The many sides of money and mankind
What is money? All of us bemoan lack of it in our lives and are mostly relentless in pursuing it. This human invention is more than just a working concept — it is vital for our survival. Having roots in the symbiotic exchange that is present in nature, money evolved from the need to exchange goods and services to aid human survival.
Examining money using a multidisciplinary approach ranging from biology, psychology, anthropology, chemistry, economics, numismatics to theology, J. P. Morgan vice- president Kabir Sehgal tries to understand all the aspects of the intricate human relationship with money in his book, Coined: The Rich Life of Money And How Its History Has Shaped Us.
Having started his career as a reluctant investment banker after failing at his online startup in Mangalore, Sehgal immediately was caught up in the 2008 financial crisis and saw “grown men crying while they carried cardboard boxes of office supplies” on public transport. His initial exploration of the financial meltdown of 2008 turned into a book on money as he struggled to understand bizarre and irrational behaviour caused by it.
Sehgal, an alumnus of Dartmouth College and the London School of Economics, gives an interesting and a very detailed perspective of money full of personal anecdotes as he starts from Galapagos Islands to understand the biological nature of exchange. “In the natural world, energy functions as currency. But in human world, money is also a primary currency,” says Sehgal in the book, after witnessing a symbiotic exchange between a green sea turtle and fish.
However, this chronicle of currency also debates the rise of money and the recent lack of consensus on the theory that the bartering system gave rise to currency.
Highlighting the link between money and obligations, Sehgal develops the argument that before there was money, there was credit and there was debt, and concludes that debt is our primary currency. The development of coins, presumably independently, in Lydia ( in modern- day Turkey), India and China, between 600 and 700 BC, led to rise in the role of banks, especially their role in providing loans for economic activities. Sehgal also gives equal importance to the ethical implications of money. He highlights the influence of religion and art on money by detailing religious beliefs about money. Quoting anthropologist David Graeber in highlighting the link between the rise of coinage an organised religion. “Influential religious leaders like Pythagoras, Buddha and Confucius all lived during the 6th century BC in areas where coinage was invented — Greece, India and China,” adding that it’s not a coincidence that from 800 BC to 600 AD both money and several lasting religions were created.
Sehgal, an officer in the US Navy Reserve, is also the bestselling author of Walk in My Shoes ( with Andrew Young) and Jazzocracy. He has got massive support for his book, with Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus, also the founder of Grameen Bank, writing the foreword and financial and political celebrities such former US Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, Paul Volcker, former chair of the US Federal Reserve; Sheila Bair, former chair of the US Federal Deposit Corporation; bestselling author Walter Isaacson and Sun Trust Banks chair- man and CEO William H. Rogers writing positive compliments, with one describing Sehgal as “the Stephen Hawking of money.”
The book, though vast in its implication, does not go in too deep. But in a frank admission, Sehgal admits that the book is meant to “spark curiosity, not satisfy it,” acknowledging that “the book does not advance a grand theory” or “completely unique perspectives.”
However, as Sehgal, who cried on the first day of his job as an investment banker, says, perhaps to all of us, “Look more closely at money and it reveals a symbol of our values.” We all have to work out what money means to us and Coined helps nudge us in the right direction.