Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing

Life is a board game. And I’m not talking about the board game called Life. Playing this particular game is not really optional, and success is largely measured in money. So by all means, make it a focus. But every now and then, take a moment to zoom out and marvel at the lunacy of it all.

That’s exactly what Jacob Goldstein does in his book Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing. Sprinkled with amusing anecdotes that explain how we got to where we are today, Goldstein’s work reminds us that while money is clearly quite useful, it cannot and should not be equated with any sort of truth. Here are some great lines, followed by a few recommendations for a soundtrack.

 

The Lines

“Money is fiction,” she said. “It was never there in the first place.”

Once coins took root in Greece, they took over the world.

[Marco Polo’s] story about paper passing as money seemed so absurd to people in Europe that they thought he was making it up.

One of the perpetual questions that still hovers over money is: Who can we trust?

It’s money if everyone believes it’s money.

For modern money to work—to have banks, and a stock market, and a central bank—there needs to be tension. Investors and bankers and activists and government officials all need to be arguing over who gets to do what, and when.

Driverless trucks will make us richer as a society. But they will not improve life for truckers.

Here is a thing that always happens with money: whatever [it] is at a given moment comes to seem like the natural form [it] should take, and anything else seems like irresponsible craziness.

Then he did something that famous economists (or, for that matter, people in general) almost never do: he admitted he was wrong.

We think a dollar today is the same as a dollar a year ago. It’s not; that’s the illusion.

Today, the Federal Reserve is one of the most powerful institutions in the world. It can create trillions of dollars out of thin air, affecting approximately everybody who uses money anywhere on Earth.

Like a lot of people who finish college and don’t know what to do, he became a lawyer and hated it.

In many parts of America in the 1840s and ’50s, anyone who wanted to could print money. Not surprisingly, lots of people wanted to.

Of course banks are greedy! Of course corporations are selfish, and Wall Street is wily! Blaming a financial crisis on these qualities is like blaming a flood on the wetness of water.

Roosevelt’s approach to money was ad hoc, ill informed, and contrary to what most smart, well-meaning, well-informed people thought he should do. Also, it worked.

Roosevelt recognized that there was nothing natural about the gold standard; it was as artificial as any other monetary arrangement.

So hundreds of millions of people were subjected to [the Euro,] a wild experiment that no one in power admitted was a wild experiment.

In the twenty-first century, it has become wildly clear that one of the most important things central bankers do is make promises that people believe.

But in the end, bitcoin would prove as dependent on the messiness of humans as every other kind of money.

We know money will be very different in the future; we just don’t know what kind of different it will be.

“Of all the many ways of organizing banking, the worst is the one we have today.”

[He] spent decades in the wilderness (and by wilderness, I mean the Caribbean, where he lived, in part, to avoid paying taxes).

But some day—maybe next week, maybe in ten years—there will be another financial crisis. And another.

 

The Soundtrack

As you might have guessed, no one is going to be turning Goldstein’s book into a movie any time soon, but just in case, here’s the soundtrack.

 

“Money” by Pink Floyd

 

“Mo Money Mo Problems” by The Notorious B.I.G.

 

“For the Love of Money” by The O’Jays

 

Enjoy the game!