Why Dante put bankers in hell and James Joyce didn't

0:00What happens next in the story of money? Nuveen has spent over 125 years helping clients answer this question. By investing in the growth of businesses, real estate, infrastructure and natural capital, we continue to deepen our expertise across income and alternatives so investors can confidently write the next chapter of their own portfolio stories. Nuveen. Invest like the future is watching. Visit nuveen.com slash future to learn more. Investing involves risk. Principal loss is possible. Hello and welcome to a special bonus edition of The Story of Money, the FT's financial history show with me, Robin Wigglesworth.

0:38And me, Gillian Tett. And today we've got a very special episode for you, which we recorded in front of a brilliant, very enthusiastic live audience at the FT Weekend Festival in London earlier this month. We explored humanity's somewhat warped, hot, cold relationship with money. It's arguably our most seductive technology, because the value we ascribe to money is actually just a product of human imagination. And I should say also human trust, because money is something we collectively choose to believe in. It's not got any intrinsic value, but the value comes from the shared story that we tell ourselves and others.

1:18and to understand how that shared story arises, it really helps to use not so much a financial lens, but a literary lens. Which is why we turned to two great writers who held up very, very different mirrors to money. In one corner, we have the Italian poet Dante Alighieri. He feared that this collective illusion would corrupt and damn us to the innermost circles of hell. But on the other hand, we have the Irish literary giant, James Joyce. He thought money would actually liberate us and give us wings. And to take us on this journey, we welcome David McWilliams, author of Money, a story of humanity to the stage.

2:14channeling capital toward the businesses, infrastructure and energy solutions that are shaping tomorrow's economy, all while aiming to deliver the resilience and returns that portfolios seek today. Nuveen. Invest like the future is watching. Visit nuveen.com slash future to learn more. Investing involves risk. Principal loss is possible.

2:37David McWilliams: Welcome, David. Thank you very much for having me. It was great to have you. And actually, you're hoping to solve my conscience by having you, David, because after we launched the story of money as a podcast, David sent me a rather rude text message with an emoji saying, what the S? Because of course, his book is all about the story of money. So he kind of thought we'd stolen it from him. So to basically get him our way back, he's here today. And he can tell us all how he had the idea first. But as an economist, tell us, how on earth did you manage to get mixed up with Dante and Joyce? Because that's not the normal territory, is it?

3:16David McWilliams: No, it's not the normal territory, but the theme of this book that Gillian and Robin have stolen, every chapter, every thesis from... Great artist steel. I was thinking, yeah, that's true, actually. I was thinking of the collective now, it's sort of a shoal of fish and it's a flock of birds. and what is it of economists, podcasters and writers? A gaggle. A jealousy. Jealousy. So the reason that Joyce and Dante appear in the book is because the main idea behind the book, so I'm a former central banker, a former investment banker. I've been a monetary economist for about 30 odd years. And Gillian, something struck me during COVID when I was writing the book that my tribe, economists, miss something big about money.

4:13We miss what money does to us.

4:17David McWilliams: What has been the role of money in human progress? What is this thing that we call money? And I alighted on the idea that money, when you really think about it, is a technology. And most of us think, economists, when we talk about technology, we talk about physical technologies, like the wheel or the internet or whatever, right? But there's this other branch of technology in economics called social technologies. And social technologies are technologies that allow us humans to collaborate, cooperate at scale and ultimately to live together. So once that idea began to germinate, then it struck me that if you look at the history of money, you see this co-evolution of money and other things which we would describe as elements of human civilization, writing, numeracy, philosophy, political discourse, all that sort of thing.

5:17David McWilliams: So it struck me that if you look at money as a coping mechanism that humans came up with when we migrated from being hunter-gatherers to domestics over thousands of years, Coping mechanism in the sense that it allowed us a way of organizing our society. Then what you see is that money is this sort of force in humanity, almost like a Promethean force. It's a bit like electricity, helping societies and cultures to actually operate. Exactly. And I mean, the book was going to be called The Fifth Element. So we had the four elements. Luke Misson got in touch and said you could do that. Yeah, exactly.

5:58David McWilliams: Exactly. I was going to rub it for him. But so the idea is that to maybe take money away from economists and bring it into your neck of the woods, anthropology, history, sociology, philosophy, and a little short jump and you're into literature. Well, that's actually what we're trying to do in the podcast, isn't it, Robin? Yeah. Your book goes from Mesopotamia to modern crypto. You cover all sorts of things and the social technology of money. But we're going to choose a few just to focus on how. Of course, we're going to Dante and James Joyce. Let's start in 13th century Florence. Yes. This was when Dante wrote what you think is one of the finest pieces of European literature.

