The History of Money in Podcast-Sized Bites.

• Author: McKinley, Vern

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing

By Jacob Goldstein

272 pp.; Hachette Books, 2020

Learning to use money is something we do as we mature, and we make adjustments in how we use it along the way, such as downloading and learning to use Venmo or other money payment apps. Despite this process, we usually take the concept of money for granted and do not spend much time thinking deeply about it.

One person who has thought about it is Jacob Goldstein, the cohost of National Public Radio's podcast and blog Planet Money, which explain money-related topics in a way that is understandable to a general audience. In his new book Money, Goldstein thinks through what money is, describes how it developed historically and where it stands today, and offers thoughts on what its future holds. He uses the same approach that he does on Planet Money. develop brief, entertaining, and engaging narratives to cover a single or a few money-related topics in a manageable slice of a reader's or listener's time (in the case of this book, chapters run about 10-15 pages). Money is Goldstein's first book.

What is money? / The book's first challenge is defining money. Economics textbooks often do this by listing a few of its basic properties, such as that it is a store of value. Goldstein, in his "Author's note," takes a very different approach, writing that money "is fiction," "a made-up thing," "unalterably social," and that it is something created "out of thin air." These statements make clear to the reader that his approach will not involve setting forth rote definitions to memorize, but rather will involve giving the reader a continuous stream of historical examples of money. As he explains, "These origin stories of money are the best way I know to understand what money is, and the power it has, and what we fight about when we fight about money."

It is impossible in a short review to summarize all the individual historical examples Goldstein provides in Money, but I will focus on a few of them and consider how he leverages these cases to introduce key money topics.

What is inflation? / To illustrate the concept of inflation, he does not use the 1970s "stagflation" that many contemporary readers are familiar with, but instead he turns to 18th century France. The central character of this case study is the notorious Scottish economist John Law, who Goldstein weaves through his narrative for much of the first third of the book. He writes that Law "creates a modern...