Money: A Story of Humanity

money is abstract and is only given value as long as the rest of us (or enough of the rest of us) believe in it. Money, like faith, is a product of the human imagination.

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.

Each of us has heard the mantra that money is the root of all evil, yet money is also an instrument of peace. Rather than kill their neighbours for food and property, the newly sedentary farming societies learned to trade using money.

Money is a force that dictates the flow of people, goods and ideas around the globe. Our efforts and talents are assessed by it; so too is the future.

In the past, when trying to explain how our ancestors developed, we have often focused on a source of energy or a physical technology that aided their progress – for example, the invention of the wheel, the discovery of coal or the arrival of the plough. But what about the social technologies that helped organise us in pursuit of common goals by en

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.

For 400,000 years, the technology that most influenced human development was fire; the contention of this book is that the crucial technology shaping humanity in the last 5,000 years has been money.

Money buys freedom: the essential promise which makes it so attractive is that, armed with money, you can change your world by gaining more control over your life.

Money buys independence. Money motivates us and releases human energy, and what we do with the energy once we have it is up to us.