York, The Museum of American Finance.
The growth of our and several other virtual museums both private and central bank supported will serve as an eventual genetic code for a museum on par with a major art, natural history or history museum. The central roles of the distribution of resources and the financial control and direction of these resources emphasizes the economic production and distribution and financial evaluation and direction of investment as both the blood stream and neural network of the body economic.