So as promised I finished reading Making Money by Terry Pratchett which was yet another Discworld book and the second Moist von Lipwig story after Going Postal. As you might imagine from the title the premise is that Moist is now taking over the bank and mint and he decides to eliminate the gold standard and introduce paper currency. Chaos ensues.
I didn’t find this book as amusing as Going Postal and I think this is because the bank characters were not as interesting as the post office characters. Or perhaps it’s because “Adorable Dearheart” was not as prominent in this book? There was a large subplot having to do with golems and I thought that got botched. I think that this book had a lot to say about society and indeed the matter of fiat currency was something that was on my mind since I had recently, well, found out how it works. Sort of. Basically the thing is that money has value just because it’s valued. The value isn’t necessarily tied down to something. In theory it’s tied down to something, but in reality it’s never tied down to anything but the institution. In other words money doesn’t really exist.
That’s crazy right? Yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. I think that materialism is a problem, I wouldn’t say a sin but at least a demerit, but having some sort of standard just helps things to run. Especially in what has turned into a non-production based and wealthless unskilled labor society. By that I mean for instance a clerk (store or office) who can do their job but isn’t necessarily able to create anything or do anything and doesn’t have anything of tangible value like a cow or transient value like gems and metals. So how would a person like that get a house without money? Yes in truth money is what has let society get to this point. Actually it’s more like the world revolves around credit and money was originally a part of that but one thing at a time. Anyway what I’m trying to say is that money just is so use it, don’t worry about it not having value, or in some cases having too much value, as long your country exists (which is something you might worry about) your money will work. And unless you’re in some kind of questionable business you only need the money that works in your own country.
So saying I somewhat wonder whether or not there will be a discworld novel about something directly comparable to oil etc. but I suppose that was touched on somewhat in The Fifth Elephant with… fat….. hmm… Anyway the book (making money that is) was fine, I enjoyed it moderately. I wouldn’t recommend reading it before going postal though. And apparently the next “main-line” discworld novel will also feature Moist and be about taxes. This was hinted at in the end just as the banking angle was hinted at in going postal but then it was stated otherwise anyway. I suppose this is somewhat of a spoiler but you know… it’s Discworld. That’s all I can say. By the way this is apparently the 22nd book I’ve read this year (I don’t mention them all here). I wonder if I could make it to 100 after hitting 50 last year. There are probably other things I should be doing though.
{ 7/14/2008 Just a small update, the end of this entry ended out being somewhat prophetic as I have only read a handful more books by this point but I did indeed do something better by starting in with math lessons. What the goal of this is at this point in my life I don’t know, it just seemed to me like it was a great deficiency of mine and I didn’t have anything better that I was likely to do or be able to achieve than learn math. By the way this was a pretty shitty review after all that rambling about fiat currency. But there really isn’t a lot to say about Discworld that it doesn’t say itself, I find the books amusing and sometimes possessing remarkably insightful social commentary}
The Sky Before Dawn 