Money Changes Everything. How Finance Made Civilization Possible. William N. Goetzmann. Princeton University Press, RPR £24.95 William Goetzmann in his new book takes readers on a whirlwind tour of financial history starting in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago and leading up to an outlook what a roadmap into the future might look like. A professor at the […]
Tensions tearing at the basis of Islamic societies are never more acute than when stoked in the name of Islam. Idealists invoking Islam as a lever for change spark upheavals that time and again hand power to cynics. Looking for an explanation why Islamic societies wallow in paralysis, some suggest Islamic societies stagnate because Islam […]
The standard go-to source for explaining what makes business tick is Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, but the subtext of Mark Moody-Stuart’s Responsible Leadership is that Smith’s companion piece Theory of Moral Sentiments my be a better manual for designing frameworks for business. In the long run, what matters for sustainable business success, argues Moody-Stuart, […]
The abrupt collapse in oil prices shows that however unyielding Saudis may be in matters of faith, in business they are consummate practitioners of the art of setting prices flexibly. It has been ever thus. John Burckhardt in 1831 published Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, an early account how the Arab economy was run […]
