Above the Viking swords and skeletons, throughout from the enchanting show of classic dollhouses, Denmark’s Nationwide Museum accommodates a human-scale hamster wheel. Guests could climb inside, seize the controls and slowly, arduously, begin to stroll and jog. A digital display screen turns the treadmill right into a pizza-delivery recreation, providing the possibility to gather some digital money alongside the best way.
As a illustration of the grinding repetitiveness of a gig economic system job, the subtext is clear. Except you’re aged 11, that’s. My son liked it.
The hamster wheel is a centrepiece of an exhibition all about cash and the economic system: KA-CHING — Present Me the Cash! Together with cash and banknotes, it has interactive quizzes, pictures of Damien Hirst’s “For The Love Of God” (that diamond-and-platinum cranium) and a video of musicians Jimmy Cauty and Invoice Drummond, aka The KLF, burning 1,000,000 quid on a Hebridean island in 1994. (Alas, I observed no dialogue of the true worth of what Cauty and Drummond have been destroying; curious readers could choose up a replica of my e-book The Undercover Economist Strikes Again if they’re determined to know.)
All in all, KA-CHING! might be the most effective contender I’ve seen for a Museum of the Financial system. Then once more, there isn’t a lot competitors. I’ve lengthy fantasised about organising such an establishment, however it appears that evidently few curators agree. Whereas museums of science, expertise and pure historical past adorn nice cities everywhere in the world, museums of the economic system are uncommon.
A part of the issue is that economics tends to check massive, diffuse phenomena by means of an summary lens. Museums flourish when there’s one thing thrilling to take a look at, whether or not it’s a Spitfire or the skeleton of a T-Rex. Good luck placing “recession” or “funding mania” right into a glass show case. And so many economy-adjacent museums shrink back from the central material.
The Financial institution of England Museum, for instance, is nice sufficient — spacious, elegant, free to enter — however its topic is actually the Financial institution of England itself. There are exhibitions concerning the constructing’s structure, the heroes and slave-trading villains who paced its corridors and, after all, cash and banknotes and an important huge gold bar inside a Perspex field — you possibly can attain in by means of a gap and attempt to choose it up. (Copenhagen’s KA-CHING! exhibit affords virtually precisely the identical Perspex-cased gold-bar-hefting expertise.)
A brand new e-book, Making Economics Public, features a chapter describing the Financial system Museum of the Federal Reserve Financial institution of St Louis. The Financial system Museum tries to debate and show financial concepts past cash. There’s an exhibit about selection and alternative price, an eight-player simulation of a buying and selling pit, a recreation of barter. It sounds enjoyable, even when the museum does additionally include a kind of accursed lift-the-gold-bar displays.
Might we do higher? Maybe. After I created my books and radio collection Fifty Issues That Made The Fashionable Financial system, my purpose was to indicate the hidden financial forces round us by refracting them by means of on a regular basis innovations. Not all of them evaluate favourably with a T-Rex, alas. I’m undecided how one would put “the welfare state” in a museum. Maybe a waxwork of William Beveridge would do?
Nor does the index fund lend itself to an exhibit, even when the concept was as soon as praised by the nice economist Paul Samuelson as an invention to face alongside “the wheel, the alphabet, Gutenberg printing, and wine and cheese”.
However different objects are extra promising. The V&A properly acquired Thomas Thwaites’s “Toaster Venture” — a bodily file of his doomed makes an attempt to construct himself a working toaster, beginning with the seek for uncooked supplies. It brilliantly illustrates, by counterexample, the decentralised genius required to construct a mass-market product; maybe my nascent Museum of the Financial system may prepare a mortgage from the V&A.
If that’s the case, I’d additionally beg the Science Museum for his or her Moniac, an incredible hydraulic laptop designed to simulate the British economic system. I’d pair it with a short description of the lifetime of its inventor, Invoice Phillips, who had extra adventures than Indiana Jones.
Maybe somebody could possibly be persuaded to produce a cuneiform pill from Mesopotamia; because of the work of archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat, we now imagine these tablets to exemplify the simultaneous growth of contracts, accounts, arithmetic and writing itself, all in service of an more and more complicated city economic system.
Scarcely cheaper could be a printer ink cartridge, the right introduction to concepts similar to two-part pricing and switching prices.
A tulip may function a springboard for a dialogue of monetary manias, however a steam locomotive from York’s Nationwide Railway Museum is perhaps extra traditionally correct. Additionally it is one of many few displays that may beat even a T-Rex for the power to encourage sheer awe.
For example the evils of capitalism, maybe a Bonsack machine — an invention to effectively produce the deadliest product in human historical past, the cigarette. And on the extra cheerful aspect, Norman Borlaug’s starvation-fighting dwarf wheat, and an interactive show displaying how lengthy an individual has to work to afford an hour’s value of fine gentle, from the oil lamp (days) to the LED (seconds).
There’s extra we may do, I’m positive. So in the event you occur to have an empty exhibition house, mates in South Kensington and 1,000,000 quid to burn, we should always discuss.
Written for and first printed within the Monetary Instances on 14 July 2023.
My first youngsters’s e-book, The Fact Detective is now accessible (not US or Canada but – sorry).
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