![]() ![]() When you look back, you see long periods of relative stability, and then suddenly, in some corner of the world, money goes bananas. Like fiction, money has changed profoundly over time, and not in a steady or gentle way. Otherwise, it’s just a chunk of metal, or a piece of paper, or, in the case of most money today, just a number stored on a bank’s computers. The social part of money-the “shared” in “shared fiction”-is exactly what makes it money. Money is fundamentally, unalterably social. Money is a made-up thing, a shared fiction. Money feels cold and mathematical and outside the realm of fuzzy human relationships. Over time, I came to understand what my aunt meant when she said money is fiction. Each little piece was interesting, but the more I learned, the more I felt like there was a deeper, richer story to tell. I returned to the idea of money again and again, chipping away little pieces, one episode at a time. Maybe! But if so, it’s the good kind of stoner question, the kind that still seems interesting in the sober light of morning. ![]() The host, Ira Glass, called it “the most stoner question” he had ever posed on his show. In 2011, we went on the radio show This American Life to ask the question I’d been wrestling with since that dinner with my aunt: “What is money?” I loved the show so much I went to work there.īy the time I got to Planet Money, the acute phase of the financial collapse was over, and we started looking at less urgent but more fundamental subjects. They talked like smart, funny people who were figuring out what was going on in the world and telling stories to explain it. The hosts didn’t use dry, news-story language or voice-of-God anchorman tones. I discovered a podcast called Planet Money. As the financial world fell apart, I started looking for anything that would explain what was going on. I was working as a reporter at the Wall Street Journal at the time, but I covered health care and didn’t know much about finance or economics. “It was never there in the first place.” That was the moment I realized money is weirder and more interesting than I thought. In the weeks before our dinner, trillions of dollars in wealth had suddenly vanished. She started life as a poet (the ’60s) and wound up with an MBA (the ’80s), so she’s a good person to talk with about money. In the fall of 2008, I went out to dinner with my aunt Janet. ![]()
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