6:41I have read parts of Inferno, at least, when I was young and dumb. And of course, you know, that became the Dove Iron Comedy. But I'm curious, why on earth were you drawn to Dante, of all the writers that have dealt with money in some form? Or is it just because he really, really hated finance?

6:58David McWilliams: No, no. I mean, so one of the ideas in the book is that when you see innovations in money, you also see innovations in other parts of what we would call human progress. That is one of the ideas that populates every chapter of the book. And Dante is, for anybody who's been educated by Jesuits, is the North Star. So basically, the story of the comedy is like a Catholic redemption story. So you go to hell, you get better, you go to purgatory, and eventually you arrive in paradise at Paradiso. But what really fascinated me wasn't so much the cantos, which are amazing, and they deal with counterfeiters in an amazing way, is that Dante lived in a period where we're going from the sort of gothic dark ages into the sort of pre-Renaissance light in a way and he lived in this amazing city called Florence and Florence was an experiment the experiment was it was neither a papacy nor was it a kingdom it was what you would probably describe now loosely as a sort of a democratic bourgeois guilt-based free city that's the first thing the second thing is what you see at the center of Florentine world is the promise that other empires or other ideas.

8:26David McWilliams: So the papacy was run by superstition. The Charlemagne and subsequent kingdoms were run by force. But the organizational, this makes Florence so different, the organizational tool that the Florentines used was money. And this attracted me to it because what you're looking at is a period of enormous social change, enormous economic change, enormous demographic change. And what you're looking at is a society based on the, for maybe the first time for a long time, on free, free-ish people. Right. And Dante being one of those. So when you start, when you start reading about Dante's life, he's born in, you know, 1250 odd.

9:12David McWilliams: Florence is a small backward town. By the time he's writing and he's exiled, He's writing the commedia, Florence has gone from a population of 18 ,000 to 100 ,000. Wow. So the promise of Florence is attracting in all sorts of people. And that I thought, that's a cauldron that you want to write about. So it was a bit like a sort of New York or a Hong Kong of the 14th century. It was a century of the world at that time. But Dante himself wasn't a merchant as such. He came from a family of merchants, but he became a soldier, didn't he? That's not really how you painted Florence. Dante was ultimately a snob.

9:47David McWilliams: A snob. And once you understand... That's not a snob description. So he's like sort of Tom Wolfe for medieval people, right? So it's like if you put your Tom Wolfe hat on... And a bonfire of vanity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because what he's doing is he's writing a document. Okay. No, nothing so enthuses great literature than bitterness. Right? As a general rule. Okay? And consequently, Dante was expelled from Florence. So he's writing as an exile. He's annoyed. He has beautifully, beautifully scores. And why was he expelled from school? He got on the wrong side. There's various differences. There's the Guelph, the Jubilee.

10:22David McWilliams: So politics. He does, he thinks he's cleverer than he is. He makes the wrong move. He gets expelled, right? Classic writer, really. Exactly, exactly. But the point is, that sort of vengefulness populates the prose and the poetry, which is beautiful. but my point in the book is to see him as a chronicler of a city that is a vision of the future at a time when Italy was the center of the world, Italy was the center of the Mediterranean trade, Italy was the, basically in effect, Italy was the harbor of the world and Dante's writing forms a kind of a bridge from the sort of medieval world towards Leonardo and Galileo.

11:10David McWilliams: And that's what interested me. And then the other thing that interests me was the financial innovation at the time. So there's two things that are fascinating. One is the emergence of zero, the concept of zero, which comes from Sicily about 100 years prior to this with a guy called Fibonacci, who anybody who's studied maths knows, right? That's the first thing. So in effect, that's the new software because it teaches mathematics. You can use balance sheets. You can talk about large numbers. You can use ratios. You can use, in effect, algebra, which is, as anybody who's ever used Excel, is the basic building block of all financial models.

11:44David McWilliams: And they were building it. That interests me. And then the second thing was his hatred of bankers. It stems from the fact that the bankers were actually a socially disruptive force because they were the people who were pushing this new stuff called money into an old status quo of the priests and the warriors. And then they discovered this thing called fractional reserve banking around his time, which we know, having been a central banker, an investment banker, is you're basically plucking money out of thin air. Yeah. And so that, I thought, as a canvas, is a great monetary story to tell. And of course, the redemptive story in the comedia allows you to tell the story from a sort of slightly moralistic perspective.

