Of several ways to provide for old age, the best is to be rich. Pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) pensions are funded by taxation and do not need to lock in the future. British and American safety net pensions remain very low. American economists (Friedman, Feldstein) pushed to privatise pensions, disregarding risk and high costs. Deindustrialisation undermined solid corporate and public sector pensions. Pre-invested private pensions only work for the better off. Popular resistance has preserved PAYGO. Pre-funded pensions, touted as best, fail because pension consumption cannot be hoarded. Headline yields are halved by transaction costs. Stock markets are too small to support social transfers, and PAYGO is an order of magnitude cheaper. Its real return is often higher than stockmarkets. Financialisation of old age is an exploitative deceit. PAYGO is informal, flexible, and robust.

Homes last for a century but have to be paid for sooner. Nineteenth-century buy-to-let rental was pervasive and depended on rolling credit. Interest rates and local taxes push it into a terminal slump even before 1914. Socially responsible and philanthropic housing was not affordable. After WW1 government policies, and not-for-profit finance extended both public housing and homeownership. German-speaking Europe and Scandinavia achieved secure rental and stable house prices. US government saved borrowers during Great Depression with guaranteed mortgage finance and continues to support house purchase. Home ownership is a privileged asset, but one-third remain excluded. Easy credit post-1980 inflated house prices caused financial collapse, widespread evictions, and unaffordable housing. Is prosperity an illusion? Housing is the largest consumer expenditure and its cost rises faster than incomes. Rising land values initially reduced inequality and then increased it. Home ownership underpinned democracy, and both are now in crisis.

Government’s task is to achieve the common good. If it takes a long time markets will not do it: banks do not lend beyond the payback time horizon. For better and worse, government acts as the risk taker of last resort. Laissez-faire arose out of the Victorian fossil fuel windfall. But rich societies see beyond the private horizons of business. After WW1 they set to safeguard security by means of infrastructure, healthcare, education, housing, and social insurance. Government authority, alone or in partnership with business, is prone to corruption. The antidote is an independent, expert, and honest civil service. In 1980 politics moved in the opposite direction, imposing business norms and seeking to impose a corporate model on government activity. An opportunistic public–private partnership is no match for pressing social challenges, nor is the academic delusion of self-sufficient free markets. In the face of private impatience, government acts as a commitment agent for society.

Climate change is a time horizon problem. Economics proposes a carbon tax and leaving the rest to the market. Tax levels are calculated by combining an economic growth model with climate projections. Such models predict very little economic impact, at odds with the alarmist projections of climate science. Economic methodology and selective evidence combine to induce complacency. This was endorsed by a Nobel Prize for William Nordhaus, its leading exponent. Complacency was challenged within economics for not being predicted by extrapolation, disregarding future generations, and modelling the risks incorrectly. Economics bears some responsibility for the problem it tries to solve. It ignores non-rational forms of denial, and falls victim to them itself. With no guidance from economics on how to address climate change, the actual approach chosen is central government precommitment, in line with our own time-horizon model.

In economics the labour force comes out of nowhere. Under capitalism children are still produced at home. Under slavery they were reared for profit. Children were reared collectively in kibbutzim and boarding schools. In industrialising Britain child labour paid for itself. Affluent societies rely on communal education. Even private schools are not-for-profit. The slogan of school choice was invented for racial segregation. Its appeal is social separation. For politicians and wealthy backers the charter school/free school/academy model is ideological money-laundering and opportunities for enrichment. Despite three decades of effort school choice has failed. Universities derive their economic support from student fees financed by government loans. This encourages expensive facilities, at the expense of students and staff. Student loans have become a lifelong burden exacerbating inequality. Bringing children to maturity relies on family altruism and public education. Other methods have failed.

In the United States a democratic impulse, multiple jurisdictions, and varied populations have facilitated corruption. Party machines relied on captive immigrant votes. Elected judges have corrupted the courts all the way to the top. Minority rule and voter suppression are rampant. Expert professionals take advantage of lay clients in finance, auditing, and healthcare. In healthcare doctors are venal and everybody cheats. A trilemma of democracy, governance, and markets cannot be resolved. In Britain, the neoliberal ascendancy relegated bureaucracy in favour of commercial cunning. Performance incentives replaced long-term government careers. Business and bureaucracy intermingle. Public service is hollowed out, diminished, outsourced, and privatised. There is little public benefit and no audit. Politicians and senior civil servants have been implicated in deep corruption. The Reagan–Thatcher revolution failed the public and has worked well for the rich.

