Jane Austen on banknotes – the right person for the wrong reason

So the huge online campaign and (rather strange) legal action won in the end: Jane Austen is to appear on the new £10 note. Most people would agree that she is in the top division of English authors, so it’s a shame that, rather than being celebrated as a novelist, she has now been chosen as a woman, rather less of an accomplishment.

As a consequence people will mentally devalue her, because the human mind always subconsciously adjusts to tokenism in the same way it adjusts to inflation. (And it is the same reason that Buy British campaigns have never worked, sending as they do the message that the products are lousy.)

Banknotes say a lot about a nation-state, and countries that cannot agree on individuals to adorn them tend to be societies potentially in fracture (Lebanon, the Eurozone etc).