Fox History & Entertainment is beginning a new series for Indian viewers. Called The Ascent of Money, it’s a television documentary based on Harvard professor Niall Ferguson’s book of the same title, published in 2008. It has been shown in the US, UK and Hong Kong, but for Indian viewers this six-part series will begin on July 30, 2009, at 10 pm.
Having watched a couple of DVDs that I received from the channel, it’s not a show to miss. A large part of its success story is the way in which it is presented.
Niall Ferguson — seriously dishy, by the way — manages to effectively take you back 5,000 years to the Inca empire — that innocent, innocuous time when “gold was sweat of the sun; silver, tears of the moon, and labour, the real, rich reward”. The rest of the world took note of the Empire’s riches and subsequently 250 years of Spanish rule was based solely on the greed for money. But greed, as explained in the series, didn’t spare the Europeans, and it’s said that two billion ounces of silver taken from the “rich hill” in Bolivia, over centuries of rule, destroyed the Spanish rulers too. Why? In Ferguson’s own words: “They had dug so much silver that the value of the metal declined considerably. They [Spaniard rulers] forgot... Money is only worth what others give in exchange for it.”
The series works because it doesn’t brood on technical, economic jargon. Instead, it looks at the psychology of money, studying the roots of why money — and greed — occurs in the first place and why “we simply refuse to learn from history”. Ferguson’s logic is simple: Money, which in turn gave birth to credit, to the bond market, to stocks and shares, is one force, whether it’s traded in silver, clay tablets, paper, or for that matter, on the computer screen, “has the ability to make us and destroy us”. And why don’t we learn from the past economic crisis? “Because we have a herd mentality” and often tend to return to making the same mistakes over and over again.
What makes The Ascent of Money delightful is that it goes back into history, digs out lessons in psychology, sociology and even literature (Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is incorporated beautifully into the first part of the series), to explain how money continues to affect us the way it does. Since banking began in Italy, the first part of the series, Dreams of Avarice, captures breathtaking views of Venice, Rome and Florence, including libraries and museums complete with art work (frescoes, paintings and sculptures depicting the rich lives) and records of ledgers and manuscripts related to the genesis of the global economy and how it thrived, collapsed and resurrected itself over centuries.
The show doesn’t only look at just why the present recession (“just short of Depression”, as Ferguson comments) happened. Instead, it explains how money-lending started... in the 15th century when Jews, expelled from Spain, became moneylenders in Venice. Since Venetian merchants, god-fearing Christians, believed that lending money at interest was a sin, Jews believed that they could lend legitimately to anyone except Jews. The series shows the rise of the Medici family and how it continued successfully — for generations — in banking, before finally going bust. It tracks individuals and “flawed geniuses” who not only rose but also drowned in financial losses.
“Irrational fear overwhelms all rational exuberance,” a guest on the show tells Ferguson, when asked about why money continues to baffle humans. But imagine a world without money. Can you?
