didn’t know anything about money in a broad or abstract sense. I certainly didn’t know anything about economic theory. And I wasn’t alone in this.
I couldn’t answer the central question of this book because I was an economic idiot. I got to be an economic idiot by the simple and natural method of being human. Humans have trouble with economics, as you may have noticed, and not just because economic circumstances sometimes cause them to starve. Humans seem to have an innate inability to pay attention to economic principles. Love, death, and money—these are the three main human concerns. We’re all keen students of love. We are fascinated by every aspect of the matter, in theory and in practice—from precise biological observations of thrusting this and gaping that to ethereal sentimentalities marketed in miles of aisles at Hallmark stores. No variety of love is too trivial for exegesis. No aspect of love is so ridiculous that it hasn’t been exhaustively reviewed by the great thinkers, the great artists, and the great hosts of daytime talk shows. As for death, such is the public appetite for investigation of the subject that the highest-rated television program in America is about an emergency room. The most hardheaded and unspeculative of persons has his notions of eschatology. The dullest mind can reason extensively about what causes kicking the bucket. Dying sparks our intellectual curiosity. But money does not. All we care about is the thing itself, preferably in large amounts. We care a very great deal about that. But here our brain work stops. We don’t seem to mind where our money comes from. And, in an affluent society, we don’t even seem to mind where our money goes. As for larger questions about money, we shrug our shoulders and say, “I wish I had more.” Why is it that we are earnest scholars of amorosity and necrosis but turn as vague and fidgety as a study hall in June when the topic is economics? I have several hypotheses, none of them very good. Love and death are limited and personal. Even when free love was in vogue, only a certain number of people would allow us to practice that freedom upon them. A pious man in the throes of Christian agape may love every creature in the world, but he’s unlikely to meet them all. And death is as finite as it gets. It has closure. Plus the death ratio is low, only 1:1 in occurrences per person. Economics happens a lot more often and involves multitudes of people and uncountable goods and services. Economics is just too complicated. It makes our
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