Book excerpt: Conventional explanations of the nature of money are weighed down by bad ideas and irrelevant historical evidence. The standard theory of finance is hampered by the lack of both sociological and ethical contextualization, and by sloppy thinking about numbers and time. Money, Finance, Reality, Morality addresses those weaknesses with truly novel models of how the economy, money, and finance actually work. The book analyses the perception of money as an economic tool (as compared to a symbolic and sociological object) as a highly functional quantitative token that assigns numerical values to the inherently unmeasurable economic activities of labour and consumption. It looks at finance as an often inferior solution to economic problems and a tool for helping the poor support the rich. And it explains how the tolerance of greed makes the money-finance system the weakest link in modern economies. Money, Finance, Reality, Morality, written without jargon or maths, will be of interest to students, teachers and practitioners in economics and finance, government and politics, religion, philosophy, and sociology. Author: Edward Hadas is a Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford University (UK). He was formerly an economics editor and columnist for Reuters Breakingviews. He also worked on the Financial Times' influential Lex column, following 25 years as a financial analyst with firms such as Morgan Stanley and Putnam Investments.