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I was really disappointed in this book. It came recommended from a friend and I was hoping for some new ideas or insights around money and economics. It really is just a nonsensical ramble of which I was not able to eke out much. This review is the least I can do to warn others to not repeat my money and time waste. The author spends a lot of time at the beginning critiquing the "myth" of barter (that two paragraph parable at the beginning of 8th grade economics manuals - of how people would try to barter and thus discover it would be easier to use money). He builds this two paragraph parable into a huge straw-man, calling it the "founding myth of economics" which he proceeds to attack. That's his attempt to take down the discipline of economics (pls. note I am not calling it a science). That's like taking down anatomy because the anatomy drawings in the 6th grade manual are not accurate. The barter parable is meant to illustrate that any transactions (barter, credit, taxes etc) are nearly impossible without a universal unit of measure for value exchanged. Which is money. The parable uses the example of barter for a transaction because it is much easier for 8th graders to imagine that rather than more complicated transactions such as credit and taxes. He argues that anthropologists found no societies without money in which significant volumes of barter exists. Of course they did not. Without money it is impossible to keep track of the price of everything against everything. Which is the point the barter parable is trying to make in a simplistic way. Next the author argues that money is tied to credit transactions (including taxes) and that credit and money are really like the chicken and the egg. Of course they are. Credit transactions are exchanges of value with a time lag. Without a way to quantify the value exchanged they are nearly impossible to make (just like barter). And of course money is not coins. Coins are just symbols for money just like bank notes. The radical idea found by the author is that exchanges of value (trading goods, trading value in time as in credit, paying taxes) are impossible without a way to measure that value. Which btw. is exactly what the economists' parable of barter is trying to say too. All of this is peppered with random anthropological accounts, quotes from Nietzsche, quotes from some french economists about our primordial debt to gods, cries that our lives have become a "series of commercial transactions", and nonsensical expressions such as "bourgeois assumptions" (really? bourgeois?). The intent is to argue that money was involved in almost everything bad people did to each other through history and therefore there's something mysterious and bad about money (debt = money = slavery = capitalism = bad, or something like that). But wooden sticks, metals, clothes, and pretty much everything else including language were also involved in pretty much everything bad some people did to some other. So why single out money? Because it is an abstract concept, and abstract and invisible things draw weak minds like candles draw moths. Ever wonder why loonies come up with perpetual motion machines involving electricity and magnetism a lot more often than involving mechanics or thermodynamics? For the same reason - electricity and magnetism, just like money, are invisible and mysterious. Easier to make up fantasies about.