Book review

I was racking my brains, trying to understand money, trying to grasp exactly what it is, when I came across these two books. One is written by Aaron Brown, who is the risk manager of a large Wall Street hedgefund. The other is by David Graeber, the anarchist who has been called the leader — and, sometimes, the anti-leader — of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Both have written brilliant books about the history of money. As you’d expect, Brown thinks that money, in its various forms, has made the world a prosperous and interesting place, and Graeber thinks that money has divided the world into two tribes — a tiny, and shrinking, number of very rich people (like Brown), and a vast, and growing, army of debtors. In a way, they’re both right. So what is money?

However often rehearsed, the facts remain eye-popping. Inequality has bolted out of control over the last three decades. Democracy has proved increasingly powerless to check the unaccountable runaway oligarchy that fails even to pay its taxes. Ferdinand Mount gives a lucid account of political decay alongside all this looting, a disengaged electorate and a cult of leadership in hock to overmighty media oligarchs, all ominously suggestive of the decline and fall of the Roman empire. When a Tory tells the story, it’s far more compelling than any left-winger. Mount was head of Margaret Thatcher’s Policy Unit from 1982 to 1984 and a director of the then most influential Tory think-tank, the Centre for Policy Studies.