This is a fairly quick read about money of course. This starts with methods that civilizations started to use in the making of coins. Did you know that in the 1200's the Chinese were pushing an economic revolution that quite possibly showed that were possibly the richest and the most technologically advanced civilization of its time. They were responsible for paper, printing and the magnetic compass.
They describe different types of coins, can you imagine carrying around a coin that was two feet long and weighed forty-three pounds ? The book describes how the first stock market started. It also describes how the gold standard came about and the good and bad about it. Do you remember the 2008 housing bubble ? Besides what you may know from things like the big short this gives you a little information from a different angle and all easily understood. This ends with the start and development of the latest money tool crypto-currency. This a great informational book about what most of love and need to survive.

NetGalley review.

I really enjoyed this book because I love learning about a topic from its origin so I can get a grasp of its history and full scope. Money is especially an interesting topic because it's so central to our lives today, so I was really interested to know about where it came from at all. I felt that the book did a good job of going through the history in a simple way. However, I still found many concepts/explanations confusing having gone to a highly ranked business school and interned at a bank. This is tricky because explaining more would require the book to be much longer. I think it might have been better for the concepts to have more thorough explanation with graphs and images, so that the reader is not stuck in an in between explanation (ex: mortgage backed funds, commercial paper, etc). Other than this, the book was a simple and fun read. Overall, however, I thought the book was informative and interesting. I really enjoyed how historical events were told in a narrative format to give the topic of money life. There were so many stories I didn't know about (ex: Luddites). I think Goldstein did a good job of being neutral in certain topics, but definitely could have objectively recognized that many Wall Street definitely did/do harm (ex: 2009). For someone without greater knowledge of the for profit system we have set up in modern capitalism, the book made it sound like they were within their moral rights to do their job the way they did. I also would have liked to know more about how money is used in places outside US/Europe.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3435061100

Unfortunately, this book and I didn't click. The information simply wasn't presented in a way that worked as a book. Each chapter was a cute little story - but presented at such a high level that it didn't leave me with actual any understanding of how things worked. There was nothing that inspired me to truly think or engage with the text - I would close the book and immediately forget what I had just read. Every sentence was an interesting fact, but there was no overarching theme or narrative. I didn't understand why I was being told what.

Having read books that go much more in depth on these topics - like Capital or Debt - I was also honestly pretty skeptical about some of the massively broad claims the author was making, without sufficient detail to back it up. I was frequently confused why I should care about things that were being told to me (still not sure why gambling probabilities matter in the scheme of history of money)?

This reads like a podcast - not a unified non-fiction book.

Review of Money by Jacob Goldstein

In the current time money is starting to lose its meaning. A massive $3Tn spending bill has been passed by the House in addition to the trillions of dollars of stimulus that have been authorized to-date.

Where is this money coming from?

Does this money need to be “raised” in any sense?

What are the implications of this spending; if any?

These are really important questions that any educated person needs to be able to answer. However I’ve found that the main difficulty of arriving at a cogent view is cutting through the partisan noise surrounding these issues.

So a review of Jacob Goldstein’s book - Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing - presented me with a welcome primer.
Money
You may have heard of Jacob Goldstein from his co-hosting of NPR’s podcast - Planet Money. I’ve been a regular listener of Planet Money for a number of years and I love the short, punchy, irreverent but informative take on economic issues of the day. Most episodes last around 20 minutes resulting in just the right length for my attention span, that these days only seems to span the reading of tweets.

So I was looking for more of the same.

It’s a fairly short book and I finished it over the course of a few evenings. My kindle has a series of dots to indicate length and if it helps you this book has about 1/2 of the dots of Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber (excellent) or ⅔ of the dots of The Millionaire Next Door (tiresome).

This book preserves the irreverent style from the podcast and is certainly not a po-faced economic textbook. It has a breezy and likeable style. If you like the style of Planet Money then this will work for you.

However I felt that it lacked some of the punchiness. Perhaps that’s simply the nature of the medium. A well-made podcast is always going to be more punchy and impactful than a book - is it? But perhaps it was because this book presents chapters all centered around a single subject - Money. Whereas the podcast are usually formatted to have varied subject matter. If you drift off in one episode then you can tune-back in to another episode. It feels more disposable than a complete book that need more staying power. However I did stay with it and was pleased I did.
The Contents
The contents are divided into five parts:

I - Inventing Money
II - the Murderer, the Boy King, and the Invention of Capitalism
III - More Money
IV - Modern Money
V - Twenty-First-Century Money
Conclusion: The Future of Money

It broadly follows the historical development of money with the majority of the book spent on modern money and beyond (parts IV and V). I would have preferred a little more sign-posting and structure. For example part III “More Money” feels a little weak. What is it, and how does that fit in?

The first three parts deal with the origins of money in coin and paper format. It touches on diverse areas such as Marco Polo, goldsmiths, gambling, European imperial traders, and the historical cost of lighting. The founding of money centered on solving the barriers to effective barter “by agreeing on some relatively durable, relatively scarce thing to use as a token of value”. This is the standard story of the origins of money.

