The Accounting System. Introduction: why you should care

Forget the stars. The Accounting System determines your fate. The Accounting System determines whether you are born with or without money and with or without opportunity. It determines your level of childhood mortality, your schooling, your pay if you work, and the size of your estate when you die.

Fortune favors those who are favored by the accounting system. Not surprisingly, those who built the system are those most favored by it.

Within The Accounting System individual people have choices they can make, but as each decade passes those choices are narrowed for most individuals. Because The Accounting System is so complex and pervasive, the naïve may not even realize it exists. People mistake one or more parts for the whole. They may think it is neutral, a mere method certain people use to keep score, when in fact it increasingly determines your score. You score, in the simplest terms, is the money you have to spend, the things that The Accounting System lists as owned by you, and your reputation.

Unless you are lucky enough to be blessed by the System from birth, or to be selected as one of its favorites at some point in your life, it would be a good idea to learn all you can about The Accounting System. Your success or failure in life is highly dependent on how well you understand the System.

Learning is not just collecting facts. It requires assembling those facts into a mental picture that is an accurate reflection of reality. Because The Accounting System is large and complex, there are some steps that will help you learn about it. By stepping back from the system you should be able to see it in perspective. Then you should be able to see where you are in the system, and what paths are available to move to where you want to be in the system.

We will begin with the story of the development of accounting over history, a temporal perspective. That will bring up many subjects that will be developed in more detail in later chapters of this book.

next: The Coin Age

[The Accounting System, Your Fate is in the Cloud, is a work in progress by William P. Meyers, ©2013]