ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses where money comes from. Printing money is costless. This can be the saviour of society, or its ruin. The fact that money is physically valueless remains disconcerting to many people, despite the huge facilitation of social organization and exchange that electronic money permits. Money has dual powers: to facilitate complex exchange and stave off panic in an instant. The economist Paul Krugman's book Peddling Prosperity provides a uniquely clear way of answering the question: How is it that money has these dual powers. The value of money is not physical, it is social. But people do not think of money's worth as residing in its social acceptance and trust in their institutions. They associate money with individualism, with selfishness, with materialism and miserliness, but the dependence of its value on institutional trust and its inherent social character is closer to something at the other extreme of human experience: morality.
