★★★☆☆ Making Money, by Terry Pratchett
Moist Von Lipwig invents monetary economics
Making Money
Terry Pratchett
Moist Von Lipwig invents monetary economics
Making Money is novel #36 in Terry Pratchett‘s Discworld series, also #5 in the Industrial Revolution subseries and #2 in the Moist von Lipwig subseries. In the previous Moist von Lipwig novel, Going Postal, Lord Vetinari, the Tyrant of Ankh-Morphrk, saved career criminal Moist von Lipwig from hanging and put him in charge of Ankh-Morpork’s failed Post Office. Moist was astonishingly successful and is now riding high.
Making Money begins with Vetinari drafting Moist to take on yet another failing government office -- the mint and its associated bank, which is the central bank of Ankh-Morpork. As the story starts Ankh-Morpork is on the gold standard, which Malvolio Bent, the bank’s chief accountant, describes as follows
‘I read somewhere that the coin represents a promise to hand over a dollar’s worth of gold,’ said Moist helpfully.
Mr Bent steepled his hands in front of his face and turned his eyes upwards, as though praying.
‘In theory, yes,’ he said after a few moments. ‘I would prefer to say that it is a tacit understanding that we will honour our promise to exchange it for a dollar’s worth of gold provided we are not, in point of fact, asked to.’
This sounds like a Pratchettian absurdity. But I am old enough to remember when the USA was still on the gold standard, and it was in fact even more absurd than this. You could indeed redeem a dollar bill for a dollar’s worth of gold. It was, however, illegal to possess gold bullion. (What that means is that it was legal to have gold if you were using it for something, e.g. a wedding ring or the plating on circuit board contacts. But you were not allowed to have just plain gold that you weren’t using.)
The USA left the gold standard in 1971, which forced the rest of the world to do so at the same time. It is now widely recognized that the gold standard was unnecessary, if not a totally boneheaded idea. (That said, the crackpots are with us always. Even now in 2026 we have folks who believe to the very bottom of their souls that gold is the One True Currency. Bent represents them in Making Money.) Moist, being himself a con-man, knows a con when he hears one. He therefore rejects the idea that money must be secured by gold, and he moves to produce banknotes unsecured by gold.
There are always people who benefit from things being The Way They Are Now. Almost by definition, these people are powerful now. And of course they resist change. That’s the plot of Making Money in a nutshell. Of course Pratchett makes a good story of it with a lot of laughs along the way.
I did not love this Discworld installment. It relied too much on the absurdity of the gold standard for its impact, which even in 2007 when the book was published was a dead letter.
I am also specifically bummed by the degradation of Lord Vetinari’s character. Vetinari had a splendid arc, from being a contemptible political hack in the earliest Discworld novels his character grew until he became something admirable -- the apotheosis of the Good Politician. He reached his height, in my opinion, in Jingo, where through hard work and cleverness he succeeded in mostly averting a war with Klatch. He was not entirely successful -- there was still a tiny little war, and some Morporkian and Klatchian soldiers died.
The problem in Making Money is that Vetinari’s apotheosis has become too literal. He is omniscient and close to omnipotent. The only real limitation on those traits is Moist. Moist is still capable of surprising Vetinari.
It’s a fun story, but it is, among Discworld novels, on the lower tier.