Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: Accounting Isn’t Cool Anymore

Accountants

Well I think accounting is cool. Accounting, like tax law or Ancient Greek, has this pleasing constellation of features:

1. It is an arcane and detailed body of knowledge, so if you have a detail-oriented, trivia-loving cast of mind, you might enjoy it, and if you become good at it people will be impressed at all the random stuff you know.
2. But it’s not random. Despite the arcana, it is a fundamentally principled body of knowledge: The rules fit together in a largely sensible way to achieve some core goals. In accounting, the basic goals include accurately and usefully presenting a company’s ...