Objective Proficiency p 47. What should we teach our children about money? Extra Reading

I struggle with the idea of the value of money, especially when so much of it supposedly disappeared after the crisis in 2008.
My father would often ask the rhetorical questions “Do you think I’m made of money?” or “Do you think money grows on trees?”, to which the only answer I could muster was yes. Money, for me, came out of nowhere. Children live, like high royalty, in a cash-free zone, where they are magically provided for by an invisible, beneficent hand. What, then, are we to teach our children about money – as they begin life with very little concept of how it works? They will eventually grasp that it is the oil that lubricates society – even basic social amenities like health or education are calculated on a pecuniary cost-benefit premise; ie, how curing this or that disease will benefit GDP.
Money is the currency not only of the economy but also of the way in which we talk. We spend or save or borrow time, we invest our lives in our children, we talk of golden years or golden opportunities. The way we think about money does much to determine how we think about our lives.
My parents were always concerned with teaching me what they called the value of money. For them, this represented the principle that if I lost or broke something, it was not going to be replaced. Likewise, doing a paper round or working in my dad’s shop for a wage as a Saturday boy would teach me the value of money.
However, I still don’t know what the value of money is – or, in fact, what money is itself. When so much of it mysteriously evaporated after the crisis in 2008, I wondered where it had gone and how one day we could be rich and the next poor. Had we just stopped believing in money and thus made it dematerialise?
Alan Watts, my favourite philosopher, writing about the great depression of 1929, pointed out that as money was a form of measurement rather than a concrete reality, to say that the economy had collapsed was like saying that we had lost trust in a certain way of thinking – as if a builder thought he could not work because he had “run out of inches”. He also noted that money is not wealth, but a symbol of it. You cannot eat a £5 note. Wealth is only ever experience – a good meal, a sunny day, laughter with friends. To think otherwise is to mistake the map for the territory.
We all need money, but it is impossible to fully understand and thus to explain. I give my children pocket money to spend as they wish, but I’m nevertheless distressed when they spend it on junk, and sometimes I will prevent them on the basis that it will be money wasted. But, really, I am not sure there is any such thing as a healthy attitude to money – because no one can really agree what it represents.

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My parents always told me that money was unimportant, but they were not well off so that was useful for them to believe.
I think money is important, but after a while you are faced with diminishing returns – after you have taken care of your basic needs, the security and freedom that money supposedly brings survive only according to the meaning you place on your surplus resources. Many wealthy people feel neither secure nor free, whereas some relatively poor people feel both.
Money is more often than not the currency of fear. The more afraid you are of losing it, as any businessman will tell you, the more likely you are to never make any. I would tell my children: don’t be afraid of anything in your life but, above all, don’t be afraid of money; that is to say, the future. Things, as my father always told me, will work out in the end. Love money and it will control you. Have faith in life instead and sooner or later enough money will come for your needs.

The Guardian