Time & Perspective Quote by Ezra Pound

Monetary illiteracy, for Pound, isn’t a harmless gap in adult knowledge; it’s a civic disability that quietly hands power to whoever can read the fine print of finance. The line works because it yokes money to literacy, a moral and political comparison with a sting: if earlier centuries were crippled by not being able to decode words, modernity is crippled by not being able to decode credit, interest, and the institutions that manufacture “value.” Pound doesn’t merely lament ignorance. He implies a ruling class that benefits from keeping the public semi-blind, and he casts economics as the hidden language of control.

The subtext is characteristically Poundian: a conviction that culture rots when it’s built on bad accounting. He’s always hunting for the mechanism behind decay, and here he names money itself as the medium through which exploitation becomes normal. Calling it a “curse” isn’t melodrama; it’s a deliberately old-fashioned word meant to suggest fate, contagion, and collective punishment. You can hear the impatience of an artist who thinks beauty and justice can’t survive a rigged ledger.

Context matters, uncomfortably. Pound’s lifelong obsession with monetary reform drifted into conspiracy-tinged crankery and, eventually, his infamous wartime fascist propaganda. That history doesn’t make the insight useless; it makes it volatile. Read generously, the line is a warning that democratic citizens can’t outsource economic understanding. Read critically, it’s also a glimpse of how easily critique of finance can curdle into scapegoating when “illiteracy” becomes an accusation rather than a call to educate.