Who needs money?

I was racking my brains, trying to understand money, trying to grasp exactly what it is, when I came across these two books. One is written by Aaron Brown, who is the risk manager of a large Wall Street hedgefund. The other is by David Graeber, the anarchist who has been called the leader — and, sometimes, the anti-leader — of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Both have written brilliant books about the history of money.

As you’d expect, Brown thinks that money, in its various forms, has made the world a prosperous and interesting place, and Graeber thinks that money has divided the world into two tribes — a tiny, and shrinking, number of very rich people (like Brown), and a vast, and growing, army of debtors. In a way, they’re both right.

So what is money? It’s an idea, or a set of conventions, that, in order to work, must exist in my head and your head at the same time.