12:31So he was exiled. He was a soldier for a bit. He lost that war he fought in, got exiled. It's in 1308 that he starts writing Conferno. And his experience as a soldier did inform how he wrote about this. I imagine, you know, war is no fun, but it certainly wasn't in Renaissance Italy. And you can almost see that, like, the parts I've read, you know, are quite vivid and violent and dark. So for all of the other people here who have not read the Divine Comedy in the original language, can you tell us a little bit Irish oh yeah well that might be that'll freak you out in the actor yeah so tell us a little bit what is the story you mentioned that it goes from some hell to purgatory to paradise

13:12David McWilliams: but what's one man's journey so it begins with one man in a forest lost which if you're a fan of the cure you will know was the basis of a forest by the cure so the idea is one man's journey through life the mistakes you make the regrets you have the responsibilities that you don't take the people who've slighted you along the way and in the beginning he is guided by somebody a guide and that guide is Virgil so Virgil takes him through the inferno and the towards the purgatory and then somebody else takes him towards the end because the amazing thing if you think of Christian concepts of hell fire, brimstone, right?

14:01David McWilliams: That all comes from Dante's head. Before Dante, nobody had any vision of hell. And Dante basically supplied us with this idea of the devil and the hurt and the savagery and the fire and the punishments, etc. So what I find amazing is that in the Christian world, our concept of hell, which has really defined Christianity for many, many years, comes from one guy's imagination. Wow. And what's even more interesting is that it doesn't just come from one guy's imagination. When he looked at the people he was going to put in hell. Oh, yes. First, he chose the bankers. Yes. Yeah. Are there any bankers here today?

14:41David McWilliams: Are there any bankers here? Yeah, exactly. He should have been writing for The Guardian in 2008. Fine. And also, he put in the bankers who were engaged particularly in usury. Yes. Why did Dante hate usury? Because the Catholic Church, as we all know, is moral, is pure, sanctified, is unencumbered by greed or jealousy or anything like that. So the Catholic Church realized that there was a great gig at a certain stage and in the history of money. It's fascinating when money becomes an asset in its own right. So that's where it goes from being a transactional idea to a conceptual asset. and how we know this is you could charge interest which is the price of money so money begat more money and this for catholics was difficult because thomas aquinas and i know this from school i wasn't writing this book i got this stuff drummed into me as a kid the idea of a just price in fact aquinas and marx were very close to each other marx wouldn't admit it but they were close to each other they both believed in the labor theory of value that basically every price needs to be based on something fundamental.

15:51David McWilliams: Whereas usury is like alchemy. It's like chemistry because you pay interest on interest. And that interest, as you said, is entirely in your head. It's not a concept. And of course, the Catholic Church realized, fuck it, we want to run this game, right? If you think the Tony Soprano approach to interest, right? Tony's like, that's our gig, right? And so they deployed all sorts of ecclesiastical con men, Aquinas, St. Augustine, although I'll be struck down for saying this, to actually make a philosophy about usury. But in effect, it was a hustle that the church wanted. That's one interpretation.

16:32David McWilliams: The other interpretation, which I think is maybe more modern, is that usury is actually very disruptive. In fact... You mean it's basically money creating money rather than money being used as an end in itself. If you look at... It means an end, I mean. Yeah. So if you look at, God, we're getting very ecclesiastical here. But if you look at the Old Testament, if you suffer the likes of Leviticus or Deuteronomy, there are notions of the Jubilee year. They're very deep in social. For debt forgiveness. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As a sacred house. If you imagine the Old Testament, all the Bible to be a book about how to behave with your neighbors so you can all live around reasonably well.

17:13David McWilliams: In fact, I remember when my son was about eight or nine and he learned the Ten Commandments for the first time. And he came into our kitchen and he sat down. He was nine. And he looked at me and he says, Dad, do you know the Ten Commandments? And I said, well, I haven't looked at them for a while. He goes, did you learn them in school? I said, yeah. He says, do you know what they are? I said, it's just a charter not to be a wanker. which I thought coming from a child was actually very, very incisive. Anyway, that is a problem and usury is a problem. But I mean, one of the things is it's not just about usury and debt that Andy gets upset.

