On money as the living god of secular civilisation, the Market as its instrument of judgment, and the faith we perform each day without knowing we are performing it
Take a note from your wallet and look at it. Really look. What you are holding is not wealth. It is a promise, extended across an entire civilisation, that other people will continue to believe what you believe. It has worked so far. That is the whole of the argument.
There is a test for whether something functions as a religion, and it does not require the presence of a god in the conventional sense — a bearded sovereign dispensing reward and punishment from a specific location. The test is structural. Does it organise the community around a set of shared beliefs whose truth cannot be individually verified? Does it produce rituals whose performance reinforces those beliefs in the participants? Does it divide the world into the sacred and the profane, assigning dignity to certain activities and degradation to others? Does it promise meaning — a framework within which suffering is not merely suffering but part of a larger story, within which work is not merely toil but participation in something that transcends the individual? Does it create a priestly class with privileged interpretive access to truths the laity cannot directly apprehend? And does it exact consequences, severe and sometimes inexplicable ones, from those who violate its commandments or simply fall outside its grace?
Money passes every test. The Market passes them twice.
Begin with the most basic theological question: what is it made of?
A Roman denarius was silver. Its value was, at least in part, intrinsic — the silver itself had weight and use, and the coin's authority derived partly from this material fact. For most of monetary history, this physical tether remained in place, attenuated and supplemented by paper instruments but never fully severed. The gold standard — the nineteenth century's great monetary religion, a faith so firmly held that its defence became the defining political issue of entire generations — was precisely the insistence that money be anchored to something real, something you could weigh, something that existed independently of anyone's belief in it.
On 15 August 1971, Richard Nixon announced that the United States would no longer redeem dollars for gold at a fixed price. The anchor was cut. What remained was pure declaration: money by governmental fiat, valuable because the state says so, because the legal system enforces obligations denominated in it, because everyone else accepts it, and for no other reason at all.1 A twenty-dollar bill is worth twenty dollars because twenty dollars is what it says it is worth, and because you believe it, and because every person who will accept it from you believes it too. The circularity is not an embarrassment. It is the mechanism. Value is the collective belief in value. This is not a metaphor for religion. It is its operating principle.
The theologian would recognise the structure immediately. The host at the centre of the Catholic Mass is, after the words of consecration, no longer bread. Its material properties are unchanged — it weighs what bread weighs, it tastes what bread tastes — but it has become something else entirely, through the operation of a shared belief activated by ritual speech. The twenty-dollar bill undergoes the same transformation in reverse: it is, materially, a piece of cotton and linen fibre with some ink on it, indistinguishable from the paper its printed surface happens to be worth less than. What makes it money is the consecration of collective faith. Remove the faith, and you have kindling. The histories of the Weimar mark, the Zimbabwean dollar, and the Continental currency of the American Revolutionary period are, in this precise sense, accounts of deconversion — of the moment when a population lost its faith in a monetary object and discovered what it actually was.2
The sociologist Émile Durkheim, attempting to identify the essential structure of religious experience, concluded that what all religions share is not a particular belief about the supernatural but a particular organisation of the world into the sacred and the profane. The sacred is set apart, ringed with prohibitions, approached with ritual, associated with the community's highest values. The profane is the everyday, the undifferentiated, the instrumental. What varies across religions is not this structure but its content — which objects, which spaces, which acts are assigned to which side of the division.3
Money has organised this division with a thoroughness that would have impressed Durkheim. There is scarcely a domain of human experience it has not touched and reclassified. Art is profane when it is practice, sacred when it is investment. A house is profane when it is shelter, sacred — untouchable, obsessively monitored, the subject of anxious conversation at every dinner table in the country — when it becomes an asset. A relationship is profane in the daily texture of its living, sacred when it is formalised in the exchange of expensive objects, the purchase of a venue, the signing of a contract whose dissolution will require the intervention of lawyers charging by the hour. Even death has been reorganised around the monetary sacred: the size of the estate, the structure of the will, the tax implications of the transfer — these are not secular intrusions into a sacred event. For most families, they are the event.
The profane is what money cannot reach or has not yet reached. The sacred — in the Durkheimian sense of what organises collective life, what generates the strongest emotions, what people will defend most fiercely — is what money touches and transforms. And money's reach, in the three centuries since the emergence of financial capitalism, has extended continuously. There are fewer and fewer places where it does not go.
But money is only the substance. The Market is the god.