However I was pleased when the author highlighted early on the “definition of money is: it’s the thing you pay taxes with.” Money is indeed a useful store of value and a more easily transportable token than a gold bar (for example), but it’s the significance given to money from a central taxing authority that catapults money into the 21st Century. The author uses a neat example of a European civilization conquering a native tribe. Clearly the native people had no interest in these paper tokens described as money. To them it had no value. Until they were disuaged of this view by the necessity of paying taxes to the conquering forces! This is a fantastic analogy of the modern situation where a central government bank that is the sole issuer of a fiat currency issues that currency into the private economy. The currency is given legitimacy purely because it’s the legal tender for paying taxes. Without that constraint there would be no natural dominance of a single currency.

Modern Money
It was the latter half of the book on modern money that really kept my interest. This covered topics such as the gold standard, the origins of the central banks, Bitcoin, the global financial crisis, the Euro, the future of banks and Modern Monetary Theory.

I was particularly impressed with the chapter on digital currency. I was expecting a pat overview that gasped with astonishment at the mysterious nature of Bitcoin's inventor Satoshi Nakomoto, but instead was a thorough history that captured the bringing together of the main elements required for Bitcoin. I had not been aware of the pre-history of developing hash functions for digital currency or the early struggles with how to make a publicly distributable ledger. Bitcoin was a quantum leap forward, and it’s often presented as such, but this book puts the development in its proper context of a very smart Satoshi putting together readily available ingredients in a very neat and simple package.

Conclusion
To me this book got better and better as it progressed and I was slightly frustrated that it seemed rushed at the end. My impression is that money and the creation of money is now a super-hot topic brought to the fore by the COVID stimulus and this book needed to be finished. As such there is a huge amount of fascinating material compressed into the book’s conclusion. This was the most interesting section and deserved more.

For example I had not been aware of a serious debate that has been undergoing about whether to disaggregate banks’ business. The author points out that it’s quite possible to have one set of institutions holding people’s money and paying interest and another set of institutions lending money. Fractional reserving is not necessarily required. There are some very reputable groups discussing radical re-shaping of the banking industry and this is something I need to look into some more.

The final discussion in the book is on the theory of the moment - Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). This has become an obsession of mine recently. And in a week or two I will be publishing a review of the hottest book on this subject - so watch out! The section on MMT was a good summary, but honestly, it deserved its own chapter. It felt tagged onto the end of the book whereas MMT provides us with the lens through which to see what money really is - simply a way of accounting for the distribution or scarce resources among the particpants in an economy.

Summer is coming up. If you’re like me you are going to want a straightforward easy read which touches on important and relevant concepts. This is the book for you (and for me).

Money is a loaded subject. That’s probably my best pun on this thing, but no guarantees I won’t try again. At any rate, it’s a fascinating subject. The made up thing of the most realistic proportions. Proverbially, it’s either (erroneously, it’s the love of…) connected to evil or makes the world go around. Presumably it can’t buy you love or make you happy, but it can buy or make you just about any other thing. So why not learn more about the actual mechanics of it? Especially when a book specifically designed to do just that just appears on Netgalley. Yes, it was time. And lean I did. I actually read the book in one day, which speaks volumes to its readability alone. But the author didn’t just make it accessible, it’s actually engaging. Not as humorous as I often prefer my serious nonfiction reads to be and not as opinionated or more like not as one or the other way leaning as some of nonfiction (especially on a subject as divisive as this one) tends to be, but a very enjoyable read all the same, this book takes you from the early days of the very invention of money to making it more practical and usable (paper money, thanks China) to making it the very soul of commerce that conquered and now rules the world. Whatever your thoughts on money, however inherently wrong the mindless pursuit of it before all others might be…let’s face it, you can use more. It’s just one of those things. No one actually needs the knowledge of economic theories to know where they stand on money. But some may want it…like I did. I was very interested in the backstory of it all and this book didn’t disappoint, in fact it educated the cr*p out of me. I learn new things and gained more theoretical knowledge of and historical context for the things I already knew or kind of knew. Some of it is pretty dense, like money markets and all the things leading up to the 2008 nightmare. Some of it is pure politics or at least economic politics, like the creation of Euro. Some of it is just an epic saga of arriving at logic…like the up and down tale of gold standard. Oh how about learning the origins of Luddites. Or meeting the man who created modern banking. Yeah, all that and so much more. And all of it…so interesting and, to the author’s credit, strikingly lively. Did I want more photos? Yes. Nerding out over some of the early moneys and so on would have been fun. But that’s what the internet’s for. Granted, you can probably learn most of this on the internet too, but for me…this is a preferred format. A well written, well put together book loaded with fascinating facts and edifying information. I can’t say this is a definitive historical account of money, there have been so many, the author cites so many, but…this is fresh, current, smart, balanced and fun. Might be a morbid reading during a financial crisis. But then again, for me anyway, knowledge is knowledge and smart is good, irrespective of the cr*appiness of the world outside. After all, the cr*appiness of world outside can almost always be directly linked to the scarcity of knowledge and paucity of smart. So yeah, read this book, learn things, be your best smartest self. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.