Against Money
How do you price a Freddo?
Sorting out my thoughts on this book, I kept coming back to a corner shop a couple of streets from my childhood home.
That shop upset my sense of things. It was where Opal Fruits became Starburst and Coco Pops became Coco Krispies, and I’d walk home uneasy that fixed things could suddenly change.
But coins felt solid. A 10p came easily from a parent’s pocket, and rarely seemed too much to ask. And it bought you a Freddo.
Until 2005. Suddenly it was 15p. A troubling walk. Names could change, and now so could the price — and the price established how likely a parent was to say yes, and so the viability of the walk.
The problems were obvious. The answers were not. Someone would wave a hand and say “inflation”, but no-one told me why prices went up and never down.
I wasn’t alone. There’s a whole lay economics built on Freddo-watching.
Against Money wants to validate the confusion of both children and their adults in the face of this problem.
A Freddo was supposed to have a value in money — and that value told you how many bags of oats it was worth, or train tickets, or copper futures.
The world in a grain of sand: one moment of exchange, one price, measuring what a thing is worth in money, and so in everything else.
Setting that price is hard. Packaging, shipping, labour. Cocoa and palm oil, traded globally. Perhaps the 2010 sale of Cadbury to Kraft, and the £7 billion of debt that paid for it.
So the question this book asks: can money really boil all of this down to one number?
Modern economics says yes — though it’s hard, and Cadbury surely got it wrong at times. When they did, they either left money on the table, or pushed too far and I walked away in disgust. But somewhere sat a real price, the perfect midpoint of all these things. The job of sellers, down to my shopkeeper, was to get as close to it as they could — helped by a modern economics profession that could name bumps on that road, and steer them nearer the true point.
This book is against money. As in “seen against a dark background”, a contrast that lets us see both money and ourselves more clearly. But also against this idea that a midpoint exists at all.
That beneath the sticker price sits a true one — a natural ideal of what a Freddo should really cost, orbiting and orbited by every other human concern.
That money’s job is not to settle a transaction but to reveal what transactions are possible. In doing so, mapping where a Freddo sits among all human desires.
This book claims that belief sits at the heart of modern economics, a belief that does a great deal to structure our worlds and what is possible within them.
What is it if not real?
The fallout of this move seems far-reaching to me.
If money is neutral, a tool that reveals some objective or natural order - then economics is merely a technocratic skill. It might be right, or wrong, but it can only be so in the way a scientist’s hypothesis can be refuted by the evidence - or a navigator can make a wrong turn and find themselves further from an objective target.
The book wants to negate the core assumption, it’s not that economics maps the territory poorly, but rather the things it claims to be mapping - real, underlying, non-monetary quantities - don’t exist. They’ve made detailed elaborate maps of imaginary places.
As a consequence, debt doesn’t mean you consumed more than you earned. Capital isn’t a pile of accumulated savings. Interest rates aren’t the price of waiting. GDP isn’t a measure of how much stuff got made. It’s not that they’re bad measures or require economics to give us better ones but that they’re fundamentally asking the wrong question.
More tangibly - I can go on the Bank of England’s website and do an inflation adjustment between monetary figures between 1209 and 2026. How should we feel about that prospect?
One line might suggest that yes, it’s all a bit of fun. Perhaps a fuzzier guess the further you go back into the past. That with more historical knowledge, archaeological findings, economic development those numbers might change - even dramatically.
But that this is a perfectible, if not perfect art of adjusting historical values to work out the measure of things in the past.
Mason & Jayadev call BS on that argument.
There is no common point of exchange that interconnects someone in 1209 and 2026. There is no answer to how many bags of raw wool under King John melt seamlessly into a box of Freddos in 2026. It’s a silly question, not least because it implies some continuity of human desire across that span of time.
The past is another country, they didn’t want Freddos there.
Instead, money seems to bring communities of exchange into being — and to depend on them in the same breath. Within that scope a price has meaning, there is an answer to how much I might pay for a car, and it does tie to questions my neighbours and colleagues ask about the cost of their things. In the same way as a bag of raw wool could certainly be traded for a gallon of ale in 1209.
However attempts to imply there’s some universal yardstick here that exists beyond these communities and relations of power internal to them tries to make a law of physics out of a fundamentally human reality.
There’s a political consequence too, the book believes that if money doesn’t reveal something that came before and isn’t neutral then it is interventionist. It creates worlds and melts social orders into it. It’s a solvent that allows people who don’t already trust each other to make an exchange and in doing so opens up whole new worlds of possibility, whilst dissolving older communities of trust.
If money isn’t a clean measuring instrument of a real economy, then it’s a technology representing a social relation enforced by law and power. There can be no claim that there are no alternatives, or that the ECB is following a reality of the numbers. Strip away those beliefs and there is just humans making political choices, pretending to an objective reality that does not exist.
And here, I think, the book reaches its limit. Like the money it describes, it becomes a solvent — dissolving old orders without settling what should follow. As a demolition job, I find it compelling. There also has to be a place for beginning a political conversation without requiring a map of everywhere it goes.
I am reminded of some of the jibes thrown at Occupy protesters along the lines of “yes your critique rings true fine, but what’s your project? What will you replace all this with”.
It’s both deeply unfair to expect a full roadmap at the beginning of a project - but also leaves a yawning gap. Demolition is unlikely to be enough to convince people to abandon cherished tools, a rival project would need to give them something to move towards.
Against Money is precisely not For an economy of social relations.
It begins a conversation that I find deeply compelling, but with a sense of longing at the end.
The book leaves us where it found us: in money’s world. Perhaps significantly more sceptical and clearer of what it means to price a Freddo, and more attuned to the social relations and dynamics of power in the community of exchange that prices it.
But the question of what comes next is deliberately, and perhaps rightly, left to another book.
Before "Against Money" I read: Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016–2021
This is the most recent book I've recorded finishing.