Browsing through yesterday's business section of the paper, I noted that a couple of our home-grown oil barons had each taken home over £4 million in pay last year. And that's just Britain! In America they would make ten times as much. What do they do with it all, I wondered? Why do they need it? And is it fair that they should get so much more than the people who work with them? Or people like doctors and teachers and the police who do equally valuable work? Then I caught myself speculating, ‘What would I myself do with all that stuff?’. There was a touch of envy there, mixed with dreams of riches. We are few of us immune. Such a complicated thing it is, this money, I thought to myself, so necessary and yet so intrusive, distorting our values and priorities. Is it good or is it bad?

One thing is sure: we could not live without it. Money really does make the world go round. Whether we are talking about a country town, a country or the world, the mechanism that provides us with work and food and fun – the economy – is no more than an elaborate arrangement of barter systems, with money as the oil that keeps it working. Come to think of it, if the barter currency really were oil, we might not be so keen to pile it up. Where would we keep four million barrels of the stuff? Part of the genius behind the idea of money is its convenience. We can store it, measure it or move it nowadays with a click on a computer keyboard. Something like 30 times the national income of this country flows through the City of London every day, and quite a few people earn their living by extracting tiny bits of it as it goes by. As many have discovered down the ages, it is often easier and more profitable to make money out of money than by actually producing something real.