I want to acknowledge Alan Watts and his essay Wealth Versus Money as the original inspiration for the ideas explored on this site.
In the essay, Watts pointed to a fundamental delusion that we share: the mistaking of money for the wealth it represents. Money, he argued, is a symbolic system created to organise production and exchange, much like inches are used to measure length. Yet when the measuring system begins to define the boundaries of reality rather than simply describing them, the tool starts to dominate what it was meant to serve.
The following passage captures the essence of his argument. He starts off using an analogy of the Great Depression as a building site:
…it was just as if someone had come to work on building a house and, on the morning of the Depression, the boss had said, “Sorry, baby, but we can’t build today. No inches.” “Whaddya mean, no inches? We got wood, We got metal. We even got tape measures.” “Yeah, but you don’t understand business. We been using too many inches and there’s just no more to go around.”
A few years later, people were saying that Germany couldn’t possibly equip a vast army and wage a war, because it didn’t have enough gold.
What wasn’t understood then, and still isn’t really understood today, is that the reality of money is of the same type as the reality of centimeters, grams, hours, or lines of longitude. Money is a way of measuring wealth but is not wealth in itself.
The full essay can be found here.
Written more than fifty years ago, some details are dated — Watts discusses the gold standard, for example, which is no longer used as it once was. However, the core insight has only grown in relevance. The first half of the essay is where the essential argument lies; after that it is very much a product of its time.
