Kabir Sehgal - Coined: The Rich Life of Money and How Its History Has Shaped Us

In 1974, I was teaching economics at Chittagong University in Bangladesh. In order to reach the campus, I had to travel through Jobra, a typical Bangladeshi village next to the newly built university campus. That same year a terrible famine caused millions across Bangladesh to suffer, and when I realized I could do nothing to ease all that suffering, I felt the arrogance of knowledge and learning begin to melt away. I wanted to overcome this feeling of uselessness by helping at least one person at a time.

I started walking around the village every day with that tiny mission in mind. There were so many things to be done that I hardly knew where to begin. Then I noticed loan-sharking was being practiced widely in the village, which was an ugly thing to watcha mechanism that exploited the poorest people. Using my one-person-at-a-time approach, I started lending to people out of my own pocket, and that is how the idea of microcredit was born.

My work as a banker to the poor has helped me reevaluate money. The traditional definition of money found in economics narrowly categorizes it as an instrument to be used either to maximize our self-interest or to give away as charity. Money, however, can also be applied to advance important social goals, such as reducing poverty and preserving the environmentbut these objectives require innovative applications and a willingness to look at money from new perspectives and through the lenses of multiple disciplines. Kabir Sehgals new book, Coined: The Rich Life of Money and How Its History Has Shaped Us, does precisely that.

I first met Kabir in New York City in 2010. He showed deep concern about the misery that the financial crisis of 2008 brought to millions of people around the world, and he agreed with me that we needed to redesign financial institutions to make them more responsible and inclusive. He went even further, wanting to determine why and how money shapes our lives, perhaps even reassessing the role it should play in our lives. He mentioned his interest in writing a book that would enrich our understanding of money, broaden our perspective, and augment our financial literacy.

The book that resulted from his efforts is a unique and fascinating study of money, not just as an instrument for buying and selling but also as an extension of humankind through the ages. This book reflects our multidimensional nature, as it is an exploration of money and exchange through the perspective of various disciplines from biology and anthropology to history and theology. Kabir examines the uses of money, its invention, its change over time, its future forms, why it is such a powerful force in our lives, and, ultimately, how it should be used.

Kabir examines the past and present of money and projects its likely future. I am most interested in the future incarnation of money: what it can be, and how it holds the power for changing society. That is the role of money I recognized through microcredit, a construct that can empower people and bring about meaningful and sustainable change in a society. That is how I see its power through social business with non-dividend companies that are dedicated to solving human problems. As more people read this book and broaden their understanding of money beyond the goal of accumulation, I hope that they will start social businesses in the future.

But whatever the future of money might be, Kabir Sehgal has done us a great service in writing this book. He has presented in this book everything that money has meant to people over the centuries and with a panoramic perspective. He has prepared the ground for us to take it forward, to give new meaning to money, to assign it new roles in our lives, and to imagine the future of money as a foundation upon which we can build the future of the world we all cherish. Thank you, Kabir.

Muhammad Yunus

Nobel Peace Laureate

Founder of Grameen Bank