Economics takes the view from the present. But as people become affluent, they care more for the future, which is what government provides for. In the twentieth century, government has grown faster than the economy, and even Conservative governments have failed to wind it down. The reason is that markets take the short view and cannot provide for the future on their own. Before the nineteenth century, interest was seen as usury, rent as parasitical, and profit as exploitation. In response, the neoclassical economics of the 1870s came to the defence of privilege: property was legitimate, interest and profit were the cost of patience, the reward for capitalist energy and enterprise. Markets were the natural order, government and taxes parasitical. Since the 1980s governments have embraced markets as enterprising, innovative, efficient, superior. But privatisation, deregulation, and outsourcing have not fulfilled their promise. Government has not gone away. An outline of the book concludes.

The introduction describes the aims and approach taken in this book. This is a study of money as social technology in the early modern world, written from the vantage point of the Dutch Republic. It aims to view early modern money 'from the inside' by studying everyday practices of makers and users of money, especially in a rural society in the east of the Dutch Republic. It analyses how public institutions (through minters, assayers, and government officials) and private individuals (farmers, merchants, and accountants) interacted in the creation and maintenance of Europe’s system of currencies. The specific focus of this book is on accounting practices and practices of material scrutiny because they offer a key to understanding the internal logic of early modern money.

Chapter 6 chronicles how money as social technology was reconfigured during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It examines economic and philanthropic discourse as well as government practice between 1750 and 1850 to explain the motives for a quick succession of currency reforms in the nineteenth century, that profoundly transformed the material properties of public money in circulation. Cheap but precise mass production was especially important in order to issue low-denomination coins, used primarily for wage payments and retail, that would be fully conversant with the official monetary standard. In order to explain why the Dutch came to take a more hostile stance towards multiple currencies circulating in their territory, the chapter delineates how a 'national economy', forged through monetary exchange, became first an ideological and then a bureaucratic reality. While national currency did not do away with plurality of money in use, especially in the Dutch–Prussian borderland that is the main locale of this book, the strong discourse of technological superiority of uniform, centrally managed currency made it more difficult to think about plurality as something other than chaos.

Chapter 1 develops the notion of money as social technology which carries the analysis throughout the subsequent, more narrative chapters. The vivid case of a clandestine Catholic congregation in the east of the Netherlands, which used money to restore its social and material fabric, is placed alongside insights drawn from scholarship about Chinese, African, and Pacific history. The core idea is that technology is a relationship between people, objects, and meaning. Technology refers to a technique exercised within a social context which gives meaning to both the maker and the made object. In the present case this means that an object is turned into money when makers and users make it fungible, that is, when they imbue it with qualities that allow it to be reliably exchanged for something else. This technological approach brings into focus how money objects bring forth and change social structure; and, conversely, where social structures are techniques that create and transform money objects.

Chapter 4 explores how artisanal knowledge helped sustain early modern monetary order by making and unmaking the intrinsic value of precious metal. Intrinsic value was a conceptual tool and a material practice that allowed people to collapse many coins into one another and to forge units from multiples. Effectively, this meant establishing a network of corresponding values between specific batches of coins. The papers of a family of assayers from The Hague offer a fine-grained picture of the processes involved. Small differences in the precious metal content of coins aroused creeping suspicion, anger, and even physical violence because it was believed that the metal of a coin reflected the mettle of a person. This was particularly true for the masters of the mint, whose reputation was tied to the reputation of their coins. Making coins, and making them work, involved financial and legal expertise, but the artisanal knowledge of assayers and other metal-workers was key. Their practices such as sampling, using high-precision balances and powerful acids, note-taking, the rule of three, and algebraic calculation allowed people to hold on to the convention that metals had an intrinsic, quantifiable value in spite of fluctuations in the price of silver and gold, both across time and across the globe.

Chapter 3 shows how stewards of the princes of Orange-Nassau employed a specific money of account, the Artois pound, to manage land, livestock, and corvée labour across the family’s fifty domains, one of which was the lordship of Bredevoort. The Artois pound was not minted as coins, and nobody in Bredevoort used it to make or receive payments. As an accounting convention, it only existed as ink on slips of paper and in bound volumes and thus required constant scribal labour to be valuable. The stewards’ trained eyes and hands parsed the multiplicity of Bredevoort’s coins, animals, grains, and labour into homogeneous money objects that had currency across the entire accounting system, but not beyond. As the chapter shows, such a system using homogeneous money was also imagined by the mathematician and engineer Simon Stevin, and while he failed to install double-entry bookkeeping in the domains of the Orange-Nassau family, the stewards shared his ideals of surveillance and profit. A series of instructions provided the script for the audit rituals that were performed year after year and that left their traces on the pages of the accounts.