Daily Magazine

Richard Dawkins said in an offhand comment in The Selfish Gene that “Money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism.” This turns out to be a rather insightful way of looking at money, and the purpose of this essay is to explore the idea more deeply to see how far it can take us. Nick Szabo later used some of the ideas in The Selfish Gene to describe the historical origins of money in his essay “Shelling Out”, but this essay will be about the theory of money.