(Roughly) Daily

“Portrait of Luca Pacioli [the father of double-entry accounting] with a student”

You’ve never heard of Yuji Ijiri. But back in 1989 he created something incredible.

It’s more revolutionary than the cotton gin, the steam engine, the PC and the smart phone combined.

When people look back hundreds of years from now, only the printing press and the Internet will have it beat for sheer mind-boggling impact on society. Both the net and the printing press enabled the democratization of information and single-handedly uplifted the collective knowledge of people all over the world.

So what am I talking about? What did Ijiri create that’s so amazing?

Triple-entry accounting.

Uh, what?

Yeah. I’m serious.

But don’t feel bad if you slept through the revolution. It wasn’t televised or posted on Reddit. When Professor Ijiri died in 2017, most people didn’t catch his obituary. His most famous book, Momentum Accounting & Triple-Entry Bookkeeping, has a grand total of zero reviews on Good Reads. So you’re not alone if you missed it…

Dan Jeffries at Hacker Noon does a wonderful, engaging job of telling this remarkable story– and of explaining why his claim of importance may not be hyperbolic at all: “Why Everyone Missed the Most Important Invention in the Last 500 Years.”

* Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith

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As we don our green eye shades, we might recall that it was on this date in 1995 that the longest federal government shutdown in US history took place under former President Bill Clinton while Republicans, led by Speaker Newt Gingrich, controlled both houses of Congress.  It lasted over three weeks, until January 6, 1996.

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