Media

Jacob Soll on “The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations”

General Programming

April 24, 2014

Good bookkeeping makes for good government—but not for very long—according to this history of accounting in the public sphere. In this talk, historian and MacArthur fellow Soll surveys public financial record keeping after the invention of double-entry accounting in 13th-century Tuscany, a breakthrough that made systematic analysis of profit and loss possible.