Rob’s comments below are in italics.Derek’s comments below are in normal font.

As we said last time, over the next series of episodes, we’ll discuss chapters from our forthcoming book, Unravelling the Money Puzzle. The first chapter is “What’s in it for you?” So why would you bother?

What’s In It For You?

Why would you bother with this? Essentially, we’re all pitched into life in the society we live in. Money is pretty much essential. Robert Anton Wilson once described it as bio survival tickets. Clearly, if you want a roof over your head and food on the table, you need to have money to do that in the society we live in.

I like that. I’ve learned since I’ve got older that there isn’t actually that much difference between monopoly money and real money.

Well, this is one of the things we’ll cover in the next section, where we look at the issue of what money is. Essentially, we’re not given any formal education on it at all. Whatever we learned, we learned from our parents, and for most of us, we didn’t have any formal lessons from them about it. We picked it up in between, out of the implications of what was going on around us.

Or, in my case, I ignored everything my dad tried to pass on to me and had to learn it all the hard way instead.

That’s a pretty common experience. Certainly, I don’t remember any lessons on it in school. The only time I can remember it being discussed at all was when one of our teachers remarked in passing that the pound note, as we had it in those days before they went over to pound coins, actually still said, “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of one pound in gold,” over the signature of the Governor of the Bank of England. The teacher said, well, actually, that’s not true these days. The reason it wasn’t true is that they suspended the convertibility of pound notes into gold in 1933, when they finally threw in the sponge on pretending that the First World War hadn’t destroyed a lot of value in the country. A pound was no longer worth what it had been. But that’s another story.

Anyway, one of the boys asked, well, in that case, why is it worth a pound? Which was a very sensible question. The teacher replied, “Well, if you’re not sure about that, you can always give me any that you’ve got.”

Which was typical of that particular teacher, totally missed the chance for what could have been a very constructive and informative discussion around that. At the time, I just thought it was a preposterous brush-off. I suppose you could take the view that he was subtly getting the point across that it’s because we all believe it’s worth a pound, and that somebody’s going to give us a pound’s worth of goods, whatever that might be.

It’s a shared story that if we stop believing it, it collapses tomorrow.

So we come out into life, and most people’s experience is that it’s a constant juggling act. We feel we’ve done all right if we get through the month without having got worse off. Of course, a lot of people in the present day, in pretty much all of the developed economies, are actually finding that they’re not getting wealthier; they’re getting less wealthy.

Just to go back a few steps, why was gold used in the first place? Gold has been used across the ages. Is it just because it’s a scarce, finite resource?

Well, it’s a scarce, finite resource. It’s incorruptible in the sense that it doesn’t corrode, rust or tarnish. That’s what makes it attractive. It’s been known since antiquity how to ascertain its purity, and it’s what they call fungible, meaning that one lump of gold is exactly like any other.

We tokenise it because it’s quite inconvenient to carry lumps of gold around.

Well, this is getting on to the topic of the next chapter. At the moment, we’re just saying why this is important to you. It’s basically important to you because, plainly, some people have a flair or expertise for accumulating it, and most of us don’t. This makes me feel that it probably suits the people who have that flair, that expertise and possibly that obsession, that the rest of us are not so well informed. It makes it easier for them to take advantage of us. I don’t think I’m being paranoid when I say that, or even if I am, it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m mistaken.

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

Exactly. I’m just running through the notes I made about the points. We’re covering them pretty rapidly.

Another impression most of us have is that it’s very difficult and complicated. In the course of the investigations we’re going to be sharing, it will come across that it’s almost embarrassingly simple in a lot of ways. The things you really need to know don’t require much sophistication or exceptional mental powers to grasp. When they’re brought out into the open and examined, they’re very easy to grasp, and once you’ve grasped and internalised them, that will empower you going forward. So that’s what we’re up to with this educational project. What you’ll get from following this through to the end is that you’ll become confident, relaxed and effective in dealing with your finances, which very few people would say, in all honesty, that they are at the moment. You’ll get the clarity to avoid being taken advantage of, and you’ll probably be quite angry when you see some of the ways you have been being taken advantage of. You’ll get clarity on how to build prosperity over the course of a lifetime. So that’s what’s in it for you from following it.

What Money Actually Is

Now I’ll go on to the next section, taking a look at what money actually is. Before I do that, are there any other points you want to raise, or any other questions you want to ask, Rob?

No, just to say that I think there was a hole in my education. I think we have to unlearn certain mental habits around it as well. It’s not just about learning; it’s about unlearning some unhelpful thought patterns around this too.

So the next section will address the question: what is money? It used to be a bit more obvious what the answer to this question might be than it is now. At the time I was growing up, which seems increasingly like ancient history, money for the most part was something completely tangible. It was coins and notes. There were one-pound notes, ten-shilling notes and five-pound notes. The ten-shilling note is worth fifty pence in today’s currency.

Slowly, we picked up on the fact that money could be balances in a bank. We thought of the bank as a big storeroom where the money was kept in a safe place. There were lots of banks up and down every main street in every town, and people were going in all day long, either depositing money or withdrawing it. So it was quite easy to look at it just as though it was a kind of storeroom.

Like a big piggy bank.

Yeah, whereas now increasingly it’s something entirely abstract, it’s figures on a screen. There’s been this huge push over the last five or six years, particularly to steer us all away from tangible forms of money and toward intangible ones, on the grounds that they’re more convenient. Of course, it’s convenient until it isn’t - when the system breaks down or when you become a victim. This has been happening quite a lot, in terms of people who felt to be troublesome to the ruling elites in some way or another being debanked. There’s absolutely nothing they can do about it, because it’s an extra-legal procedure. A number of people are grappling with court cases over this, and in the meantime, it’s almost impossible to function normally in the society we have.

I think Nigel Farage had one of his accounts closed, didn’t he? Although he’s clearly back in line with the establishment narrative because he’s back in the fold now.

He did. I don’t have a great deal of sympathy for him, but I don’t think it should happen to anybody.

The Canadian truckers’ protest was the other thing that came to mind.

Exactly.

Anyway, what is money, in essence? I’ll start with the classic definitions, and then we’ll see how this works out.

1. A Medium of Exchange

First and foremost, money is regarded as a medium of exchange. Now, what does that mean? The typical way it’s explained is that, in primitive societies, people operated by barter. Somebody would take goods they had produced or otherwise acquired and swap them for other goods, which is obviously very cumbersome.

There’s considerable doubt over that narrative as a literal historical sequence. Part of the confusion comes from the degree of obsession we have these days with money, and the degree of obsession we have with looking after our own individual interests over and above others. In very primitive societies, much of what went on was much more like a gift economy.

It was the local community as well. It’s not like you were buying from someone in a different country.

Yeah, or someone you’d never met before and never expected to meet again. But people were much less rigorous about making sure they covered their own interests. They were much more prepared to just be generous, providing something to their neighbours and fellow villagers, and expecting that when the boot was on the other foot, they’d be taken care of. It was very common throughout the world, in all sorts of cultures.

All the Scottish clans used to do that, didn’t they? This principle of hospitality.

Yes indeed. So, what does it mean, a “medium of exchange?”

Suppose a farmer wants a table, and the carpenter thinks the table is worth three bags of wheat. If they were operating on a strict barter system, they’d do a straight swap, and chances a...