Stephenson's money-centric interview on Wired News

By Cory Doctorow at 10:57 am Thursday, Apr 15

Paul Boutin conducted an interview with Neal Stephenson for Wired News in honour of Neal's new book, Confusion, sequel to the Leibnitzpunk doorstopper Quicksilver, a book that I like more and more the further I get from it (that is, when I read it, I liked it OK, but the more I think about it, the better I like it). Paul got Stephenson to expound for quite a while on money and what it means, a subject on which Neal has many interesting and rarely-heard things to say.

[M]oney is a sort of medium for the exchange of information. When the price of cloth went up in Antwerp, it was because the system of international trade, in some fashion that's too complex for us to understand, was transmitting information about the supply/demand balance. Money makes that kind of information flow better.

Nowadays money is electronic and there's plenty of it. Back then, money had to be silver or gold. In those days silver came from the Spanish colonies of Mexico and Peru, and gold came from the Portuguese colony of Brazil. It was transported across the Atlantic to Europe, though English and other privateers did their best to intercept it en route. Some of it circulated in European markets, some was hoarded in the vaults of wealthy families and institutions, and a lot of it flowed east toward India and China. China was notoriously hungry for silver. It was a complicated flow pattern, with any number of sources and sinks and eddies and feedback loops, and like any other such system it was capable of chaotic behavior. If enough people hoarded their metal, a money shortage would develop, which would make it very difficult to conduct trade on any level beyond that of a village market, and throttle the flow of information.

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