蜜芽传媒

Something a bit weird happened at one minute to midnight, last night. Millions of those little metal discs that we carry around in our pockets became officially worthless. Apparently, some shops will continue to accept them for a couple of weeks. But they don鈥檛 have to. The old, round, one-pound coin is no longer worth a pound. Its value has disappeared, a bit like a soul leaving a body. It looks exactly the same. But pretty much everything about it is different.

It鈥檚 often said by people who understand economics a lot better than I do that the value of money is dependent upon us believing it has a value 鈥� that if we stopped believing in it, it would no longer work. Which, of course, makes money sound a lot like religion. And why a run on the banks, for example, can feel like a mass loss of faith. 鈥淎ll that is solid melts into air鈥�, as Karl Marx famously put it.

Money seemed a bit more understandable to me when its value was linked to a big pile of gold locked up in a government vault. But when, in the mid twentieth century, the link between money and gold was broken, then the value of money was established by fiat. It鈥檚 even called fiat money. And fiat is the Latin for 鈥渓et it be鈥�. In other words, the value of money is established by proclamation, a bit like a Papal Bull.

The dollar bill has 鈥淚n God we trust鈥� printed on it. The pound coin is stamped with the letters FD, fidei defensor, defender of the faith. It even seems that religion itself is being directly requisitioned back up the authority of money.

It is precisely this connection between money and religion that the development economist John Rapley has explored in his fascinating new book Twilight of the Money Gods: Economics as a Religion and How it all went Wrong. 鈥淭hink about it,鈥� says Rapley 鈥淓conomics offers a comprehensive doctrine with a moral code promising adherents salvation in this world; an ideology so compelling that the faithful remake whole societies to conform to its demands.鈥�
On this very programme, economists are consulted almost daily about their predictions for the future of the stock market as though they were modern day prophets or some sort of religious shamans. They often speak in a rarefied language that non-specialists struggle to understand, with credit default swaps and quantitative easing being as grounded as the higher metaphysical speculations of Thomas Aquinas.

And if there鈥檚 anything to this comparison, then, as the history of religion clearly demonstrates, one of the great dangers to watch out for is of a developing disconnect between the priesthood and the people in the pews. That鈥檚 why there was a Reformation in the church 500 years ago. And also why Rapley argues that economics needs to be rescued back from economists. For with both God and money, some things are just too important to be left only to the experts.

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