BOOK REVIEWS: GOLDSTEIN AND LEVENSON BOOKS

I have a personal blind spot when it comes to the subject of finance. I realize this probably seems an odd thing to publish under the auspices of Forbes, but the whole field of investments and financial economics just doesn't hold my interest, and information about it tends not to stick in my mind. It's not that I don't like money per se— I enjoy having money, and being able to buy things with it. But the various and sundry things people do to turn a little bit of money into a bit more money have never really been interesting to me. I'm happy to put the smallish amount of funds we have available for that sort of thing into index funds, and pretty much just leave it there.

This does, of course, seriously limit my chances of becoming a trillionaire, and investment is a fairly common topic of conversation among friends of mine, so every now and then I end up making a bit of an effort to learn something about the subject. That led, somewhat indirectly, into two recent reads: Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein, and Money for Nothing: The Scientists, Fraudsters, and Corrupt Politicians Who Reinvented Money, Panicked a Nation, and Made the World Rich by Thomas Levenson. I've enjoyed Tom's books in the past, so when a new one popped up it immediately went into the queue, but at around the same time the Goldstein got a lot of praise as a great introduction to the subject for the financially illiterate, which sounded like just the sort of thing I need.

Goldstein's book is by far the shorter of the two— 226 pages excluding notes and references, to Levenson's 340— but aims to be more comprehensive, a history of the idea of money from all the way back to the invention of physical coins to the modern craze for Bitcoin. This takes the form of 15 brief chapters, each delving into a particular anecdote from the history of money: the invention and subsequent abandonment of paper money in China, the time a Scottish gambler was put in charge of all the money in France, various experiments with going on and off the gold standard, or the creation of the complex financial instruments that led to the 2009 crash.

This was a light and entertaining read, but I'm not sure it left me all that much more informed, or did that much to increase my interest in the subject. A number of the individual anecdotes were unfamiliar to me, and they're all well told, but the core idea of money as a social contract was something I already knew. It is an important idea, though, so this book probably fills a valuable niche as a corrective for people who have a more intuitive sense that, say, gold is more real than paper money, or as a jumping-off point for people who are interested in the subject but don't know where to start.

Levenson's book, on the other hand, is a highly detailed exploration of a particular event in the history of money, the South Sea Bubble in England in the 1700's. This has a bit of overlap with the Goldstein— John Law, the Scottish gambler who made a mess of France's finances gets a chapter here, and there's a comparison of the French and English approaches to recovering from their respective crises. Where Goldstein's telling is necessarily very streamlined, though, Levenson really gets into the weeds with brief sketches of dozens of key figures and institutions of the period.

To read the complete article, see:
Book Review: Two Books About Money (https://www.forbes.com/sites/chadorzel/2021/06/21/book-review-two-books-about-money/)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
NEW BOOK: MONEY (https://www.coinbooks.org/v23/esylum_v23n37a04.html)
NEW BOOK: MONEY FOR NOTHING (https://www.coinbooks.org/v23/esylum_v23n33a07.html)

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