17:52He's also pretty upset about currency manipulation, isn't he? Yeah, because I mean, look, I have not read the full Divine Comedy in the original Uskin, in fact. In the Canto 30 of the Inferno, he has some pretty shocking punishments for currency manipulators. So normal users are only in the seventh circle, but like a nasty part of it with other people that committed violence against God. But counterfeiters or currency manipulators are in the eighth circle, and that's just one circle above Lucifer. Yes. So that's very bad. Your average investment banking trading desk is next to Lucifer, according to Dante.

18:31Why?

18:32David McWilliams: Having worked on said trading desk in the past. So this goes back to the basic idea that at the core of the credibility of Florence was not an army, not a creed, but a coin. And this is the fascinating thing. And the coin was the golden florin, which was in effect the reserve currency of Europe for about 200 years, from about 1258 to about middle of the 15th century. So what Dante understood, despite his pronouncements against banking and usury and greed, was that what anchored the credibility of Florence was the quality of the coin that they used. And there was a real counterfeiter called Adam, who actually was English, right?

19:22If in doubt, blame the English bankers.

19:24David McWilliams: That's what I was just saying, yeah. The English traders. So Adam, so basically because Florence was such an interesting place, lots of people came and went. Thomas Cromwell ended up in Florence. All these people, right? They went to Florence to learn. You learned trade, you learned all sorts of stuff. And a character called Adam in the 13th century turns up and he's working for a Brescian couple of brothers. And the Brescian brothers convinced Adam, this happened in real life, to debase the Florin by adding copper to it. Dante had seen this as a child. And this is why it's so interesting. And Adam was impaled and burned at the stake in the center, right?

20:05David McWilliams: So what was fascinating for me was that Dante reserves one of the most atrocious, abominable punishments for somebody who in real life committed a pretty nonchalant crime, debasing the currency. You're not murdering somebody, but for Dante, it was enormously important. And I went to Florence about five years ago, and a mate of mine told me this story. And you know when you're writing, you grab a story like this and you say, okay, where is this going to take me? Well, it comes back to your point that actually money is not just a number or in a balance sheet. It's actually a really powerful enabler of social cohesion, but also social disruption.

20:44And so disbasement is actually a threat to the social order. I want to get us plenty of time to talk about James Joyce. Do you think just central bank having been one, do you think central bankers would down-tay put them in the eighth circle of hell for debasing currencies with QE?

20:57David McWilliams: Well, we debase currencies as a matter of course. I mean, come on, I was a central banker in Ireland when we had our own currency. There's a thing called the punt. And we claimed it was a hard currency and we devalued it seven times in eight years, which is kind of a laugh, you know. It's like, really? Are we really doing this? That's a fifth circle of hell. Yeah, that was, no. So I think that, you know, as an economist, as a monetary economist, I think central bankers are in a very difficult situation. the primary reason is central bankers pretend to control the supply of money and they don't.

21:29David McWilliams: So once you understand that, that basically what we teach kids in college and we teach economists is what I would call the push story of money. That some very clever people in the top of the central bank figure out, okay, well, growth is going to be this and inflation is going to be that. We will make X amount of money available to the system. And we will then push that money into the commercial banks and they will determine either the price or the quantity, but not both. And consequently, that money is pushed down. So we believe this story because it feels right. And it feels that somebody's in control.

22:02David McWilliams: But in actual fact, the pull theory of money is much more interesting, which is that the central banks are pulled around by commercial banks because it's the commercial banks who create money. The irony of Dante is that he actually died in exile in 1321. He was 56. After ranting and raving against bankers and saying how evil they were and how they were in the seventh or eighth circle of hell, depending on whether they were doing loans or currency manipulation, there was a bitter irony in Dante's story where he was hypocritical, wasn't he? Well, in the same way here in the UK, where senior Labour politicians talk about public schools or private schools, and they talk about public schools and the state schools, and they send their kids to swanky schools, right?

22:50David McWilliams: I presume that happens all the time. Tony Blair... Yeah, we're not going to hit that rabbit hole, but anyway. No, but the point is... Tell us about Dante. That's the essential hypocrisy, right? So Dante eventually does what all middle-class fathers do for their children. They send them to the swanky school to try and make sure they get a break. and the swanky schools at the time were called reckoning schools and they were schools that adopted Fibonacci's mathematics and they were schools that began to become popular in Florence during Dante's time. They turned their back on Latin, on the classics, on culture, on history and they taught mathematics and science and they were banker schools and at the end of the day, like a Labour politician sending their kids to Eton, they did the same thing.

