Broken Money by Lyn Alden is one of the best books I've read.
It traces how money evolved from pre-human credit systems all the way to today's debt-based world. By the end, I understood how we ended up with a system this broken.
If this were mandatory reading in school, I believe there would be a revolution tomorrow.
Below are the ideas that stuck with me most.
Credit predates money, and even humans
This was one of the most revealing things I read in the book. I never thought about it this way before.
In small groups (and even animal groups), when you do a favor for someone, you expect them to pay it back eventually. No money, no contracts. Just memory and trust.
This is exactly how it works in everyday life. When you make breakfast for your partner, you expect them to reciprocate somehow. Maybe they make you lunch, maybe they take care of a kid, maybe something else. That's credit. We just don't call it that because it's based on trust, not invoices.
It works up to about 150 people (Dunbar's number). Beyond that, you can't track who owes what to whom, because you don't know these people.
That's why we invented money. Not to replace barter, but to extend this personal credit system to strangers.
Hard money emerges naturally, and technology then breaks it
The 160 fiat currencies we have today are the anomaly. Real money was never invented top-down. It emerged on its own.
Whenever groups started trading, they gravitated toward things that were scarce, durable, and hard to fake. There was no designer to design perfect money. It just happened. Gold happened to be good for large transactions, silver for smaller ones.
But technology always catches up. Cowrie shells were used as money across West Africa, China, and India for thousands of years. Then Europeans arrived with ships and nets, mass-imported them from the ocean, and flooded the supply. This caused a currency collapse.
The same pattern repeats. Any money that can be replicated or faked eventually gets replaced by something harder to abuse.
Gold was used as money for roughly 3,000 years. But it failed in the digital age.
Once we invented the telegraph, information traveled instantly. Gold still moved by ship. This disconnect created banks. Banks then held the gold and issued paper instead. Over time this concentrated power in the hands of a few, and eventually those few decided the paper doesn't have to be redeemable for gold anymore.
Today gold sits in vaults of central banks and governments, and we're still looking for some better money that replaces it.
The current debt system is unsustainable
Money originally represented something real: credit, then gold. The paper in your pocket used to be a claim on actual gold sitting in a vault. But somewhere along the way, the paper decoupled from anything real.
Now money is printed out of thin air. And the debt, measured against everything we actually produce, has done nothing but grow for 100 years. It has never meaningfully shrunk. Not once.
The problem with this is that there are more claims than there is stuff. Your bank deposit is a liability of your bank. Your bank's reserves are a liability of the Fed. The Fed's assets are government bonds, which are a liability of the government. And most European central banks hold US bonds too, so it's all entangled globally. It's liabilities all the way down, with nothing solid at the bottom.
When it gets too broken to ignore, private losses become public debt. In 2008, the banks that caused the crisis got bailed out. The mortgage owners who lost their homes got nothing. During COVID, airlines that ran with no cash buffer got government money. The ones that were financially responsible competed against subsidized zombie companies.
The profits are private. The failures get socialized. And it keeps happening because the system is too expensive to let fail.
There's no clean way out. We're 100 years deep into a system that has never been cleared. It just gets rolled over, decade after decade.
And at some point, people will stop believing in it. We've seen this happen in Lebanon, Argentina, Turkey. When trust collapses, the system can't be fixed, it gets replaced. What comes next, nobody knows.
The system is unfair: ordinary people get priced out
We lost the ability to save. In the past, people saved extra money in gold. It held its value over centuries. You didn't have to know anything about the stock market, inflation, or investing in real estate. Today, fiat currencies melt like ice cubes. Holding cash means losing purchasing power every year.
But people still need to save. Everyone is forced to become an "investor" and bet their savings in real estate, the stock market, collectibles, fine art or other forms of investing. These things have gone mostly up so far. Not because these things became more valuable, but because there is more money chasing them.
This is also one of the main reasons housing is so expensive. Wealthy people park money in real estate to avoid the inflation built into the system. Ordinary people get priced out. Wealth concentrates.
Things that were never meant to be stores of value became stores of value. And it makes life harder for everyone who isn't already wealthy.
The world of surveillance
The ability to transact freely is a basic human right. Historically, this is how we traded, built things together and communicated what we value. When you buy something, you signal to the world what matters to you. That signal should be private.
But in today's system, it isn't. Every transaction leaves a trail. And the threshold for what gets reported to governments hasn't kept up with inflation. The $10,000 reporting limit was set in 1970. In today's money that's closer to $80,000. Ordinary transactions now trigger surveillance that was designed for large ones.
Some European countries have gone further. In France, paying a business in cash above €1,000 is illegal. In Greece, the limit is €500. And by 2027, the EU is rolling out a €10,000 cap across all member states.
This might sound reasonable. Catch criminals, prevent money laundering. But if we think about what it means for individual citizens - every purchase above that threshold leaves a permanent record. And with inflation, that threshold covers more of everyday life every year. How you spend money reveals everything about you: where you go, what you value, what you support, what you struggle with. That data then exists forever.
This surveillance creep doesn't require new legislation. The limits stay the same, and the inflation does the rest of the work. The money loses value, and more of everyday life falls under surveillance.
Whoever controls the money controls the people.