The distinction matters. Money is what the faithful hold. The Market is the entity whose judgments they receive, whose favor they court, whose displeasure they fear, and whose workings they attempt, with limited and sometimes catastrophic results, to interpret and predict. The relationship between the believer and the Market has every characteristic of the relationship between a supplicant and a deity: the deity is immensely powerful, ultimately inscrutable, responsive to certain kinds of behaviour in ways that reward sustained attention, capable of sudden reversals that punish the confident, and beyond the reach of any individual's will.
The Market is invisible. You cannot point to it. It has no location, no face, no body. It is the aggregate consequence of millions of simultaneous decisions, none of which alone produced the outcome you observe. When the Market rises, no one did that. When the Market falls, no one is responsible in any individually attributable sense — and yet the consequences for specific human beings are as concrete and severe as any act of deliberate intention. People lose livelihoods. Retirements are cancelled. Houses are sold. Children's educations are reshaped. The cause — the Market — is real in its effects and absent as a subject. This is a fairly good description of how gods have always worked.4
The Market is omniscient, or is treated as though it is. This is the claim encoded in the efficient market hypothesis — the doctrine, foundational to modern financial theory, that market prices at any moment incorporate all available information about the underlying assets.5 The theological implications of this claim are not accidental. If the Market knows everything, then the Market's judgment is, by definition, correct. The price is the truth. To bet against the Market is to claim superior knowledge to an entity that has processed the beliefs of every participant simultaneously — an act of epistemic hubris that the theology does not encourage. The correct posture is submission: index to the Market, trust the price, do not presume to know better. This is not a financial recommendation. It is a spiritual instruction.
The Market speaks in signs that require interpretation. Its language is the movement of prices, the shape of yield curves, the direction of capital flows, the sentiment readings extracted from trading volumes and options activity. None of these signs is self-interpreting. Between the sign and its meaning stands a priestly class — economists, analysts, fund managers, central bankers — whose authority derives from their claimed ability to read what the Market is saying. The analyst's note, the central bank governor's testimony, the economist's forecast: these are not secular documents. They are exegesis. They are commentary on a sacred text that is rewritten every second and that will, most of the time, prove to have been misread by the commentators who claimed most confidently to understand it.6
Every religion has its account of theodicy: the problem of why an all-powerful benevolent deity permits suffering. The Market has its own version of this problem, and its standard resolution is structurally identical to the one theology has always offered.
When the Market destroys — when a crash eliminates the savings of the prudent alongside the speculations of the reckless, when a currency crisis impoverishes an entire country whose citizens played by every available rule, when the efficient allocation of capital produces the efficient destruction of a community — the standard explanation is not that the Market failed. It is that the Market is correcting. The language is everywhere, and it is doing serious theological work. A correction is not a malfunction. It is an adjustment toward truth. The pain is not pointless suffering but discipline — the Market's way of communicating that something was mispriced, that behaviour was unsustainable, that reality is reasserting itself against the wishful thinking of participants who should have known better. The suffering, in this account, is not what the Market did wrong. It is what the Market is fixing.
This is the logic of the scourge. The god does not err. The community has transgressed, or has accumulated error, or has simply been tested, and the suffering is the mechanism of restoration. What is remarkable is not that this argument is made — theodicy is a universal feature of religious thought and the Market's version of it is no more intellectually incoherent than most — but that it is made by people who would reject the label of religious thinker with genuine indignation. The austerity economist who explains that the pain of fiscal contraction is necessary medicine, that the Market requires it, that there is no alternative because the Market has spoken and its judgments are not negotiable, is making a theological argument in the exact structure of the argument the medieval churchman made about plague. The difference is in the deity's name, not in the argumentative form.7
Consider the rituals. Not as metaphor — as literal structural parallels to the rituals of the world's established religions.
