Every educated person really ought to have a basic understanding of accounting. Just like maths, science, programming, music, literature, history, etc., it’s one of those things which helps you make sense of the world. Although dealing with money is not much fun, it’s an unavoidable part of life, so you might as well take a few minutes to understand it.

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Eventually I figured it out: basic accounting is just graph theory. The traditional ways of representing financial information hide that structure astonishingly well, but once I had figured out that it was just a graph, it suddenly all made sense.