By Adam Rowe

The coronavirus may have blind-sided our health-care system, but the Federal Reserve was ready with the same miracle cure it now prescribes for almost every financial emergency. Quantitative easing is the technical name for it, but the basic idea is to create a lot of money -- about $3 trillion so far in the pandemic era. This quick fix for an economic calamity is intuitively appealing to politicians and more than a few economists, but ordinary common sense is apt to be mystified. Look too closely at the way the Fed plays with the money supply and you may become confused about the basic concept underlying the dollars we earn, save and spend. What is money, exactly?

A fun, fascinating introduction to this daunting question is Jacob Goldstein's "Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing" (Hachette, 257 pages, $28). In a casual, conversational style, Mr. Goldstein explains how the concept of money has evolved throughout human history, from the emergence of clay tokens in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago to the arrival of bitcoin. Mr. Goldstein, who is the co-host of NPR's "Planet Money," has a talent for simplifying a complicated story and conveying the essential point along with a few colorful details that make it stick.

A recurring theme is what Mr. Goldstein refers to as "the not-enough-money problem," by which he means currency, not wealth. As societies innovate and grow, their prosperity gets shackled by outmoded ideas of what money is. "Then someone has an insight," Mr. Goldstein writes. "They say: We are doing money all wrong. Here's a better way to do it." So inscribed clay tokens become coins, paper money backed by gold becomes paper backed by the promises of central bankers, and the promises of central bankers are beginning to give way to the ingenuity of computer programmers and a future we can only dimly imagine.

Mr. Goldstein concludes by suggesting that a more democratic monetary future awaits us, one in which the people seize control of their money from rarefied experts. But to create that future, "we'd have to decide that we trust ourselves -- that we trust our elected representatives -- to control money itself." The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward more money for everyone.

Frederick Kaufman's "The Money Plot" (Other Press, 288 pages, $27.99) also begins with the observation that money is a fiction, something made-up and therefore malleable. But whereas Mr. Goldstein writes unpretentiously, with a talent for simplifying complex subjects, Mr. Kaufman, an English professor, can make even the simplest idea hard to grasp. Here is a typical sentence: "As allegory made money out of cowries, metonymy made money out of wives, and catachresis made money out of livestock, the magical thinking that guides synecdoche also came to define a great deal of what we consider money."

A discussion of the gold standard, in which every dollar was convertible into a fixed quantity of gold, becomes, in Mr. Kaufman's hands, a discussion of an early American literary genre -- first-person accounts of white women captured by Native Americans. "The maiden in distress was being threatened by a tribe of savage Pequots," Mr. Kaufman writes, with more than a little interpretive flair, summarizing President Nixon's reasons for liberating the dollar from what remained of the gold standard in 1971, "and so the dollar took its place in a long line of American captivity narratives."

And yet there is a lot of erudition in Mr. Kaufman's analysis of money as a form of storytelling. The word for semiotics, or the study of symbols, Mr. Kaufman notes, comes from "the ancient Greek word seme, which means both 'word' and 'coin.' " The history of money is the history of communication systems. Like language, money is rooted in arbitrary custom even as it expands into the basis for rational cooperation among strangers. The word credit comes from the Latin word credere, which means "to believe." All money depends on the faith of those who use it. And like any powerful belief, money can be exploited by some to manipulate the minds of others.

"Those who control money," Mr. Kaufman writes, "are less scientist than shaman, seer, storyteller and soothsayer -- those who spun ancient talks about sticks and stones, convincing others of their fiction." In this ancient tradition, the dollar has triumphed as the greatest story ever told. "For what fiction would ever transcend the floating dollar? . . . The Koran, the Torah, the Gospels, the Upanishads, the Tao-Te-Ching, the Mahabharata -- all pale beside the dollar."

Religion and money are also brought together in Lance Morrow's short, sparkling "God and Mammon" (Encounter, 163 pages, $25.99). Written during the bleak, bewildering months of the early coronavirus pandemic, "God and Mammon" is both a memoir and a daily chronicle from one of our most insightful essayists. It is also a meditation on American history in which the immediate present intrudes constantly. Mr. Morrow was born, he tells us, during a bleak moment in the 20th century -- a few weeks after the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939. He arrived "in a small private hospital in Philadelphia much favored by abortionists," as his father jauntily described it later.

Almost as a birthright, Mr. Morrow has been observing the world with a careful eye ever since. And that alone makes his reflections -- on where are, how we got here, and whither we are tending -- worth reading. The resulting essay wanders gracefully with the mind of its author, ruminating on the many small and large insights he has absorbed along the way.

Mr. Morrow takes as his organizing theme the distinctly American preoccupation with money and "the part that this boisterous, decisive, gaudy, mysterious, frequently treacherous, neurotic, and vanishing thing has played in forming the American character." As a starting point, he quotes the Puritan minister Cotton Mather, who worried that prosperity had made the New England colonists forget the religious mission that sent them to America in the first place: "Religion brought forth prosperity, and the daughter destroyed the mother."

Mather's lament has preoccupied Americans ever since. But perhaps, Mr. Morrow suggests, the Puritan divine got it backward. Money was always the driving impulse, supplying the "energy on which the American dream would proceed down the years." Our unrivaled prosperity brought forth the spiritual need to "justify America's great fortune -- and find some deeper purpose for it."

Mr. Morrow's book provides an elegant record of an open, inquisitive mind pondering that inscrutable mystery. Read it not for easy answers but for an example worth emulating.

--Mr. Rowe is a historian in Dallas.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

11-19-20 1246ET