Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Money makes the world go round?, 2 Feb 2005
Puzzled by pensions? Muddled by mortgages? Stumped by the stock exchange? Money is something we all use every day and in a nation obsessed with house prices and addicted to credit cards, this book sets out to "tell you where money comes from, what it means, what it's doing to our planet and what we might be able to do about it". And, I might add - why you should care about those things. This little book is an excellent addition to the trio of books in the Fragile Earth series - The Little Food Book, The Little Earth Book and this one - The Little Money Book. Jam packed with interesting nuggets of information, this little book will challenge the commom assumption that 'economics is boring'. It's amazing what David Boyle has packed into a mere 192 pages - the book starts with a history of money and where it came from and covers everything from stock markets to the Enron scandal, debt, mortgages, pensions, oil, volunteering, barter, philanthropy,
downshifting, ethical consumerism and investment - and much more! While this may sound a bit overwhelming, it's all presented in easily digestible bite size chunks which provide plenty of food for thought! This is the kind of book that you can easily dip into and cherry pick the bits that interest you most. In a world where it is said that more than 1.3 billion people still live on less than $1 a day, while others have incredible wealth; this is a timely book which provides useful background to the economic news we hear on a daily basis. There are some interesting ideas in this book and the subtitle "A provocative view of the way money works" tells you that it's about a lot more than just money - it's a book about communities, relationships, happiness and the way we live our lives! All in all a very interesting read with lots of ideas and links to other books and website for more information on the subjects which are covered. Recommended.
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3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Nice collection of facts, but, ..., 9 Jul 2006
This books contains a nice collection of facts about money, ranging from making it, keeping it, happiness, up to finally giving it away for a good cause. However, two things severely diminish the reading experience:
1.) The author does not seem to have a firm grasp on some of the topics. He, for example, actually blames "Statistics" for the 1929 stock market crash ("Keynesianism was taken over by econometricians and technocrats: Keynes was always skeptical of using too many statistics in economics though he also invented the GDP"). As a PhD student in Finance, I can believe that overblown future growth expectations and irrational exuberance are now widely regarded as the causes of the 1929 crash. The interested reader is referred to the excellent book "Irrational Exuberance" which puts stock market booms and crashes into a historical perspective.
I am by no means an expert in all of the areas covered in the book, but whenever I had some prior knowledge on a topic it was easy to spot misleading or simply plain wrong claims by the author ("... currency dealers around the world will send the value of your currency suddenly and catastrophically through the floor."). This gives the impression that the other sections of the book (that are new to me), are equally unreliable.
2.) The author is a pure anti-capitalist and blames international corporations pretty much for every single evil in the world ("... biodiverse farms can produce thousands of times more food than large, industrial monocultures. Global corporations don't like this and can't recognize it."). The book often contains 2-3 such irritating claims on a page.
In a nutshell, the book is quite nice for a quick read, maybe on an airplane. But keep in mind that only about half of the book is about money. The remainder is a collection of the author's rather subjective opinions on world hunger and the like.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The credit crunch - it was all forseen, 18 May 2009
This small but wonderful, readable book, written in 2003 (!) predicted the current credit crunch, explaining how greedy speculators and financiers can manipulate money in the absence of any significant controls. It explains how, after previous crunches, controls were put in place and then removed, leading to subsequent ones. The mechanics are so simple that politicians as well as financiers will have been well aware of the consequences of the credit boom but were hoping to enjoy its benefits before the inevitable crash. Governments were happy to let the wizz-kids make their fast bucks, lending money to all and sundry - effectively increasing the money supply - because they were benefiting from it. Gordon Brown's grand disassociation with boom and bust was, like his 'prudence', largely hot air. He was happy to enjoy the fruits of the boom he encouraged, and his ambition for premiership blinded him to the likelihood of the inevitable bust occurring during his tenure. Tony Blair got out just in time!
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by Craig Sams
by James Bruges
by David Boyle
