A sweeping history of the American invention of modern money.
Economists endlessly debate the nature of legal tender monetary systems—coins and bills issued by a government or other authority. Yet the origins of these currencies have received little attention.
Dror Goldberg tells the story of modern money in North America through the Massachusetts colony during the seventeenth century. As the young settlement transitioned to self-governance and its economy grew, the need to formalize a smooth exchange emerged. Printing local money followed.
Easy Money illustrates how colonists invented contemporary currency by shifting its foundation from intrinsically valuable goods—such as silver—to the taxation of the state. Goldberg traces how this structure grew into a worldwide system in which, monetarily, we are all Massachusetts. Weaving economics, law, and American history, Easy Money is a new touchstone in the story of monetary systems.
About the Author Dror Goldberg is a senior faculty member in the Department of Management and Economics at the Open University of Israel.
Industry Reviews
"Easy Money provides an engrossing narrative account of this lesser-known crucible. Although scholarship about the first American colonies could fill the Mayflower, Mr. Goldberg's chronicle is the first book-length attempt to explain why a defining concept in our global financial system emerged within a desperate theocracy on the fringes of the British Empire." * The Wall Street Journal *
"Easy Money, grounded in a doctoral dissertation and nine publications, will become an instant classic. Lucid, arresting, and free of jargon, it is accessible to general readers and scholars . . . Essential." * Choice *
"Easy Money is a major contribution to North Atlantic monetary history...The book pulls off a neat trick by being very engaging for economic historians and at the same time accessible to a broad audience." * EH.Net *
"Paper money and legal tender clauses did not emerge in a vacuum. Easy Money tells how exigencies, forethoughts, and experiments combined to make an early paper money sustainable and valuable-at least for a while. Full of insights about the 21st century brought from carefully interpreting 17th century events, Easy Money is a fascinating mixture of American political, economic, and intellectual history that is sharply focused on how paper money was invented and implemented." -- Thomas Sargent | New York University | recipient of 2011 Nobel Prize in Economics
"Skillfully assembling a large body of evidence in this ambitious work, Goldberg has woven a complex, yet accessible narrative about an important event in monetary history, which tackles important questions such as: How does money evolve? What explains the timing, location, and form of monetary invention? And why Massachusetts?" -- Jane Knodell | University of Vermont
"It is often said that money is a social construct. But few of us take the time to painstakingly chronicle the political, economic, and social processes by which it is constructed. In Easy Money, Dror Goldberg traces the story of modern legal tender currency back to its 17th century Transatlantic roots and the upstart colony of Massachusetts. It is a story of war, politics, law, religion, and circumstance in which necessity reveals itself as the mother of monetary invention. It is also a story with important lessons for the future of money." -- Dan Awrey | Cornell University
"Easy Money is the story of one of history's great inventions in a depth that no one has done before. The outlines of this story have been known for quite a while, but no one has explained in Goldberg's rich detail how the 1690-1692 innovation happened when and where it did." -- Richard Sylla | New York University
