Money

A really interesting history of money in all its forms, and even more so, a series of stories about people – individuals who had a major impact on money (from the Emperor Nero to Sun Yat-sen) and people en-masse and their reactions to it. There was a lot that was new to me here and the interest level never flagged. This is written by an economist rather than a historian and better for it as David can bring his own perspective to it, based on what he was originally taught, what he learned from seeing the Irish financial crash from the inside and how he views recent developments like crypto-currencies and Modern Monetary Theory. It is not hard to agree with his rather dismissive view of Bitcoin and its ilk – (it isn’t money and there is no obvious problem that it solves) and to also back his cheerleading for the M-Pesa payment system. He claims (not unreasonably) that money is mankind’s greatest invention, being the enabler of almost everything else in the modern world (increased…