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Money: The Unauthorised Biography (2013)

by Felix Martin(Favorite Author)

3.65 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1847922333 (ISBN13: 9781847922335)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Bodley Head

review 1: Maybe like a lot of other people, the global subprime mortgage crisis triggered in me a desire to learn more about economics. Called "the dismal science" for a good reason, it's also hugely important in our lives. After some earlier reading I'd already learned to think of money as human cooperation, rather than anything tangible such as gold. This author prefers to define it as transferable credit, which is probably more accurate (economically), but shows why no one likes economists. :-) Isn't the concept of money as human cooperation a much more positive definition?Whichever it is, this book did a good job describing the history of mankind's stuttering knowledge of what this social technology is, and how to manage it, from pre-history (as much as possible), to more advanc... moreed understanding during Roman and Chinese societies. (I could've used more on non-western societies, actually.) The most interesting part of the author's point of view is that monetary theory took a giant step BACKWARDS during the Enlightenment, for a well-intentioned but ill-informed reason. He lays the blame at the feet of John Locke, and everyone who listened to him. Although a founding father of liberal humanism, and therefore someone to respect for all of his political theory that we enjoy in modern democracies, that same point-of-view led Locke to insist that money had a fixed & inviolate value, not something that is adjusted dynamically by the society that's using it. He was protecting against abuse of power by the sovereign. See? He was on the right track, but fixed currency (while desirable for its simplicity & unambiguity) isn't what money really is. Nor does it serve an economy or its people's ability to produce & cooperate very well.
review 2: The first few chapters provide a fascinating account of the history and philosophy of money. However, the later chapters loose a lot of momentum and become increasingly esoteric and jargonized. Take, for example this impenetrable sentences, "It is nothing more than ensuring the synchronization, in the aggregate, of incoming and outgoing payments due on his assets and liabilities-which are themselves, of course, the aggregated liabilities and assets of all his borrowers and creditors". less

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