10 hours Ago By Reviewed by Douglas J. Johnston
This is a book about money management that starts well but finishes lousy. Read this article for free: Already have an account? To continue reading, please subscribe: * This is a book about money management that starts well but finishes lousy. Read unlimited articles for free today: Already have an account? This is a book about money management that starts well but finishes lousy.
Author Jessica Moorhouse is a Toronto-based financial counsellor with an undergraduate degree in film studies. This is her first book. Moorhouse begins with a nice intro to the field of behavioural finance.
Everything But Money She also lucidly explains a related, and relatively new, subfield of biological science, epigenetics, that focuses on the study of heritable traits, apart from genetics. The idea, in a nutshell, is that there are mechanisms of inheritance above and beyond DNA-based inheritance. It’s an intriguing field in its early stages of development as a science.
But it has also given birth to overbroad and pseudo-scientific assertions. Moorhouse is not immune to this quackery. She sometimes crudely extrapolates epigenetic ideas, and then buttresses those ideas with foreign history.
For example, she advances the idea of Canadian “Black trauma” about financial matters. But virtually all the evidence she cites, much of it merely anecdotal, is American. More to the point, slavery ended early in Canada, in 1834, with the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act by the British parliament.
That statute applied to most of the British Empire, including Canada. And well before that, by the Upper Canada Act of 1793, the importation of new slaves into Upper Canada was outlawed. Some two centuries later, Moorhouse ascribes a descended-from-slaves Black Canadian’s present-day money-management problems to intergenerational historical trauma — “post traumatic slave syndrome” is the buzz phrase employed.
It’s a conclusion at once facile, and in the context of Canada, ahistorical. She subsequently rolls out a chapter about privilege. The chapter includes an exercise to calibrate the racist privilege you enjoy.
You tick a checklist of boxes to determine your degree of privilege, specifically white, and especially white male. It’s intended to reveal to what extent you’re an unconscious closet racist. It’s clumsy, and it’s offensive.
Sexism, racism and historical injustices undoubtedly influenced how some peoples, and cultures, became dysfunctional when it comes to money and property. But Moorhouse’s treatment comes off as a simplistic grafted-on polemic. Turns out, that’s what it is.
And it wasn’t even her idea. Late in the book she discloses her initial book proposal contained “only one line briefly mentioning the impact that trauma and systemic injustice have on our finances, but to my surprise, that one line was what stuck out the most. I was subsequently asked to pitch a new proposal for a book exploring those topics in depth and well, here we are.
” The book’s penultimate chapter reverts to more orthodox advice, and provides self-help tools, including model spreadsheets to track debt and spending and calculate net worth. However, even here Moorhouse gets polemical, and soon launches into a discussion of somewhat esoteric therapies designed to correct behavioural dysfunction when it comes to money. Many of the therapies she plumps for are fairly new.
It’s therefore difficult to determinatively assess whether they’re efficacious or just vogueish. But what’s certain is that they’re very expensive, which begs the question as to how an individual already having money-management problems comes up with the cash to pay for them. Her final chapter begins with a quotation from Ram Dass.
Moorhouse doesn’t explain who Ram Dass is. Ram Dass was a New Age guru (he died in 2019) whose birth name was Richard Alpert. Alpert, and his colleague Timothy Leary, were Harvard University psychology professors and pioneering prophets of LSD and other psychedelic drugs until their dismissal from the university in 1963.
A dubious icon. When it comes to investment, average Canadians would be better to look to the fundamental-value advice of the “Oracle of Omaha” Warren Buffett, rather than the oracle of acid. And the summary message of this feel-good last chapter? “Money is not happiness.
” Quite the revelation, that. This is an initially interesting, and even novel, take on money management and finance. But it too fast spirals downward into doctrinaire woke extremism married to New Age nuttiness.
Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer. Everything But Money: The Hidden Barriers Between You and Financial Freedom By Jessica Moorhouse HarperCollins, 304 pages, $25 Advertisement Advertisement.
