A book series that makes economics easy to read
True stories, plain English and both sides of every argument. From cowrie shells to Bitcoin, and from Adam Smith to your mortgage.
Book One
The Story of MoneyFrom shells to Satoshis
Book Two
Big Ideas, Your MoneyIdeologies, wages, savings and the home
Book Three · planned
When Economies FallFrom fallen empires to today's debts
Hover a book to bring it forward
Each one sounds simple. Each one opens a chapter. Hover to see where the answer lives.
Why would anyone accept a stone they can't move as money?
Book One · Chapter 2
Why did a barrow of banknotes buy a single loaf in 1923?
Book One · Chapter 11
Is Bitcoin money, or something else?
Book One · Chapter 19
Can a government run out of its own money?
Book Two · Chapter 8
Who decides what your savings are worth?
Book Two · Chapter 11
Is your house a home, or an investment?
Book Two · Chapter 14
The series
Book One
From Shells to Satoshis
Five thousand years of money, told through the people who lived it: a prisoner's cigarette economy, a stone at the bottom of the sea, Rome's shrinking silver, a barrow of banknotes in 1923, and a pizza bought with bitcoin.
Book Two
How economic beliefs shape your wages, savings and home
Smith, Marx, Keynes, Hayek, the Austrians and Modern Monetary Theory, each given its best case and its toughest critics. Then the four levers every government pulls: wages, prices, savings and the home.
Book Three · working title
From fallen empires to today's debts
What happens when promises outgrow the money behind them? Case studies from Rome and Spain to Weimar, Argentina, Japan and the pressures on today's public finances.
Story first
Every chapter opens with a real person at a real moment, and the economics unfolds from what happened to them.
Both sides, fairly
Where economists disagree, you get the best case for, the best case against, and what the evidence actually settles.
Plain English
No equations and no jargon left unexplained. If you can follow a news story, you can follow this.
Sourced
Facts and figures carry notes to their sources, so you can check anything for yourself.
Coming soon
A free interactive dashboard to go with the books. Trace where a pay packet goes, see how prices, savings and taxes connect, and try the levers for yourself.
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