Just in case UK readers of this blog have failed to notice, my new book The Economics of Enough is now available. Amazon and other websites are selling it – I think it will be a day or two before it gets to the real world stores. I'm doing my first talk about it today and will post the podcast link when available. US readers have to wait until next week, it seems.
Not long ago I read a quote from a Greek writer (an early one, probably sixth or fifth century), who was bewailing the invention of money as something that had corrupted the human spirit. Wealth in the past had been held in goods, and there was a limit to these. Quantities of grain were subject to pests, to rot and to pilfering; cattle were vulnerable to disease or predators; furniture was attacked by worms, and clothing by the moth. Things were always bulky to store, and a boundary of decency was set by people’s appetites: who could use thirty tons of apples, or where would they pasture thirty thousand sheep? People always reached a point, with such things, where they felt they had “enough”. Even land was held in families, and rarely offered for exchange. But coins, especially gold coins: they were different: a miser could hide a huge fortune in a small pot, and it would never rust away. There was no limit to the amount of money which was desirable. Indeed, it fired a sort of collecting passion, so that the more people had the more they wanted, even though they might never really intend to use it.