Money: The veil we put on ourselves - J.W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev , Against Money, University of Chicago Press, 2026

Abstract

This is a book about the difficulty of thinking about money without thinking according to money.To pacify the fairy-tale magic of the money-world's hold over us, Mason and Jayadev aim to 'think about the long-run trajectory of the rule of money over society, and how to imagine it ending' (269).Toward that end, Marx and Keynes are companions, but not masters.The point is less fidelity to a tradition than a 'direction of travel' (269).The target of the book is familiar.Economics still teaches that money is a veil over an underlying real economy, a convenient device for exchange, a neutral measure of value, a lubricant.But Mason and Jayadev's claim is something other than the simple insistence that 'money matters'.Instead, they argue that money matters in three distinct senses: it has a direct effect on production and social life; it evolves according to its own logic rather than merely reflecting putative 'real' developments; and many of the most important economic quantities, such as GDP, debt ratios, the interest rate, capital, and so on, exist only in monetary terms ( 27).Their complaint extends beyond the simple lament that mainstream theory has the wrong model of money towards a more robust claim that economic thought in se repeatedly invents a phantom real object behind monetary quantities and then treats money as the imperfect name of that object.In their pithy way, Mason and Jayadev describe the book as being about the 'and' in Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (13).That is, it's about the connective tissue between money and things, payments and production, ledgers and life.The opening move is ontological, though the authors might not center that framing themselves.Buildings have bricks, pipes, roofs, and windows.But they also have owners, prices, balance-sheet values, and expected income streams.These latter qualities are invisible prima facie, but they condition our relation to the building just as much as its physical properties do (4).The ordinary mistake is to treat size, location, and price as ontologically equivalent facts.But price is not in the building in the way that bricks are in the building.These are social facts, backed by accounting, law, coercion, and expectation.For Mason and Jayadev, money values do not reflect real quantities pre-existing behind them: debt is not merely past consumption in excess of income; neither is capital a physical stock of tools; nor is the interest rate the price of goods today relative to goods tomorrow (14-15).Grasped on its own terms, money in money-world is a coordination device: a social anonymizer and social ledger that expands serial capacity while breaking and reconstituting human relations in often violent ways (15).The chapters on debt and capital are where this method first appears.Debt, in the moralizing story of everyday economics, is the accumulated result of having lived beyond one's means.Mason and Jayadev show why this is not even good accounting.Rising debtincome ratios may reflect new borrowing but also higher interest rates, slower nominal income growth, deflation, refinancing conditions, or changes in asset prices.In the post-1980 US, the rise in household debt ratios was not primarily a story about profligacy but

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Finance and Society, 2026 · DOI ↗