The Long Patience

About this book

Money can sit, or it can grow. Beginning with a single worn coin in a grandmother's sweet-tin, Elias Wong unfolds the whole quiet drama of money: the doubling rice that reveals the power of compounding, the fishing boat divided into shares, the great hall where a crowd of strangers discovers a price, the fevers and panics that have swept markets in many ages, and the patient observers who learned to separate an estimate of worth from the crowd's latest price. Across sixteen short illustrated chapters, this is a book about growth, markets and temperament. It explains historical patterns and mathematical ideas; it never tells a reader what to buy, sell or hold, and no outcome is promised.