The Pit

Populist View of Trading Well Crafted

Much in the same way he took on the railroad monopolies in The Octopus, Frank Norris rakes the notion of speculation through the coals in this well-written tome. More turgid and overwrought than truly informative, he lays out the pitfalls of speculative grain trading, while never once setting forth the permanent prosperity that unregulated commerce has provided the vast majority of participants who chose to risk their own capital on a chance of increasing it, while providing a way for those content to merely labor for a wage, a much better standard of living than they would have had without such investors.