The ringing of the bell at the opening and closing of the exchange. The specific costume of the trading floor — the coloured jackets, the badges, the badges' hierarchy of access. The earnings call, with its quarterly confessional structure: the disclosure of what was achieved, the explanation of variance from what was promised, the forward guidance whose language is precisely calibrated to manage the deity's expectations without triggering its displeasure. The annual report, in whose production entire departments labour for months, producing a document whose primary audience is not the regulator, not the employee, not the customer, but the Market — the entity that will read it, pass judgment on it, and render that judgment in the movement of a price. The initial public offering, which is precisely a ceremony of consecration: the transformation of a private thing into a Market-facing thing, accompanied by roadshows and bankers and a specific, careful liturgy of disclosure and pricing, at the end of which the bell rings and the price is discovered, and the entity has entered the Market's grace or fallen short of it, and everyone in the room knows which within seconds.8
Georg Simmel, in his Philosophie des Geldes (1900), observed that money has a distinctive relationship to human psychology that no previous object of value had achieved: it is purely relational, purely abstract, purely a means, and yet it acquires, through this very abstraction, a psychological weight that overwhelms the specific things it is supposed to be a means toward. People pursue money not for what it can buy but for what having it means — for the security, the status, the sense of possibility, the identity. They sacrifice things of genuine and irreplaceable value — time, health, relationships, the texture of daily experience — in order to accumulate more of it, and they do this even when the accumulation has long since passed the point at which it could buy anything they actually need. Simmel called this the tragedy of culture: the means has become the end. What he was describing, without using the word, is the structure of idolatry.9
There is an objection to all of this that will be made by economists and is worth addressing with care, because it contains a real point alongside a concealment.
The objection is that money is not a religion because it is not based on claims about the supernatural. Religion makes claims that transcend the physical world — about the existence of a god, about the soul's survival of death, about the structure of a moral universe. Money makes no such claims. It is a social technology, a coordination mechanism, a solution to the problems of barter and the double coincidence of wants. Its value is grounded in law and social consensus rather than in the supernatural, and this makes it categorically different from religious belief even if it resembles religious belief in certain structural respects.
The concealment in this objection is the assumption that the supernatural is what distinguishes religion from other forms of collective commitment. It is not. Durkheim's analysis — and the subsequent century of anthropology and sociology of religion that has largely validated it — identifies what is distinctive about religion not in its metaphysical claims but in its social function: the organisation of a community around shared objects of collective belief and ritual, the generation of a sense of the sacred, the production of the individual's experience of being part of something larger than herself. These functions are fully present in the monetary system. And the metaphysical claim — that money has value — is, as we have seen, no less supernatural in its structure than the claim that the host has been transformed. Both are claims about an invisible property of an entirely ordinary physical object, a property that exists only in the shared belief of the community, that cannot be verified by any individual acting alone, and that vanishes the moment the community stops believing it.10
The objection also misunderstands what money promises. It is not agnostic about transcendence. Money promises — has always promised — a form of escape from the conditions of ordinary mortal existence: from dependence, from insecurity, from the body's needs and the community's claims. Accumulate enough, and the laws of scarcity that govern everyone else do not govern you. Accumulate enough, and time itself becomes negotiable — your time, the time of those you hire, the time that future generations will spend on projects you endow. The very rich are not merely comfortable. They are trying to be permanent. The named building, the endowed chair, the foundation that will outlast the body — these are monuments. They are what money, in its deepest aspiration, is for. This is not a secular ambition. It is the oldest religious one.11
What would it mean to see the monetary religion clearly?
Not to abandon it. The faith that sustains the value of money is among the most functional collective fictions humanity has ever produced — more durable than most empires, more universally adopted than any single religion, more capable of coordinating the behaviour of strangers across languages and cultures and centuries than any alternative arrangement we have discovered. The anthropologist David Graeber, tracing the history of debt across five thousand years of human civilisation, found that some form of credit preceded coinage everywhere it has been studied — that the monetary relation is not an invention of capitalism or the Enlightenment but a feature of human social life whose roots go deeper than writing.12 You cannot step outside a structure this fundamental. You can only decide whether to inhabit it consciously.
Seeing the monetary religion clearly means, first, recognising the Market for what it is: not an oracle, not a source of moral judgment, not a self-correcting mechanism that tends toward the good, but an aggregation of human beliefs whose outputs reflect the distribution of power and information among the participants, and whose outputs can therefore be as wrong, as cruel, as arbitrarily punishing as any other human institution. The Market that priced subprime mortgage-backed securities as safe was not miscommunicating a truth that careful exegesis would have recovered. It was wrong, in the ordinary sense, in the way that institutions made of human beings are wrong when their incentive structures systematically reward the mispricing of risk. The god was not speaking in a language the priests failed to interpret. The god was repeating what the priests had told it to say.13
It means, second, noticing what the religion displaces. Every religion organises attention and assigns value. The monetary religion has organised the attention of the modern world with remarkable efficiency — toward the quantifiable and away from the unquantifiable, toward what can be priced and away from what cannot, toward the production of exchange value and away from the production of the things that make lives worth living but that the Market cannot see. The ecologist whose work protects a watershed that will never appear on a balance sheet. The teacher whose influence on a student will propagate across a lifetime and cannot be denominated. The relationship whose value is precisely its resistance to the logic of optimization. These are not failures of the Market to price correctly. They are things the Market is structurally incapable of seeing, in the same way that a religion cannot perceive what falls outside its sacred framework. The monetary religion's blind spots are large, and we are living inside many of their consequences.14
The secular century was supposed to have finished with god. It inherited the Enlightenment's confidence that reason, applied consistently, would reveal the true structure of human welfare and allow it to be deliberately pursued — that the arbitrary impositions of religious authority, the superstitions, the sacred objects and ritual observances and priestly mediations would be seen for what they were and set aside. What happened instead is that the sacred migrated. It left the cathedrals and the altars and the specific named deities and took up residence in the abstraction that the same century had elevated to the centre of every human transaction. The god became money. The church became the market. The congregation became the economy. And the faithful — which is to say everyone, because there is no longer any outside — continued to perform the rituals, obey the commandments, fear the judgment, and seek the grace of an entity they had persuaded themselves they no longer believed in.
