I plowed through this book mostly while on this trip. Money is obviously a fundamental part of our lives and its history seemed like an interesting thing to read about. This book does a good job of identifying certain features of money and the development of those features and the relationship of monetary innovations throughout the last 2000 years or so of history to economic growth. As you would expect, the author places a little too much weight on the role of money, but it is a critical innovation and one that relies largely on trust, usually in government, a trust which, as McWilliams demonstrates, has been broken a number of times. Like most great human innovations, money is an abstracted way of dealing with a need, as language was for communication and rules and laws were for governing societies.
The author is an academic, an Irish academic at that, so we are treated to what I would view as unneeded and inaccurate little lectures on the value of diversity in economic and social hotspots, but those were minor distractions. The fact is that diverse religions or ethnic backgrounds or anything in a particular geography have nothing to do with the success of that area and are as likely to be a hindrance as a benefit. Certainly didn’t prevent the various regions he cited from eventually falling behind, and that would be an interesting story–why were those former hotspots suddenly backwaters. And there were some surprising factual errors–Pompei never was and isn’t a port city. (A reader corrects me on this–I recalled from being there that Pompeii was about a mile inland on a river, but it was a port city in that goods came and went by boat from the town.)
There are other books on money that I intend to read as part of a wider survey, but this one was very readable and informative. And the author has the same attitude toward cryptocurrency that I do–it is a huge scam and y0u should stay far away from it.
