Money, Sovereignty and Other Blurring Concepts

“The City Different” is just that. Where else do residents covet dirt roads and protest that paving will reduce real estate values? Where else does it seem entirely reasonable?

Time to read. Time to actually read something without rushing, something more than a few pages long, and maybe, just maybe, something that will make what’s happening around us appear to make sense.

If you’re going to have such an opportunity this summer, as I just did, let me make some recommendations.

* First, get a copy of “The History of Money” (Crown Publishers, $25). Anthropologist Jack Weatherford takes us from the invention of money in ancient Lydia to what he calls “the third great mutation,” the development of electronic money. You don’t need to be a “money person” to read this simply written book, and you’ll come away from it with a broader sense of money as a social and cultural institution, as a force that has transformed our ability to create and trade.

“The History of Money” makes it clear that money isn’t a thing; it is a technology that has grown from awkward transfers of beads to clumsy transfers of coins to the abstract symbolism of paper money. Now it is about to make another leap, transcending national boundaries and reducing the power of governments over commerce.

* Next, find a copy of Walt Wriston’s “The Twilight of Sovereignty” (Scribner’s, $25). First published in 1992, this book seems more prescient year by year. Listen to these questions, still unanswered:

“How does a national government measure capital formation, when much new capital is intellectual? How does it measure the productivity of knowledge workers, whose product cannot be counted on our fingers? If it cannot do that, how can it track productivity growth? How does it track or control the money supply when the financial markets create new financial instruments faster than the regulators can keep track of them? And if it cannot do any of these things with the relative precision of simpler times, what becomes of the great mission of modern governments?”

In a mere 178 pages, “The Twilight of Sovereignty” shows us that whereas geography once made history, the information revolution will make geography history. The democratic distribution of information permitted by the marriage of computers and telecommunications, Wriston writes, will undermine geography and ideas of national sovereignty. You can read these same ideas, updated monthly, in the manic anarchy of articles in Wired magazine. But banker Wriston laid it all out in 1992, before the World Wide Web, Netscape or the arrival of interactive gaming.

* Finally, get a copy of “The Sovereign Individual” (Simon & Schuster, $25) by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. An extension of their earlier book, “The Great Reckoning,” this one has the same historical sweep as “The History of Money”--the changes wrought, and to be wrought, by the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the Information Revolution.

The most fundamental idea in “The Sovereign Individual,” demonstrated through more than 2,000 years of history, is that “returns to violence”--the rewards that may accrue to the use of organized violence by the state--are declining. Just as gunpowder ended the power of armored knights on horseback and contributed to the decline of feudal society, new technology is reducing the ability of the state to enforce its power and control. At the same time, other new technologies are shifting economic power to individuals. Just as the overhead cost of supporting the Roman state led to its eventual fall, Davidson and Rees-Mogg believe that the overhead cost of the modern industrial state will no longer be supported when people find ways to escape it.

Why? Because the burden of taxation on the most productive individuals far exceeds any benefits received.

“The civilization that brought you world war, the assembly line, Social Security, income tax, deodorant and the toaster oven is dying,” they declare.

“Deodorant and toaster oven may survive. The others won’t.”

All are worth reading. Best of all, not one of these books will provide you with a list of mutual funds that will double your money in the next three years.

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Scott Burns writes for the Dallas Morning News. He can be reached at scott@scottburns.com, or at his Web page at https://www.scottburns.com