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The Ascent of Money

a Financial History of the World
Jan 15, 2011
This book describes the history of financial innovation as an evolutionary process mirroring our cultural evolution over the past 700 years. I wonder if this is a strictly economic assessment and what a similar history of social, cultural, legal, or political innovation, studying an altogether different human subject, would produce. From a legal standpoint, financial evolution is a process of breaking down legal barriers, which implies a re-ordering of what is acceptable. In this sense, the result is terrifying in that it implies a greater acceptance of how we manage priorities and risk as a society through ill-fated financial gambits. On the other hand, maybe this is more of an analysis of an ethereal merchant class which, brandishing the science of economics, has come to wield a great deal of structural and productive power in our particular cultural climate. But can this class, in an age where people and citizens are increasingly investors and property owners, be easily distinguished from any other? Is legal change actually analogous to cultural evolution? If so, why? If not, how do we distinguish between them?