The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World - Summary 
| From renowned and proliferant historian Niall Ferguson, "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World" gives an all-encompassing view of money and its many derivitive instruments through-out human history. | |
| Some years ago, writes Ferguson, a previously unknown tribe appeared at the edge of the Amazonian rainforest. For many generations these people had subsisted solely on hunting and gathering. | |
|
Indeed, they had no conception of money
and so unsurprisingly, they had little concept of futurity either. Now, living near to a city, they subsist on food brought by strangers with no demand for anything in return.
So by removing the hunting-and-gathering lifestyle was a first step toward the larger
prosperity of humankind, Ferguson suggests - contra Marshall Sahlins's Stone Age
Economics (1974) - while other instruments compelled us farther along the evolutionary path.
One was the development of credit and debt, "as important as any technological innovation in the rise of civilization, from ancient Babylon to present-day Hong Kong." |
|
| Niall Ferguson takes a position similar to that of Jacob Bronowski (the title of the book, of course, being homage to The Ascent of Man). He offers plenty of nuts-and-bolts information. Every day, $2 trillion changes hands and every single second of the day someone is selling something to someone else, somewhere, clearly a far more congenial use of time and energy than war, including coup and other pastimes of our tribe writ large. | |
| War, after all, is a leading cause of inflation - writes Ferguson, which he then attends to in a nicely scathing critical analysis of the Enron scandal. | |