- Pratchett, Terry.
Making Money.
New York: HarperCollins, 2007.
ISBN 978-0-06-116164-3.
-
Who'd have imagined that fractional reserve banking, fiat currency,
and macroeconometric modelling could be so funny? When Lord Vetinari,
tyrant of Ankh-Morpork, decides the economy needs more juice than the
stodgy plutocrat-run banks provide, he immediately identifies the
ideal curriculum vitæ of a
central banker: confidence man, showman, and all-purpose crook. (In
our world, mumbling and unparsable prose seem additional job requirements,
but things are simpler on Discworld.)
Fortunately, the man for the job is right at hand when the hereditary
chief of the Royal Bank goes to her reward: Moist von Lipwig,
triumphant in turning around the Post Office in
Going Postal, is persuaded
(Lord Vetinari can be very persuasive, especially to
civil servants he has already once hanged by the neck) to take the
second-in-command position at the Bank, the Chairman's
office having been assumed by Mr. Fusspot, a small dog who
lives in the in-box on Lipwig's desk.
Moist soon finds himself introducing paper money, coping with
problems in the gold vault, dealing with a model of the
economy which may be more than a model (giving an entirely
new meaning to “liquidity”), fending off a run
on the bank, summoning the dead to gain control of a
super-weapon, and finding a store of value which is better than
gold. If you aren't into economics, this is a terrific Discworld
novel; if you are, it's delightful on a deeper level.
The “Glooper” in the basement of the bank is based
upon economist
William Phillips's
MONIAC hydraulic
economic computer, of which a dozen or more were built. There is
no evidence that fiddling with Phillips's device was able to
influence the economy which it modelled, but perhaps this is
because Phillips never had an assistant named “Igor”.
If you're new to Terry Pratchett and don't know where to start, here's
a handy
chart
(home page and
other language translations) which shows the main threads and their
interconnections. Making Money does not appear in
this map; it should be added to the right of Going Postal.
January 2008 