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Best Sellers | | Home Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered | |
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Usually ships in 1 business days | | Only 2 left in stock, order soon! | | | | | | We must bring money back down to earth.Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money presents the path for bringing money back down to earth--philosophically, strategically and pragmatically, and with an entrepreneurial spirit that is informed by decades of work by the thousands of CEOs, investors, grant-makers, food producers and consumers who are seeding the restorative economy.The months and years ahead will surely see a flood of books proposing micro- and macro-economic fixes to the financial crises of the day. Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money brings a different vision--a meta-economic vision, looking above the top tine and below the bottom line, a new way of seeing what is going on in the soil of the economy.The soil of the economy? Bringing money back down to earth?This is the path towards a financial system that serves people and place as much at it serves industry sectors and markets. To discover this path, and to begin to walk down it, is the mission of Slow Money.This mission emerges from decades of work as a venture capitalist, foundation treasurer, and entrepreneur by Woody Tasch, whose explorations shed new light on a truer, more beautiful, more prudent kind of fiduciary responsibility, a fiduciary responsibility that is not stuck in the industrial concepts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but which reflects the new economic, social and environmental realities of the 21st century.These explorations take us from the jokes of his father to the insights of his son, from the Board rooms of foundations and start-up companies to the farm fields of Vermont, from gopher holes in New Mexico to the possibilities of an alternative stock exchange, from Carlo Petrini to Muhammad Yunus, from Thoreau to Soros.Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money investigates an essential new strategy for investing in local food systems, and introduces a group of fiduciary activists who are exploring what should come after industrial finance and industrial agriculture. Theirs is a vision for investing that puts soil fertility into return-on-investment calculations.- Could there ever be an alternative stock exchange dedicated to slow, small, and local?
- Could a million American families get their food from CSAs?
- What if you had to invest 50 percent of your assets within 50 miles of where you live?
Such questions--at the heart of Slow Money--are the first step on our path to a new economy and a new culture. Inquiries into Slow Money is a call to action for designing capital markets built around--not extraction and consumption but--preservation and restoration.Is it a movement or is it an investment strategy? Yes.
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| | Product Details | | Author: | Woody Tasch | | Hardcover: | 240 pages | | Publisher: | Chelsea Green Publishing | | Publication Date: | November 12, 2008 | | Language: | English | | ISBN: | 1603580069 | | Product Length: | 7.8 inches | | Product Width: | 5.86 inches | | Product Height: | 0.85 inches | | Product Weight: | 0.84 pounds | | Package Length: | 7.7 inches | | Package Width: | 6.0 inches | | Package Height: | 1.0 inches | | Package Weight: | 0.85 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 20 reviews |
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| | Customer Reviews | Average Customer Review: ( 20 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
37 of 41 found the following review helpful:
 Beautiful vision Jan 13, 2009
By Mark Mills
The vision, goal and poetry of this book are beyond reproach. Unfortunately, it is written to fellow true-believers. The average reader will find it difficult to translate into action or new insight.
For example, the book suggests more money should be invested in corporations with very long term plans. The author points out that top-soil takes hundreds of years to become a mature ecosystem, so we need companies with similar outlooks. Of course, that is a great goal, but most readers will wonder how such an organization could survive when government policy currently promotes mad consumerism as a sort of patriotism. The author regularly points out the absurdity of this 'pro-growth' religion, but never investigates its history, institutional power base nor weaknesses. The new comer to 'slow money' will find the omission frustrating.
31 of 34 found the following review helpful:
 This Book is the Start of a Movement Jan 28, 2010
By L. Brunjes
"Lopa Brunjes"
Every once in a while, you come upon a book that impresses you with the feeling that you are watching history unfold with each page--you find yourself daydreaming mid-read about telling your children and your children's children about who you were when you first read that book, and how you had the kernel of foresight that it would be the start of something that would influence our world and our relationship to it. For better, forever.
This is one of those books.
Slow Money is medicine for our diseased relationship with money and the tangible resources that it was originally intended to represent. It is a poetic, profound de-conditioning of our standard, abstracted views of economics. Woody Tasch's background in traditional venture capital investing allows him to speak the lingo we all know with aplomb, while also breaking ground for the new languaging that is needed to start this critical conversation. It represents the transition from money as depleting to repleting, from money as numbers to money as what has stood the test of time as the apotheosis of human culture and survival: food.
As a leader in the biochar field, I am intimately familiar with the catastrophic dangers inherent in eroding our soil health, and work daily to help us avoid them. Enter Slow Money: I am floored. I am inspired. I am rejoicing. Slow Money is exactly what our soils and the people that depend on them (read: ALL OF US) need, and it brings poetry to economics in a way that is deeply and unexpectedly healing to our collective psyche.
