Review: "Gold: The Once and Future Money"
Friday, June 11, 2010 at 07:07PM |
Ray Sawhill
Gold: The Once and Future Money by Nathan Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
An ambitious attempt to interpret all of economic history through the lens of gold, with the goal of establishing gold as the best available basis for money.
What have people used as money? What have rulers and governments tended to do to money? What comes into focus when you use gold as a reference source?
The main ideas here are that 1) gold is the people’s money (in the sense that people will always and have always found gold to be valuable and desirable); 2) gold keeps people, and especially rulers, honest; and 3) in a world of ever-shifting values, gold can be usefully used as a stable reference point.
Lewis tells the history of money generally, focuses in on the history of money in the U.S., then zeroes in on a survey of currency crises throughout the world. In its critiques of conventional economics, the gold-bug vision is surprisingly radical and trenchant -- very similar to, say, the Modern Monetary Theory (ie., hyper-Keynesian) view of things, though their proposed solutions differ by 180 degrees.
The book was twice as long as I needed it to be, but I was glad to have read it. Whether Lewis’ argument is right or wrong -- and how would I know? -- I found the book informative, challenging, and enlightening.
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