“Money is essentially credit, a belief system, in which we participate in practice so long as we treat money as valuable. This means that money is also debt. Every time we handle money, we handle someone else’s debt or obligation. Modern money is valuable because someone else is promising to pay, and they are trusted. What are they paying, and to whom? They promise to pay back the loan with interest, and pay it back in the form of money. They promise to acquire money, perhaps through investment, or labour, or the sale of assets, or speculation, to pay off their obligations. So they pay with the obligations of others. Then modern money is not simply a belief system because we treat paper tokens or sight deposits as valuable – it is also a system of obligations. Economic life is constrained by the perpetual need for acquiring money. This has enormous implications. Modern economics and politics—and even, to some extent, sociology—are based on the idea of human freedom. And they intend to advise us on the choices that we make. But they are ill-equipped for understanding money because transcendent obligations are put aside from the start, and confined to the sphere of ‘religion’ or ‘superstition.’”

Philip Goodchild on his book Theology of Money [via curate]