对本书主旨、论证和背景的一些质疑

The book has a twin UK documentary series called "Ascent of Money". Later, PBS produced a shortened version of the documentary that can be accessed online for free. Both films are very illuminating and educational, thus I felt compelled by curiosity to read the prints.

The book is famous for its bold conclusion that development finance is primarily responsible for the evolution of human history. Few strong statements supporting this view jump out of the text - "Financial history, the essential backstory behind all history", "Financial innovation has been an indispensable factor in man’s advance" and "the evolution of credit and debt was as important as any technological innovation in the rise of civilization."

The author provides several short stories to illustrate his view. The banking family Medici supported the Italian Renaissance via bank loans and bond market; Dutch and British stock market contributed to the later revolution and imperial success; The French revolution was rooted in preceding stock market turmoil; and China's Qing Dynasty declined due to its inability to introduce more adaptive financing methods, and her current uprise is a result of modern finance system.

These stories can be relate to and reinforced by books that also discover the linkage between finance and societal change. For instance, the "Wall Street and Rise of Hilter" and the "Wall Street and Rise of Bolshevik" attempt to show that Hilter and Soviet Russia were first financially supported by a few wall street bankers and industry tycoons. In the book "Tradegy and Hope", professor Carrol Quigley attributes the inevitable downfall of Soviety Union to its rigid and inflexible financial system which lacks of modern credit money mechanism.

However, some questions arrive as we learn more about the book and the author. The author, Ferguson, in his preceding book, The Cash Nexus, asserts that economic factor is only partially responsible for societal change. This contention, however, contradicts what he is saying in this book. If such contradiction is logically sound, then the author must have altered his view between writing the two books. However, the rationale for such a change is not given in the book.

Moreover, the author committed a grand fallacy by treating a necessary conducive factor as a sufficient one. I do believe that finance has been playing a critical role to human soceity, but I don't think finance alone can shape the society into what it is today. In other words, development of finance is necessary to societal change, but it is wrong to say that its existence is sufficient to such change. And the author didn't even attempt to prove finance being a sufficient factor.

In terms of reasoning method, the book relies on inductive argumentations, such as generalization and causality, which are susceptible to exceptions and alternative causes. Thus, without additional information to justify the conclusion that financial development is the main driving force of human history, and reject other factors as the main force, the overall argument in this book is weak and subject to implausibility.

Lastly, the time of publication of this book, 2008, makes one to suspect the book's implied political nature. Some positions in the book seem to function as justification of the creidt crisis in 2008. They suggest that financial turmoil in 2008 is a normal piece of history-making moment in the long financial history; Crisis is bound to occur regularly throughout history, because the dying of financial institutions such as Bear Sterns and Merry Lynch simply represents a part of natural selection process in the finance industry.

Thus, one can infer from the above passage that there would be no one to blame for the 2008 crisis. Nonetheless, a few economists and politicians such as Ron Paul have pointed out that the sinner was the US central bank who inflated the bubble prior to the crisis. If Ron Paul is right, then the author's view can be argued as a diversion from the criticism of the US central bank.

Despite of these short comings, the book provides interesting stories, intrigueing ideas connecting segments of social and historical knowledge, and an vivid illustration of importance of finance to human history. To that I do not object.

By HartmannJG52
2012.10.03