Talking to My Daughter: The Sunday Times Bestseller

what I call “human economies”—that is, those where money acts primarily as a social currency, to create, maintain, or sever relations between people rather than to purchase things.

But along with the consumer revolution there now emerged an intellectual revolution that sharply altered the understanding of the role of ‘vanities’ in an economy. In 1705, a London physician called Bernard Mandeville published an economic tract (unusually but charmingly written in verse) entitled The Fable of the Bees, which proposed that – contra