Jane Gleeson-White

Author of Double Entry, the history of Accounting that traces double-entry bookkeeping from Luca Pacioli’s 1494 treatise Particularis de computis et scripturis through the Renaissance, the rise of Capitalism (via Sombart’s claim that the two are inseparable, “like form and content”), and into the modern audit and the “expectations gap.” The book’s larger argument — the thread Kyle’s note flags — is that financial statements “cannot be trusted to convey the true state of a business,” and that measures like GDP (born of 1930s national accounting) and traditional accounts systematically fail to record externalities like Climate Change and ecological debt. Kyle marks it a light-engagement read whose highlights stand on their own.

Context: Jane Gleeson-White is an Australian author and economics commentator. Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance (2011) won and was shortlisted for several Australian non-fiction awards; she later wrote Six Capitals on the limits of accounting for natural and human capital.

Where this appears

• Double Entry — author; the book is the sole source for this page, covering the history and limits of double-entry accounting.