Is the invention of accounting so useful that, as Charlie Munger once said, "you have to know
accounting. It's the language of practical business life. It was a very useful thing to deliver to
civilization. I've heard it came to civilization through Venice which of course was once the great
commercial power in the Mediterranean"? (WOO 2013)
This positive view on accounting can be contrasted with an opposing view by Paul Browne that
"the recent [accounting] scandals have brought a new level of attention to the accounting
profession as gatekeepers and custodians of social interest." (DUM 2013)
Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), accounting
(in relation to addition and subtraction) are neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or
undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to
believe.
Of course, this reexamination of different opposing views on accounting does not mean that the study of addition and subtraction is
useless, or that those fields (related to accounting)-like bookkeeping, auditing, forensics, info management, finance, philosophy of
accounting, accounting ethics, lean accounting, mental accounting, environmental audit, creative accounting, carbon accounting, social
accounting, and so on-are unimportant. (WK 2013) In fact, neither of these extreme views is plausible.
Rather, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of accounting in regard to the dialectic relationship between
addition and subtraction-while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor
integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More
specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the double-sided theory of accounting) to
go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way and is organized in four chapters.
This seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about accounting in
relation to addition and subtraction from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature,
society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally
called its "post-human" fate.