The persuasion was the cleverest part. A religion you do not know you hold is the most powerful kind. It requires no apologists, generates no heretics, inspires no reformation. Its commandments are not experienced as commandments but as reality — as the natural order of things, the way the world simply is. The person who sacrifices her health to her career is not, in her own account, performing an act of worship. She is being rational, being responsible, doing what the situation requires. The community that strips its public spaces of everything that cannot generate revenue is not, in its own account, conducting a religious purge. It is being fiscally prudent. The politician who announces that there is no money for the hospital but that the conditions exist to attract investment is not, in her own account, interpreting a sacred text. She is describing reality.
But reality is not given. It is made. And the making of it — the particular organisation of value, attention, and obligation that we have inherited and continue to reproduce — reflects a set of commitments so deeply held that they have become invisible. That is what a religion looks like from the inside. That is what it has always looked like.
The question worth asking is not whether to believe in money. We are past the point where that question has a practical answer. The question is whether to believe in it as believers or as people who know what they are doing — who can see the faith inside the transaction, the ritual inside the earnings call, the theology inside the correction, and who might, by seeing these things clearly, retain some freedom to value what the deity cannot price.
That freedom is small. It shrinks every year. But it is not yet gone. And it begins, as all freedoms begin, with the refusal to call the sacred by a secular name just because it makes us more comfortable to do so.
1The decision of 15 August 1971 — made without prior consultation with the international partners whose currencies were pegged to the dollar under the Bretton Woods system — was announced by Nixon in a Sunday evening television address that presented it primarily as an anti-inflationary measure and said little about its structural implications for the global monetary order. The French finance minister Valéry Giscard d'Estaing had previously described the dollar's role under Bretton Woods as an “exorbitant privilege” — the ability to create obligations that the world was compelled to accept as reserves. After August 1971, the privilege became pure. There was no longer even a theoretical redemption mechanism. The dollar was worth what the United States government said it was worth, backed by the full faith and credit of an entity whose own debts were denominated in the currency it alone could issue. The circularity was complete. It has supported the world's primary reserve currency ever since, which is itself an interesting piece of evidence about the self-sustaining properties of sufficiently widely shared belief.
2The German hyperinflation of 1921–1923 is the most extensively documented modern case of monetary deconversion. At its peak, prices were doubling every two to three days, and the currency had lost so completely the collective belief that sustained it that workers demanded payment in the middle of the day to spend their wages before the afternoon's price increases made them worthless. The psychological scarring of the event — its persistence in German collective memory and its influence on the Bundesbank's subsequent institutional culture — is precisely what one would expect from a religious trauma: not merely an economic shock but a revelation of the contingency of something that had been experienced as foundational. The Zimbabwean dollar's collapse between 2007 and 2009, which produced inflation estimated at 79.6 billion percent per month at its November 2008 peak, compressed the same revelation into a shorter timeframe and with a smaller institutional infrastructure available for documentation. In both cases, the discovery that the sacred object was cotton fibre was not gradual. It was catastrophic.
3Durkheim, É. (1912). Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. Félix Alcan. Translated as The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1915) by Joseph Ward Swain. Durkheim's analysis was based primarily on Australian Aboriginal religion, which he chose because its apparent simplicity — the absence of the elaborate theological superstructure of the world's major religions — made the structural features more visible. His core claim — that the sacred is not a property of the objects designated as sacred but a quality that the community projects onto them through collective ritual — maps directly onto the monetary system. The bank note is not sacred in itself. It is sacred because the community has, through the accumulated ritual of use and exchange, designated it so. The parallel to the totem — the clan's sacred object, arbitrary in its material form but absolute in its symbolic authority — is close enough to have been noticed by several subsequent anthropologists, though rarely with the directness the parallel deserves.
