Above the Viking swords and skeletons, throughout from the enchanting show of classic dollhouses, Denmark’s Nationwide Museum incorporates a human-scale hamster wheel. Guests could climb inside, seize the controls and slowly, arduously, begin to stroll and jog. A digital display turns the treadmill right into a pizza-delivery recreation, providing the possibility to gather some digital money alongside the way in which.
As a illustration of the grinding repetitiveness of a gig financial system job, the subtext is apparent. Until you’re aged 11, that’s. My son liked it.
The hamster wheel is a centrepiece of an exhibition all about cash and the financial system: KA-CHING — Present Me the Cash! Together with cash and banknotes, it has interactive quizzes, photos 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 decide up a duplicate 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 Economic system. Then once more, there isn’t a lot competitors. I’ve lengthy fantasised about establishing such an establishment, however evidently few curators agree. Whereas museums of science, expertise and pure historical past adorn nice cities all around the world, museums of the financial system are uncommon.
A part of the issue is that economics tends to review giant, diffuse phenomena by means of an summary lens. Museums flourish when there’s one thing thrilling to have 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 draw back from the central subject material.
The Financial institution of England Museum, for instance, is nice sufficient — spacious, elegant, free to enter — however its topic is de facto the Financial institution of England itself. There are exhibitions in regards to the constructing’s structure, the heroes and slave-trading villains who paced its corridors and, in fact, cash and banknotes and an amazing huge gold bar inside a Perspex field — you possibly can attain in by means of a gap and attempt to decide it up. (Copenhagen’s KA-CHING! exhibit affords nearly precisely the identical Perspex-cased gold-bar-hefting expertise.)
A brand new e-book, Making Economics Public, features a chapter describing the Economic system Museum of the Federal Reserve Financial institution of St Louis. The Economic system Museum tries to debate and reveal financial concepts past cash. There’s an exhibit about selection and alternative value, an eight-player simulation of a buying and selling pit, a recreation of barter. It sounds enjoyable, even when the museum does additionally comprise a type of accursed lift-the-gold-bar displays.
May we do higher? Maybe. After I created my books and radio sequence Fifty Issues That Made The Fashionable Economic system, my intention 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 thought was as soon as praised by the good 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 correctly acquired Thomas Thwaites’s “Toaster Undertaking” — 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 Economic system may organize a mortgage from the V&A.
In that case, I’d additionally beg the Science Museum for his or her Moniac, an incredible hydraulic pc designed to simulate the British financial 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 may very well be persuaded to produce a cuneiform pill from Mesopotamia; because of the work of archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat, we now consider these tablets to exemplify the simultaneous improvement of contracts, accounts, arithmetic and writing itself, all in service of an more and more advanced city financial system.
Scarcely cheaper can be a printer ink cartridge, the proper introduction to concepts resembling 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 likely to be extra traditionally correct. It’s also 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 facet, Norman Borlaug’s starvation-fighting dwarf wheat, and an interactive show exhibiting how lengthy an individual has to work to afford an hour’s price of fine gentle, from the oil lamp (days) to the LED (seconds).
There’s extra we may do, I’m certain. So in case you occur to have an empty exhibition area, buddies in South Kensington and 1,000,000 quid to burn, we must always speak.
Written for and first revealed within the Monetary Occasions on 14 July 2023.
My first youngsters’s e-book, The Fact Detective is now obtainable (not US or Canada but – sorry).
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