"Atlas of Finance
By Dariusz Wojcik et al.
Yale, 240 pages, $40
We should not, or so we are told, judge a book by its cover, but when that book is an "Atlas of Finance" -- and one of the two people featured on its cover, a clever tribute to banknotes, is Karl Marx (the other, reassuringly, is Adam Smith) -- it's reasonable to think that the image hints at what may be lurking inside.
The tone is set in the book's introduction, in which Dariusz Wojcik, its "lead author and project manager," rejects the proposition that, despite its "transformative power . . . finance is indispensable to humanity."
Thus, before "the plunderous West showed up on their shores," indigenous Australians used barter and "prospered" for some 50,000 years in unity with their environment, its flora and fauna.
"As such," according to Mr. Wojcik, "money and finance can be seen as the scissors that cut the umbilical cord connecting us to Mother Nature."
To the extent that is true, we owe money and finance our thanks. Had our species remained dependent on such a reliably unreliable and frequently lethal parent, today's remarkable human flourishing would not even have made it into our dreams.
Mr. Wojcik, a professor of financial geography at the National University of Singapore, has been aided by a collective of eight co-authors, a cartographer and a design editor, nearly all of whom are drawn from academia. The book's subtitle promises to map the "global story of money." But the tale tends to be one in which the vault is half-empty. In his introduction, Mr. Wojcik acknowledges the importance of finance in our rise from "groups of hunter-gatherers" to participants in today's "global and digital networks," but he frets that we are "destroying the natural resources necessary for our sustenance." This ignores the success of human ingenuity in repeatedly finding new resources (and making better use of old ones), thus enabling us to survive and very much more than that. Later in the "Atlas" the authors claim that Marx's "warnings about money alienating people from each other and their environment are timeless." They are?
The book's ideological slant is effectively sharpened by its brevity, which is compounded by the space taken up by its numerous charts and maps. For example, whether due to space constraints, ideology or both, the account of the eurozone crisis is as flawed as it is superficial. There is no proper discussion of the way the origins of that disaster lay in the very establishment of the euro, which represented a triumph of technocratic politics over market economics. That would be an awkward truth for this book's authors -- no fans, seemingly, of laissez-faire -- to admit.
The pressure for concision, and the writers' obvious confidence that their beliefs are self-evidently correct, cause them to rely too often on assertion rather than argument. The commentary that accompanies a map showing the flow of remittances from foreign workers to relatives back home concludes with the statement that "the key task will be ensuring that remittances translate into fair, equitable, and sustainable development for those most in need." It will?
The narrative set out in the "Atlas" has plenty of room for exploitation, chicanery and inequity. But capitalism fueled by finance, as even cover-boy Marx and his henchman Engels conceded in the "Manifesto of the Communist Party," "has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals." Such wonders go largely unexplored in this book, as does the contribution made to them by finance's excesses. The "Atlas" could have included a map focused on the enormous and rapid expansion of the British railway network in the 1840s, much of it funded by a speculative boom (followed by a bust, but the railway lines endured). Instead, readers must make do with the inevitable depiction of a tulip.
Inequality is highlighted, but the extraordinary growth in and broadening of human prosperity over the last century is not. Both would have had their place in a more evenhanded work. Similarly, climate change's grim specter makes regular appearances, but there is almost nothing to explain the Industrial Revolution (why there, why then?) or to illustrate its spread or the extraordinary benefits it brought in exchange for all those emissions.
For all that, in its text and ingenious, often beautifully executed illustrations (which typically combine a map with "data visualizations" of one sort or another), the "Atlas" contains a wealth of information, on subjects ranging from high-frequency trading to the role of Edmond Halley (of comet fame) as a pioneer of actuarial science. One or two of the book's charts are a touch difficult to decipher -- more so, take it from me, for the colorblind. But those are the exceptions. Some offer a master class in the use of design as exposition, including one that illustrates the unpromising-sounding topic of maritime risk-sharing with unexpected and elegant panache. One map shows the vast swath of territory in which hoards of Roman coins have been found, revealing both the empire's internal cohesion and its external reach (hoards have been discovered as far away as India). A second flags how far China's Belt and Road Initiative extends across the world, although no mention is made in the text of the frequent criticism that the BRI is a form of "creditor imperialism."
In his introduction to the "Atlas" Mr. Wojcik writes of his hope that it becomes a resource for (among others) "regulators and policymakers." Given his wish that this could help in the process of reharnessing "the power of finance for the common good" (whatever that may be), that would be better avoided.
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Mr. Stuttaford is the editor of National Review's Capital Matters." [1]
One starts wandering if Andrew Stuttaford will sing praises to all those emissions of capitalism if all those emissions end up starting to kill him.
1. REVIEW --- Books: The Wealth Of Nations On the Go. Stuttaford, Andrew. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 30 Nov 2024: C.8.
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