Frederick Kaufman
Frederick Kaufman is an author, a contributing editor at Harper’s, and a professor at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism.
He has written about American food culture and other subjects for the New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Gourmet, Saveur, the New York Times Magazine, Wired, and many more. He has spoken about this issue at the United Nations and has appeared on NBC, MSNBC, Fox Business News, Democracy Now, NPR’s Radio Lab, and BBC World Service.
Other books written by Frederick Kaufman
- Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food
- A Short History of the American Stomach
The Money Plot: A History of Currency’s Power to Enchant, Control, and Manipulate
Frederick Kaufman tackles the complex history of money, beginning with the earliest myths and wrapping up with Wall Street’s byzantine present-day doings. Along the way, he exposes a set of allegorical plots, stock characters, and stereotypical metaphors that have long been linked with money and commercial culture, from Melanesian trading rituals to the dogma of Medieval churchmen faced with global commerce, the rationales of Mercantilism and colonial expansion, and the U.S. dollar’s 1971 unpinning from gold.
The Money Plot offers a tool to see through the haze of modern banking and finance, demonstrating that the standard reasons given for economic inequality—the Neoliberal gospel of market forces—are, like dollars, euros, and yuan, contingent upon structures people have designed. It shines a light on the one percent’s efforts to contain a money culture that benefits them within boundaries they themselves are increasingly setting.
Frederick Kaufman warns that if we cannot recognize what is going on, we run the risk of becoming pawns and shells ourselves, of becoming characters in someone else’s plot, of becoming other people’s money.
Where to find Frederick Kaufman
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