The Money Game

"Adam Smith is a pseudonym – he was an extremely successful professional investor called George Goodman, who also wrote a newspaper column. This is a real insider’s account of the way that the money markets and trading works. And the most helpful way of understanding it is as a sort of a game – taken dead seriously, but contentless, in the way that games are. He talks about Keynes’s idea of how investment is intolerably boring to anyone who lacks a gambling trait in their character. It’s very funny, very fluent, very well-written and also a real pro’s view. I don’t know why it isn’t famous any more. “It’s possible…to be a functioning competent, literate, well-educated adult and not know what a bond is” The first section is called “You: Identity, Anxiety, Money,” and it’s very good on the way that money touches on things about anxiety. In a way, it’s a reassuring book, because it tells you that the ways that the professionals are conflicted and confused actually pretty much exactly mirrors the way that the rest of us are. The professionals have more tools, but they have the same underlying complexities and ambiguities and ambivalences. George Goodman also wrote a very interesting book about counterculture, about transcendental meditation and yoga and so on. He has an unusually wide-ranging mind and set of interests. I think he also felt what I was talking about: That there was this sort of gap, that there wasn’t this kind of writing directed at the lay reader and that there should be. It’s so important that people should understand. It’s very obvious now after the blow-up, but this thing goes very deep in terms of how modern society works. There’s also a larger point, I think, which is that democracy implies an informed electorate."