Money: A Story of Humanity

If society is based on a rigid caste system, it’s easy to rule. Terror is a dominant tool of control and institutions and religions tend to be based around fear and strictures. In a society mediated by money, where social status is somewhat mobile, rationality gains prominence over emotion and hard thinking challenges rule following.9

In contrast, the bottom-up economy is organic. It’s an evolutionary system of trial and error, where the market, based on prices, preferences and scarcity, organises the economy and society. Prices and profits, rather than plans and priests, determine whether something is working. People involve themselves in the bottom-up economy willingly, rather

In the tabernacle of the human mind, the coin works as a short cut, denoting the value of an immense array of real commodities and experiences in one universally understood tiny bit of portable metal.

This means that the shekel was liquid. Unlike something that was illiquid, such as property, its value was easy to unlock and transfer. It

The rate of interest isn’t merely a price; it is also a code, a mini-encyclopaedia of information about the person we are lending to, the chances of success, the risk in the region, the competition in the market, the technological infrastructure, and a whole host of other variables.

The development of the rate of interest was an enormous leap forward because it allowed us to connect our present economic reality to some imagined future scenario. If the interest rate is too low, a lender won’t lend to the future, and the commercial journey of investment in tomorrow stops. But if the rate is too high, a realistic borrower won’t b

With debt came the notion of the value of time, and with this came the concept of the price of money: the rate of interest.

It turns out brain size does correlate with group size: the neocortex, the part of our brain that deals with complex thinking and reasoning, grows in primates relative to the number of fellow primates they are likely to live with. Brains evolve to handle the number of social contacts we are going to have.

Counterintuitively, money is valuable not when it is scarce but when it is abundant. In this sense, money resembles another wondrous human technology: language. Both money and language are crowd phenomena. Like language, the more people who use money, the more valuable it becomes.