4The impersonality of market outcomes — the fact that no one decided that a particular factory town would be destroyed by trade liberalisation, or that a particular currency crisis would eliminate a generation's savings — is often cited as evidence that the Market is value-neutral, operating according to principles rather than preferences. This is precisely the structure of divine judgment in traditions that conceive of god as operating through natural law rather than direct intervention: no one decided the plague; the plague followed from conditions; the conditions were a consequence of accumulated transgression. The moral work that “market forces” performs in contemporary political discourse is identical to the moral work that “divine will” performed in earlier periods of political justification. In both cases, a human outcome is attributed to a non-human agent in a way that dissolves the question of who is responsible for it.
5Fama, E.F. (1970). “Efficient Capital Markets: A Review of Empirical Work.” Journal of Finance, 25(2), 383–417. The efficient market hypothesis exists in three forms — weak, semi-strong, and strong — of which the strong form (all information, including private information, is incorporated in prices) is generally treated as a limiting ideal rather than an empirical claim. But the semi-strong form — that publicly available information is rapidly and correctly incorporated in prices — has functioned in practice as the foundational doctrine of asset management and financial regulation for fifty years, with consequences for the structure of pension funds, the regulation of insider trading, and the design of derivatives markets whose scale is difficult to overstate. The empirical challenges to the hypothesis — momentum effects, value anomalies, the persistent outperformance of certain systematic strategies — have modified but not displaced it. This is the normal pattern for theological challenges to foundational doctrine: they are absorbed as qualifications rather than refutations, and the doctrine continues to organise practice.
6The track record of professional economic forecasting — the priestly class's record of interpreting the deity's intentions — is not encouraging. Philip Tetlock's two-decade study of expert political and economic judgment, published as Expert Political Judgment (2005), found that professional forecasters performed no better than chance on many categories of prediction, and that their confidence substantially exceeded their accuracy — the more confident the expert, the more likely they were to be wrong. The International Monetary Fund's forecasts for the trajectory of economies undergoing its adjustment programmes have been systematically optimistic by factors that, in some cases, amount to the underestimation of recessions by several hundred percent. None of this has materially diminished the authority of economists in public life. This is consistent with the sociology of priestly authority: the priest's power derives not from the accuracy of their prophecies but from their structural position as the designated interpreters of the sacred. False prophecies can be reinterpreted, retroactively qualified, attributed to the congregation's failure to heed prior warnings. The interpretive franchise survives the failed interpretation.
7The austerity debates of the 2010s — in which governments across southern Europe were required, as a condition of financial assistance, to implement spending cuts whose severity provoked political crises, democratic reversals, and humanitarian consequences that the lending institutions' own economists had substantially underestimated — produced some of the clearest public instances of Market theodicy in the modern period. The argument that the pain was necessary, that the alternative was worse, that the Market required it, was made repeatedly and with conviction by people who simultaneously insisted that their discipline was empirical and value-neutral. The circularity — the Market is the measure of right outcomes; right outcomes are what the Market requires; the Market's requirements must therefore be satisfied regardless of their observed effects on human welfare — was structural rather than cynical. It is the circularity of a closed theological system. It cannot be broken from inside the system because the system's terms provide no external referent against which the system itself could be judged.
8The IPO roadshow — the week of presentations in which the company's founders and bankers travel between institutional investors, making the case for the valuation, reading the room, adjusting the story — is one of the most explicitly ritual processes in contemporary business life, and is understood as such by its participants even when they would not use that word. The book-building process, in which the bank collects indications of interest from investors and constructs a clearing price, is a ceremony whose outcome is known to be as much a product of narrative and social dynamics as of financial analysis. The grey market in which sophisticated participants trade pre-IPO shares is a kind of anticipatory prayer — an attempt to discern the god's likely judgment before the judgment is rendered. And the first-day trading — the public revelation of whether the Market's grace has been extended — is followed with an attention that has no parallel in secular life except, perhaps, elections.
