I just read these one after the other - they won't interest everyone here, but if you like the historical aspect of money they're worth a look. James Ledbetter's One Nation Under Gold is about the role of gold in the monetary history of the U.S. I may as well say up front that Ledbetter considers the gold standard mainly as a failed experiment, so you can imagine the variety of reactions he'd get in this forum. Anyway, he provides a pretty readable account of the relevant events and their effects on society: the California gold rush, the issuance of greenbacks in the Civil War, the several financial panics and the Depression, Bretton Woods, the “Nixon Shock,” the rise of bullion dealers - and their tactics - when gold ownership was again legal. I'm not knowledgeable enough to evaluate his every point (though he commits a couple of howlers, like placing the Comstock Lode in Colorado). But I'm at least semi-literate on most of these topics and I still found enough that I didn't already know to keep me turning the pages. It's well footnoted. David Birch's Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin is about the future of money, though in order to frame his argument he often refers back to the history of money from the ancient world forward. Or so he does in the first part of the book, before getting down into more specific predictions and, frankly, a little more disorganized techno-babble than I usually care for. Still, whether you're convinced or not, it's kind of irresistible to listen to someone telling you confidently what the future will be like. Birch thinks that the era of central banking will one day be seen as a historical blip, that money will be issued by businesses and “communities” broadly defined, and that people will use their phones to manage multiple currencies backed by kilowatt hours, airline miles, traditional commodities (even gold!) and so on, in a sort of high-speed back-to-the-future barter system. I dunno – why not? He's also rather funny sometimes, or at least I got a smile out of the reference to cryptocurrencies as dosh ex machina. Not one word in either of these books will tell you how to grade, store, or doctor your coins. You've been warned
First one sounds interesting and worth looking at. But "Ledbetter considers the gold standard mainly as a failed experiment" makes me wonder. Experiment does not exactly seem like the correct word for something which was around for thousands of years and its replacement has only been around for about 100 years.
