My main qualification for talking the way I do about money is that for the last forty years I happen to have been exposed to an unusual variety of hands-on experiences of money as a system. This was not part of any conscious plan on my behalf; it just happened as I moved from one career step to the next. I now realize that my successive professional activities have given me five very different perspectives on money, and that each has changed what I thought about it before. It is this combination of experiences which has made an unusual observer of the money system.
I often say that money is to us like water is to the fish: it is such an intrinsic part of our environment that we hardly notice it. We rarely ask how it works, or reflect upon the way it shapes our lives. I sometimes feel like a flying fish who has had the opportunity to take a ‘bird’s eye view” of the water in which we swim, and is now trying to report back to its fellow fish and explain what it has learned about what we usually cannot see. Credentials of a Flying Fish is a brief overview of my life’s journey and the perspectives I have acquired along the way which have shaped my thinking and writings.