More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
It’s much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest, and who is a cheat.
Rumour-mongers are the original fourth estate, journalists who inform society about and thus protect it from cheats and freeloaders.
if a Catholic priest dressed in his sacred garments solemnly said the right words at the right moment, mundane bread and wine turned into God’s flesh and blood. The priest exclaimed ‘Hoc est corpus meum!’ (Latin for ‘This is my body!’) and hocus pocus – the bread turned into Christ’s flesh.
if a certified lawyer followed all the proper liturgy and rituals, wrote all the required spells and oaths on a wonderfully decorated piece of paper, and affixed his ornate signature to the bottom of the document, then hocus pocus – a new company was incorporated.
Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world.
The transition to agriculture began around 9500–8500 BC in the hill country of south-eastern Turkey, western Iran, and the Levant.
They told a tale of progress fuelled by human brain power. Evolution gradually produced ever more intelligent people.
Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease.
We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.
How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are
they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away. One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.
Free association and holistic thought have given way to compartmentalisation and bureaucracy.
For the conquerors, the entire world was a single empire and all humans were potential subjects, and for the prophets, the entire world held a single truth and all humans were potential believers. They too tried to establish an order that would be applicable for everyone everywhere.
This conqueror is money.
How did money succeed where gods and kings failed?
‘We are conquering you for your own benefit,’ said the Persians.
The presumption to rule the entire world for the benefit of all its inhabitants was startling.
They too are haunted by ceaseless cares and worries, until sickness, old age and death put a bitter end to them. Everything that one has accumulated vanishes like smoke. Life is a pointless rat race. But how to escape it?
We either fear that the pleasure might disappear, or we hope that it will intensify.
We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.
Scientists have provided the imperial project with practical knowledge, ideological justification and technological gadgets.
Humankind was trapped in this predicament for thousands of years. As a result, economies remained frozen. The way out of the trap was discovered only in the modern era, with the appearance of a new system based on trust in the future.
If the pie is static, and I have a big part of it, then I must have taken somebody else’s slice.
The idea of progress is built on the notion that if we admit our ignorance and invest resources in research, things can improve.
In 1776 the Scottish economist Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, probably the most important economics manifesto of all time.
Being rich meant being moral. In Smith’s story, people become rich not by despoiling their neighbours, but by increasing the overall size of the pie.
This brings about more profits, which are again reinvested in production, which brings more profits, et cetera ad infinitum.
how economic affluence and a thriving middle class are essential for stable democratic institutions, and about the need therefore to inculcate Afghan tribesmen in the values of free enterprise, thrift and self-reliance.
Banks and governments print money, but ultimately, it is the scientists who foot the bill.
So they are creating trillions of dollars, euros and yen out of thin air, pumping cheap credit into the system, and hoping that the scientists, technicians and engineers will manage to come up with something really big, before the bubble bursts.
create entire new industries, whose profits could back the trillions of make-believe money that the banks and governments have created since 2008.
Remember, too, that until the late eighteenth century, Asia was the world’s economic powerhouse,
The empires built by bankers and merchants in frock coats and top hats defeated the empires built by kings and noblemen in gold clothes and shining armour.
As every schoolchild knows, Isabella hit the jackpot. Columbus’ discoveries enabled the Spaniards to conquer America, where they established gold and silver mines as well as sugar and tobacco plantations that enriched the Spanish kings, bankers and merchants beyond their wildest dreams.
Nurhaci and Nader Shah ran out of fuel after a few thousand miles. Capitalist entrepreneurs only increased their financial momentum from conquest to conquest.
In order to increase the number of potential investors and reduce the risk they incurred, Europeans turned to limited liability joint-stock companies.
How exactly did the Dutch win the trust of the financial system? Firstly, they were sticklers about repaying their loans on time and in full, making the extension of credit less risky for lenders. Secondly, their country’s judicial system enjoyed independence and protected private rights – in particular private property rights.
Better to do business with merchants than with kings, and better to do it in Holland than in Madrid.
They, too, realise that if they want to keep their money and use it to gain more wealth, they are better off investing it where the rule of law prevails and where private property is respected – in the Netherlands, for example.
the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC for short, was chartered in 1602,
Wall Street.
The behaviour of the French crown was particularly notorious during what was called the Mississippi Bubble, the largest financial crisis of eighteenth-century Europe. That story also begins with an empire-building joint-stock company.
Euphoria swept the streets of Paris. People sold all their possessions and took huge loans in order to buy Mississippi shares. Everybody believed they’d discovered the easy way to riches.
Eventually it ran out of money. When this happened, the controller-general of finances, the same John Law, authorised the printing of more money in order to buy additional shares.
The price of Mississippi shares dropped from 10,000 livres back to 1,000 livres, and then collapsed completely, and the shares lost every sou of their worth.
Small investors lost everything, and many committed suicide.
The Mississippi Bubble was one of history’s most spectacular financial crashes.
This became one of the chief reasons that the overseas French Empire fell into British hands.
Eventually, in the 1780s, Louis XVI, who had ascended to the throne on his grandfather’s death, realised that half his annual budget was tied to servicing the interest on his loans, and that he was heading towards bankruptcy.
The most notorious example of how governments did the bidding of big money was the First Opium War, fought between Britain and China (1840–42).
