Making Sense of Dollars and Cents

“Learned, lively and often irreverent, David McWilliams’s “The History of Money” is rich with surprising details about currency, then and now.

 

THE HISTORY OF MONEY: A Story of Humanity, by David McWilliams

 

I have seen the best minds of my generation watch “The Wizard of Oz” synced to the Pink Floyd album “The Dark Side of the Moon”; dress in blue gingham as Dorothy for Halloween; and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. But have they considered it as an allegory of class struggle?

 

In “Yellow Brick Road,” the most enchanting chapter in his new book about how money came to be, David McWilliams revives a theory first proposed by the historian Henry Littlefield. In the 1900 L. Frank Baum novel that inspired the movie, the road represents the Gold Standard. The Tin Man is an industrial worker whose wages are going down. The Cowardly Lion is the Democratic-Populist presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. And so on.

 

At a moment of political earthquake for the actual Emerald City of New York, when we’re all Venmoing and Zelleing and Apple-paying as though living in a video game, “The History of Money” just hits different. Like an arrow into the ticking heart of capitalism and its discontents.

 

To McWilliams, money is funny, quite literally. He wants to show it warm and vibrating, not cold and clanky. A former central bank economist from Dublin — “a white, almost pink, Irishman” — he now, like seemingly every finance bro on the planet, has a podcast, and also hosts an economics and stand-up comedy festival and has written several other books.

 

His latest is learned but lively, even whimsical, with a short foreword by the writer Michael Lewis, who is described by the author as “charitable and empathetic to the last” — a nice way of saying he was maybe a little soft on the crypto-criminal Sam Bankman-Fried.

 

Divided into five fast-moving sections, “The History of Money” starts with the Ishango Bone, reputed to be the first “commercial tallystick,” discovered in Congo, and comes, continentally at least, full circle to M-Pesa, a flourishing Kenyan currency based on phone credits.

 

McWilliams writes with extra zest about the ancient Roman general Vespasian, who paid his legionnaires with coins backed by salt — hence the origin of the word “salary” — and, upon becoming emperor, levied attendants in public bathrooms, who collected urine, then prized for its cleaning abilities (even of teeth).

 

When his son Titus found this particular taxation practice gross, the father responded: “Pecunia non olet.” Money does not smell.

 

Johannes Gutenberg is presented as a naughty wingman in the invention of the printing press that changed the world. Of this “bounder” perpetually in debt, McWilliams writes, “From a risk perspective, let’s just say J.G. wasn’t triple-A, more a walking junk bond.”

 

And James Joyce was not just some monk of literary modernism scribbling in a garret, but a businessman who gave Ireland its first cinema, the Volta, in 1909.

 

“Why do we still find it hard to accept that these two roles — the artist and the entrepreneur — ­ are not mutually exclusive?” McWilliams wonders. “Commerce and art have always gone hand in hand, yet over a hundred years after Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ introduced the world to a new sort of novel, the lazy idea of the indigent creative set against the uninspired businessperson, the ingenious bohemian versus the tedious bourgeois, remains as powerful as ever.”

 

He shows how writing and money have always been tightly intertwined, from cuneiform to letters of indulgence to check writing — anyone else miss the satisfying rrrip of tearing off a check? I haven’t seen any other economist mentally hopscotch from the Bankman-Fried scandal to “The Bubble,” the satirical 1720 poem by Jonathan Swift.

 

Despite its title, “The History of Money” is not an encyclopedic volume, but an opinionated, irreverent parsing of currency’s charms. It could not possibly be comprehensive — money is one of those subjects, like air or water, that are sort of everywhere and everything, arising and ebbing and flowing — but it is idiosyncratic and interesting.

 

What, you wanted guidance through our weird, new, not-in-Kansas-anymore world of the Melania Meme? Donald J. Trump and Brexit are dispatched in less than a sentence about quantitative easing. The prospective trillionaire Elon Musk is unmentioned. McWilliams does have harsh words for Bitcoin generally, which he believes is “a financial lobby group more than a new form of money,” a kind of fiscal Esperanto.

 

He argues that the elected officials who rise and fall, the appointees and experts who seem to be in charge and to be responsible for our collective successes and crises, are really just not.

 

“The business cycle is nothing more than the collective expression of human nature, vacillating between optimism and pessimism,” he writes. “We get giddy together; we get depressed together. The ‘together’ bit is the key.”

 

THE HISTORY OF MONEY: A Story of Humanity | By David McWilliams | Holt | 416 pp. | $32.99” [1]

 

1. Making Sense of Dollars and Cents: Nonfiction. Jacobs, Alexandra.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Nov 9, 2025.