This book is so riddled with gems that I realized immediately that underlining key phrases would be pointless, because I would be underlining the whole book. I am going to read it several times so that I can systematically adopt the healthy mental gestalt that Slow Money brilliantly expounds.
May all who read Slow Money be agents of this meme, which promises to change the way we view money, forever.
23 of 28 found the following review helpful:
Bringint it all together Dec 25, 2008
By SunshineGirl
Disgusted with the garbage we call food and the markets and government that subsidize it? Impatient with politicians who refuse to connect the dots between ag subsidies, obesity, childhood diabetes, shriveling family farms and an environment poisoned by ag chemicals? If you found Michael Pollan's works provocative and insightful, you'll recognize this book as the next "ah ha" moment on the path to food and farms that nurture rather than weaken our communities. "Slow Money" is a way to fight back. It has a message of hope and empowerment like the one that propelled Obama to victory: together we build momentum for change. We pool our money and invest it in a food system that builds instead of harms environmental and human health. I invested in three copies of this book: one for me and two for friends, who will tell their friends. The movement begins.
6 of 6 found the following review helpful:
 Great underpinning values & ideas, but frustrating in tone and style, and lacking in substance Oct 20, 2011
By Alexander C. Zorach
"Alex Zorach"
I had been greatly looking forward to this book, and I actually found it to be a huge let-down. I am a huge fan of the slow food movement, and I think the analogy between slow food and the economic system is a rich and valid one.
When it comes to values, economics, and goals, I am nearly 100% on the same page with Tasch. When it comes to the shortcoming of mainstream economics, the problems facing our global economic system, and the way these relate to the environment and other issues of sustainability, Tasch gets it. But I have three really harsh criticisms of this book that, in my opinion, make it not worth reading.
My first criticism is that this book is written in such a way that it is highly unlikely to persuade anyone who does not already believe the premises of the book. I don't know about Tasch's motivation, but I am strongly committed to sustainability, and I care deeply about building a consensus to move towards a sustainable society--not just a consensus among liberal people or educated people, but among all people, including people of a more conservative or libertarian persuasion. There are ways to successfully broach the subjects of sustainability and economic reform with people of all political views -- in fact, there are ways in which conservatives and libertarians are leading the way in their criticisms of the mainstream global economy. However...this book would be unlikely to appeal to these people; it's not written in their language, and indeed, not in a language that an overwhelming majority of Americans could understand or relate to, which leads into my next point.
My second comment is that on tone...it's absolutely off-the-wall. Tasch seems like he's tooting his own horn more often than not; his play on words, literary references, and the like, are at times artful, but the topic is one on which I want a more substantive, direct work. The tone, in many places, strikes me as intellectual masturbation, a sort of self-indulgent act that, while beautiful in its own right, doesn't really communicate much of anything to anyone. I also think that at times, the flowery language, unnecessarily rich in big words, is used to mask a lack of a deeper scholarly rigor. Which leads into my last and most scathing criticism.
Third, this book is mostly hot air. It's a lot of talking about the problem, and a lot of extremely general, painfully vague talking about solutions, but in the end, there's little concrete. This book, although non-fiction, and for all its intellectual language, is remarkably non-scholarly. It is loaded with highly subjective statements, and it does very little to cite or connect with any more concrete work of others.
If you want to get concrete, a really great text that I would recommend is Local Money, by Peter North, or the older (soon to become classic?) Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender, by Thomas H. Greco. Greco's book in particular is accessible to a broader audience and is more of a consensus-building book; North's book is more thorough and has very rigorous scholarship. Both provide a more concrete, more direct solution to the problems this book is hoping to address.
14 of 18 found the following review helpful:
Where your money went Jan 09, 2009
By Joan Dye Gussow
Sometimes books come along at exactly the right time to help us understand where we were headed just before we crashed. Slow Money does that and more. And now that business as usual has publicly tanked, there's no one I'd rather follow into the fields of food and finance than former financier Woody Tasch who trails everyone from Icarus to Rod Serling in his wake. Here is his basket of exclamations, explorations, exhortations and explanations of how frantic capital might be slowed so as to support instead of destroying--as it now does--soil fertility, biodiversity, food quality and local economies. Reflect for a moment on Tasch's idea that we need to learn to make a living rather than a killing in the market and then get this book. It will turn your head around and make you laugh at the same time. It goes along with Small is Beautiful on my "books that matter" shelf.
See all 20 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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