![]() ![]() The third section includes a chapter called ‘The Rise and Rise of a Scandalous Profession’. The depths of the authors ‘analysis’ come when she asserts that “this profit-driven way of thinking encouraged by double entry is… destroying the world beneath our feet.” By this point I was sorely tempted to abandon a work that had promised so much and was delivering nothing but a straw man to beat down but I persisted, if only to see if the author could redeem the book. Though the rational markets hypothesis has been widely discredited, the accounting system which began in Italy in the fourteenth century has provided untold numbers of balanced accounts which, while not providing anyone with as sensational a story as RBS or Enron, have underpinned the business decisions which have led to modern prosperity. She goes on to claim, really rather ludicrously, that “the accounts it generates are… designed to convince an audience of something: for example, of a business’s solidity, as with saw with the Royal Bank of Scotland, or of its ongoing success, as in the case of Enron.” This is absurd ignoring the fact that private wealth has existed for millennia – can double entry accounting be blamed for the famously unscrupulous manner in which Pompey Magnus accumulated his wealth? – there are thousands, millions even, of examples of the results of double entry accounting helping managers to make decisions. Following the analysis of the German economist Werner Sombart and others surrounding the origins of the word ‘capitalism’, the author asserts that double entry accounting was responsible for the birth of our modern commercial system. The drawing together of the strands of mathematics and of the other famous people with whom Pacioli shared his time is extremely interesting.īy the end of the second section, however, Gleeson-White has moved away from the development of double entry accounting and has begun to make some pretty radical claims. Gleeson-White should be given credit here for her thorough research on the subject. The First section of the book is a biography of Luca Pacioli, the first man to set down the alla viniziana, or ‘Venetian way’ of (double entry accounting). Anyone who has read the first seventy pages will understand that Venice had been transformed into a great business centre by the end of the fifteenth century, and had adopted Johan Gutenburg’s printing press before many other places, and will thus not need such childless parallels. ![]() It is hard to see how these comparisons help anyone, and dumb the text down to the level of a moderately interesting BBC documentary. The author starts poorly, however, patronising her audience a number of times with declarations that Renaissance Venice was ‘the New York of its age’ or ‘the Silicon Valley’ of its age. ![]() A blend of accounting and Renaissance Italian history Jane Gleeson-White could have been writing for an audience of me. Jane has a PhD in creative writing, which included work on country in the novels of Alexis Wright and Kim Scott, and is currently working on a project about the emerging rights of nature movement in Australia.ĭouble Entry has not long been available, but I have been looking forward to reading it since I first heard of its impending publication. She is a former fiction editor of Overland literary journal and wrote a blog about books,, from 2010 to 2016. She has written for the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Bloomberg, Wired, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, Meanjin, Overland, Wellbeing and Good Reading magazine. Jane is a regular commentator on economics and sustainability, including for the Sundance Film Festival, United Nations and European Union. Her first two books are about literature: Classics (2005) and Australian Classics (2007). She is the author of the bestselling, internationally acclaimed Double Entry: How the merchants of Venice shaped the modern world (2011) and its sequel Six Capitals: The revolution capitalism has to have (2015). Jane Gleeson-White is a writer, editor and speaker, and is well known for her work on literature, economics and the natural world. ![]()
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