A good paragraph from Niall Ferguson’s 2008. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (Penguin Press):
“Despite our deeply rooted prejudices against ‘filthy lucre’, however, money is the root of https://www.stephenhicks.org/most progress. To adapt a phrase from Jacob Bronowski (whose marvelous television history of scientific progress I watched avidly as a schoolboy), the ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man. Far from being the work of mere leeches intent on sucking the life’s blood out of indebted families or gambling with the savings of widows and orphans, financial innovation has been an indispensable factor in man’s advance from wretched subsistence to the giddy heights of material prosperity that so many people know today. The evolution of credit and debt was as important as any technological innovation in the rise of civilization, from ancient Babylon to present-day Hong Kong. Banks and the bond market provided the material basis for the splendours of the Italian Renaissance. Corporate finance was the indispensable foundation of both the Dutch and British empires, just as the triumph of the United States in the twentieth century was inseparable from advances in insurance, mortgage finance and consumer credit. Perhaps, too, it will be a financial crisis that signals the twilight of American global primacy.” (pp. 2-3)
The rest of the book is very good and very accessible reading.