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    Money: The Unauthorised Biography
    Unavailable
    Money: The Unauthorised Biography
    Unavailable
    Money: The Unauthorised Biography
    Audiobook12 hours

    Money: The Unauthorised Biography

    Written by Felix Martin

    Narrated by Nicholas Guy Smith

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    From ancient currency to Adam Smith, from the gold standard to shadow banking and the Great Recession: a sweeping historical epic that traces the development and evolution of one of humankind's greatest inventions.

    What is money, and how does it work? In this tour de force of political, cultural and economic history, Felix Martin challenges nothing less than our conventional understanding of money. He describes how the Western idea of money emerged from interactions between Mesopotamia and ancient Greece and was shaped over the centuries by tensions between sovereigns and the emerging middle classes. He explores the extraordinary diversity of the world's monetary systems, from the Pacific island of Yap, where value was once measured by immovable stones, to the currency of today that exists solely on globally connected computer screens. Martin shows that money has always been a deeply political instrument, and that it is our failure to remember this that led to the crisis in our financial system and so to the Great Recession. He concludes with practical solutions to our current pressing, money-based problems.

    Money skips nimbly among such far-ranging topics as John Locke's disastrous excursion into economic policy, Montesquieu's faith in finance to discipline the power of kings, the social organization of ancient Sparta and the Soviet Union's ill-fated attempt to abolish money and banking altogether. Throughout, Martin makes vivid sense of a chaotic and sometimes incoherent system-the everyday currency that we all share-in the clearest and most stimulating terms. This is a magisterial work of history and economics, with profound implications for the world today.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMar 4, 2014
    ISBN9780804191548
    Unavailable
    Money: The Unauthorised Biography

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    Reviews for Money

    3.5/5

    24 ratings2 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Another confused book. Seems to think everyone else is confused, and there's more than a hint of arrogance about it. Foolish others, e tells us, think that "money" equals "coinage", but Martin knows it's not coinage but a "social technology" (which seems to mean a way of tracking and settling debts). But i remember the concepts of M1, M2, M3 in my basic Economics course at Oxford; these clearly distinguished cash in circulation as just one element in the money supply. Very much against the idea that money developed out of barter (the standard view from Aristotle, Adam Smith and all, but he doesn't explain the role of wives, cows, camels, in pre-coinage economies. But he dates the beginning of money to the beginning of coinage in Ancient Greece and that this also required an intellectual understanding by philosophers of what money really is. he darts around all over the history books, with some illuminating details, e.g. the use of sticks for tallying tax payments in medieval England which led to the word "stocks" and also to the burning of Westminster Palace - as painted by Turner. Exposition of Bagehot as an observer of the real world, rather than an economic theorist is also good, I get the feeling that his examples are a bit random and his protesting a bit too much. Nonetheless, Economics does have a case to answer. It seemed a pretty thin explanation of the world when i studied it, and subsequent events have done little to change that view. Nor does this book have the answer.
    • 3/5
      I found the book to be readable, but wordy in its explanation. At times it was dry, but what off-setted that was the practical ideas about money from its history and its modern applications. If there were more set points to remember instead of the wordy banter I would have liked the book more.