The co-host of the popular NPR podcast Planet Money provides a well-researched entertaining
somewhat irreverent look at how money is a made-up thing that has evolved over time to suit
humanity's changing needs.Money only works because we all agree to believe in it. In Money
Jacob Goldstein shows how money is a useful fiction that has shaped societies for thousands of
years from the rise of coins in ancient Greece to the first stock market in Amsterdam to the
emergence of shadow banking in the 21st century. At the heart of the story are the fringe
thinkers and world leaders who reimagined money. Kublai Khan the Mongol emperor created paper
money backed by nothing centuries before it appeared in the west. John Law a professional
gambler and convicted murderer brought modern money to France (and destroyed the country's
economy). The cypherpunks a group of radical libertarian computer programmers paved the way
for bitcoin. One thing they all realized: what counts as money (and what doesn't) is the result
of choices we make and those choices have a profound effect on who gets more stuff and who
gets less who gets to take risks when times are good and who gets screwed when things go bad.
Lively accessible and full of interesting details (like the 43-pound copper coins that
17th-century Swedes carried strapped to their backs) Money is the story of the choices that
gave us money as we know it today.
