Informative, clear, snarky. ( )

If, like me, you both loathe talking about money and high finance -- and are terrified by it -- this is the book for you. In clear, often funny and always insightful ways, writer John Lanchester exposes some of the "bullshit" -- and a lot of the "nonsense" (read the book for the difference) -- in modern finance. Some terms I thought I understood but didn't (hedge find). Others, I didn't understand, but am newly terrified by. Hollowing out is one. "Hollowing out" is when jobs disappear from an economy while from the outside things look the same, except for the fact that families that once depended on these jobs are devastated. Other terms are surprisingly beautiful, like La ricchezza e una ragione: richness is a relationship between two people. Both his forward and afterword are must-reads, as he both parses where we've come from and, ominously, where we're going, especially in terms of the increasing gap between haves (and haves way to much) and have-nots. Spoiler: the gap will gets much, much worse. ( )

A mixed bag. If I wasn't an economist and knew virtually nothing this book would've been marginally helpful. As a teacher of Econ, it didn't help me understand anything, wasn't that interesting and wouldn't help my students in the classroom. ( )

John Lanchester is a novelist, but this is a non-fiction book about economic and financial terms and what they mean - most of it in the form of a lexicon. In the essays which top and tail the lexicon, Lanchester explains why he decided to produce such a book. Partly it was an offshoot of a novel he was writing about the financial crisis - he had to teach himself this language and he wanted to share that. But even more, he believes that it is important that ordinary people understand the language well enough to engage in the discussions about it - the jargon didn't arise as a form of obfuscation, but it has that effect if people think that the issues are too complicated for them to understand. Lanchester points out that speaking the language doesn't mean that you agree with a particular point of view - economists argue with each other all the time - and a lot of the discussions are really about things like different values, which we could all get involved in if we could just get past the language barrier.

The details of modern money are often complicated, but the principles underlying those details aren’t; I want this book to leave you much more confident in your own sense of what those principles are. Money is a lot like babies, and once you know the language, the rule is the same as that put forward by Dr Spock: ‘Trust yourself, you know more than you think you do.’

In order to help us do this, Lanchester has produced a lexicon which is clear, readable and witty (there's an entry on the difference between bullshit and nonsense - the first is exaggeration, a normal part of life and especially of sales - the second is trying to persuade people of things which could never be true, and is dangerous).

It's also nice to read someone who is sceptical of neoliberal ideas without being ranty. In fact, because he is not defending a particular school of thought, Lanchester is able to point out that all the models have something wrong with them. They should be seen as explanatory guides, aids to understanding - but because of the bitter and politicised debates, they have become rigid laws.

It has to be said that if you don’t appreciate the miraculous power of markets, their astonishing ability to match buyer and seller, to meet needs, to find prices which clear themselves of goods, to satisfy wants that consumers didn’t know they had, to create livelihoods in an astonishing proliferation of nooks and niches and specialisms and crafts and skills – if you don’t appreciate those things then you’ve probably never really ‘got’ economics, and you are also missing out on something of the wonder and variety and complexity of human culture. Having said that, if you think that markets are magically the solution to everything and have some kind of mystical inherent ability to always be right and to self-regulate in all conditions, all weathers, all extremities and despite all unforeseen circumstances, well then, you are probably a neo-liberal economist.

So, in the book itself, you get the difference between macro- and micro-economics; you get the deep weirdness of the whole concept of money itself; you get some interesting history (the controversy in the US about the whole idea of having a central bank!); and some jawdropping statistics (the property stock in the London borough of Wandsworth is worth only slightly less than the entire stock of Northern Ireland). And I learnt a lot about the financial terminology and what it means - the definitions weren't always as comprehensive or useful as they might have been in a dictionary, but reading the book and thinking about the contents has left me feeling much more confident about what I do and don't know, and having enough baseline knowledge to go off and research more where that is necessary. ( )

Another highly enjoyable Lanchester book who remains an indispensable guide to the complexities of the financial system. The dictionary format makes this a fast read. ( )