For Turgot, the world of finance was a mirror held up to the world, with real and financial assets exchangeable for each other. Since land, buildings and factories produce income, so money must yield interest. This important insight is too often overlooked by modern economists.

In his 1776 classic, The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith explained: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

As economic production moves from the very primitive scale, it becomes harder for individuals to make production, consumption, and trade decisions without having a fixed frame of reference with which to compare the value of different objects to one another. This property, the unit of account, is the third function of money after being a medium of e

But along with the consumer revolution there now emerged an intellectual revolution that sharply altered the understanding of the role of ‘vanities’ in an economy. In 1705, a London physician called Bernard Mandeville published an economic tract (unusually but charmingly written in verse) entitled The Fable of the Bees, which proposed that – contra