Hippo quoted Double entry by Jane Gleeson-White
A fascinating exploration of how a simple system used to measure and record wealth spawned …
Content warning Mild spoiler on the direction this book takes, although there can hardly be a spoiler for non-fiction (or can there?)
'Without looking too closely one might already glimpse in double-entry bookkeeping the ideas of gravitation, the circulation of blood and energy conservation.' What Sombart means by this extravagant claim is that through its encouragement of regular record-keeping, mathematical order and the reduction of events to numbers abstracted from time and place, double entry fostered a new view of the world as being subject to quantification—and it was this urge to abstract and quantify natural phenomena that lay at the heart of the scientific revolution.
— Double entry by Jane Gleeson-White (32%)
This is where the book begins to get intense: around here is when it struck me the scale at which accounting has taken over our lives and the way in which we view the world! (Not solely due to this quote, mind you, but through reading the entire set of chapters around this point)