ABSTRACT
As a good atheist I want to start from a passage in my favourite book in the Bible, Ecclesiastes: ‘Cast thy bread upon waters: for thou shalt find it after many days’.1 The translation is from a version which as a good Catholic atheist I was brought up believing should be treated with some scepticism, the King James Bible. However, the translation offers a fine expression of a metaphor about the goodness of giving and the value of reciprocal relationships. Given all that Andrew Collier has given us over the years, it is a remark that I hope finds application to his own work, that in this book I hope he finds at least something in return, and that in this paper the ideas do not return in too soggy or stale a state. This paper is a reflection on a number of themes in Andrew Collier’s work on the relation of commerce and the language of value from which I have a learned a great deal.