9Simmel, G. (1900). Philosophie des Geldes. Duncker & Humblot. Translated as The Philosophy of Money (1978) by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. Simmel's analysis remains the most philosophically serious sustained engagement with money's psychological and cultural effects ever written, and it is notable for the degree to which it anticipates problems — the colonisation of qualitative experience by quantitative logic, the erosion of the distinction between means and ends, the psychological consequences of living in a world where everything can in principle be converted into everything else — that were not widely recognised as social problems until decades after his death. His concept of the “blasé attitude” — the psychological flattening produced by exposure to a world in which all value differences have been reduced to price differences — describes what it feels like to live in a world whose god is money: not suffering, but anaesthesia. Not deprivation, but the inability to distinguish between things that matter differently.
10The anthropological literature on the sacred is not unanimous on Durkheim's specific formulation, but the structural point — that what is sacred in a community is determined by collective designation rather than by any property of the designated object — is robust across a wide range of traditions. Mary Douglas's work on purity and pollution (Purity and Danger, 1966) extends Durkheim's analysis to show how the boundary between sacred and profane is maintained by elaborate prohibitions and rituals of separation — a structure entirely visible in the regulatory architecture surrounding financial markets, where the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate trading (insider trading, market manipulation, front-running) is maintained by an elaborate legal and regulatory apparatus that functions, sociologically, exactly as a purity code. The person who trades on material non-public information is not merely committing a legal offence. In the Market's moral framework, she has violated the sacred. She has accessed the god's truth before it was revealed to the congregation. The severity of the sanction reflects the severity of the transgression.
11The aspiration to permanence through wealth is visible not only in the named building but in the entire structure of trust law — the legal apparatus by which accumulated wealth can be made to persist across generations, insulated from the redistributive claims of taxation and the dissipative tendencies of inheritance. The dynasty trust, whose perpetuity is now unlimited in a number of American states following the repeal of the rule against perpetuities, is a legal expression of the aspiration to defeat time — to produce a structure that will continue to act in the world long after the body that produced the wealth has ceased to do so. The aspiration is not secular. It is the specific aspiration of every monument ever built, every temple ever endowed, every pyramid ever filled with provisions for the afterlife. The form changes. The desire does not.
12Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House. Graeber's central historical finding — that credit relations, denominated in abstract units of account, precede the physical coinage whose invention is conventionally supposed to have made credit possible — inverts the standard economic history and reveals money as fundamentally a social relation rather than a physical commodity. The implication for the theological analogy is significant: money is not a practical tool that was later given sacred properties by the communities that used it. The sacred properties — the community's trust, the shared belief in the validity of the obligation, the moral weight attached to debt and its repayment — were there from the beginning. The sacred preceded the commodity. The faith came before the coin.
13The financial crisis of 2007–2008 has been extensively documented; the most analytically useful accounts for the purposes of this argument are those that identify the specific mechanisms by which the Market's pricing of risk was not merely inaccurate but systematically incentivised to be inaccurate. Lewis, M. (2010). The Big Short. W.W. Norton. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (2011). The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report. U.S. Government Printing Office. The FCIC report's conclusion — that the crisis was avoidable and was the result of human action, inaction, and systemic failure — is precisely the conclusion that Market theology cannot accommodate without revising its foundational premises. It has not, in the main, been accommodated. The theological system absorbed the crisis as a correction and continued.
14The problem of unpriced externalities — costs imposed by economic activity on parties who did not participate in the transaction that generated them — is the standard economic framing of the Market's blindness to what it cannot price. Carbon emissions are the most extensively discussed current example. But the category extends well beyond environmental costs to include the destruction of social capital, the erosion of the cultural commons, the costs imposed on future generations by decisions whose short-term benefits are captured by current participants. The standard response — that externalities can in principle be priced and thereby incorporated into Market signals — is technically correct and practically extraordinary: it proposes to cure the Market's blindness by extending the Market's reach, to solve the problem of what money cannot see by making everything visible to money. That this proposal is made in good faith by serious people is itself an indication of how completely the monetary religion has colonised the imagination of the alternatives to it.
Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Durkheim, É. (1912). Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. Félix Alcan. Trans. Swain, J.W. (1915). Allen & Unwin.
Fama, E.F. (1970). “Efficient Capital Markets: A Review of Empirical Work.” Journal of Finance, 25(2), 383–417.
Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (2011). The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report. U.S. Government Printing Office.
Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House.
Lewis, M. (2010). The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. W.W. Norton.
Simmel, G. (1900). Philosophie des Geldes. Duncker & Humblot. Trans. Bottomore, T. and Frisby, D. (1978). Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Tetlock, P.E. (2005). Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Princeton University Press.