Comments by "Curious Crow" (@CuriousCrow-mp4cx) on "How Capitalism Conquered the World" video.

  1. You need to read the review of the book "Money" by David McWilliams (2024) in the Financial Times. It explains why Monetary History ≠ the Economic History of Humanity. Quote: "Money sits at the very core of human social and economic life. That is a boon to its historians, because it makes it of near-universal interest — but it also brings significant challenges. One is that money is so fundamental a part of our conceptual furniture that it is hard to get an objective view: misleading metaphors, conventional misunderstandings and the surreptitious special pleading of vested interests abound. Another is that any history of money must effectively also be a general economic history of humanity. In the wrong hands, the history of money can thus easily degenerate into a conceptually confused and unmanageably expansive mess. McWilliams dodges these elephant traps. He establishes the Archimedean point of an accurate conceptual framework up front. Money, he explains in his introduction, is nothing more or less than a “wondrous technology” that “resides in our heads, representing value”, and which “humans invented to help us negotiate an increasingly complex and interrelated world.” He thus wastes no time on old canards such as the habit of confusing the tokens that have historically been used to represent money with money itself or the myth that money is a medium of exchange that emerges from barter. Instead, he identifies money clearly as a specific, but constantly evolving, collection of ideas and institutions — from numeracy and accounting through to coinage and the eurodollar market." Money as a technology with supporting institutions, existed before Capitalism. Therefore, it doesn't belong in a history of Capitalism. It deserves a treatment all by itself especially as Finance and Banking, the Golden Calves of our age, are poorly understood by the public and that leads them to be especially vulnerable to the crises in this area. It will also better inform the understanding of evolutions like Cryptocurrency, and the opportunities and threats they represents. Keep on pursuing the knowledge though. More people need to understand money as a technology, a tool that can kill or cure.
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