23:38David McWilliams: Dante sent his kids to the swanky school. And did they become bankers? I didn't follow the... But given the proclivity of people who go to posh schools to fail their parents, I suspect not.

24:00So we've been through Dante's medieval Florence. Currency manipulation, currency debasement was treasonous and would see you impaled and sent to the eighth circle of hell where you'd be neighboring Lucifer himself. But your book is quite expansive and we are going to be fast forwarding to Ireland, to Dublin in the turn of the late 19th, early 20th century. And so that's quite a big gap time-wise. It's also a big gap conceptually because Because between Dante railing against usury and against currency manipulation and hating on bankers, in those 600 years, you basically had an explosion of finance and a complete transformation how it was done.

24:43And suddenly you get things like not just Fibonacci, but you get joint companies, you get markets, you get exchanges, all of that. So talk to us about how James Joyce came into this world and made sense of it. and why he took such a radical different view from Dante.

25:01David McWilliams: So James Joyce, one of the notions of, the reason I use Dante is that the financial innovations that came around the time of Dante was the backdrop to the Renaissance. So I always think what was happening in money before other things happened? And is there a link? And there clearly is a link. So I was intrigued about Joyce. Joyce created this character called Leopold Bloom. and Leopold Bloom was the central character of Ulysses and Leopold Bloom was a Jewish guy by his father's name but was baptized three times, once a Protestant, once a Catholic and once for the crack, right? That's called hedging your back.

25:40David McWilliams: Okay, so I said to myself, where did Joyce find this guy? Where did he find this character? Because this character was probably not part of the Jewish community in Dublin at the time who would have been quite orthodox. and this man was a libertarian,

25:59David McWilliams: a deviant, a brilliant person, a wonderful, but he was also an advertising copywriter, which is the least romantic job your hero can have. Like madmen in Dublin. Precisely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He was the Don Draper without all the sex. Yeah. Because he wanted the sex, but his wife wouldn't give it to him, which is an essential story because Judas is about what do you do in the day you realize that your wife is sleeping with somebody else. Yeah. and you do what all Irish men do, you go for a walk. I thought you went to the pub. You do go to the pub, yes, but you go for a walk. So Joyce is fascinating for a variety of reasons.

26:32David McWilliams: One is that he's the founder of modernism. Ulysses is an extraordinary read. He is an amazing character. Absolutely fascinating in many aspects. But there's one story that stuck out for me in Joyce. So he goes to Trieste, which is where he finds Bloom because Trieste at the turn of the century so we're talking from about 1890 through to 1920 was the most cosmopolitan, most mercantile probably most liberal, most exciting and without a doubt the most multi-ethnic city in Europe and Joyce goes there because he was a cosmopolitan he could speak Italian, he could speak French he could speak Spanish, he could speak Norwegian he was an unbelievably brilliant linguist and he goes there not just to earn a living but to really imbibe of this extraordinary city.

27:23David McWilliams: And the city is made amazing by virtue of the Suez Canal. So the Suez Canal, and this is back to, I was listening to Robin, okay, the other day eulogizing about the Erie Canal and how finance created the Erie Canal. Maybe an equally interesting story is how finance created the Suez Canal. Yes. Because how can you actually undertake such a risky project unless you disseminate the risk all over the place? So that interests me. And then, of course, the Suez Canal opens up Trieste because the Adriatic is no longer a cul-de-sac. It is actually a pathway. It's probably the most busy maritime channel in Europe by the end of the 19th century.

28:05David McWilliams: Joyce goes there. But one story fascinated by Joyce, and this is the difference for Joyce's perception of money from Dante to Joyce. So Dante is a snob who's worried about the social disruption of money. Joyce is an anarchist in the way he lives, in the way he behaves. He was in debt all the time. All the time. Yeah, all the time. Boring money, left, right, and center. He had such a huge financial instability, didn't he, in his life? His father was a rogue. And he didn't need, didn't the father drink away all the money? And so that left Joyce. Says your man having a beer, only one of the papers.

28:37David McWilliams: Jesus. Exposed her. But if you come from that kind of background of economic uncertainty, but also you're in debt all the time, normally that doesn't lend you to have a favorable view of finance and financiers. But Joyce is generally very pro-finance. Yes. And I'm curious why that was. This is a fascinating thing. So one of the more interesting stories about James Joyce is that in 1909, James Joyce comes back to Ireland for the last time. He's only 28 years old, so he never comes back to Ireland. And he comes back to Ireland in October of 1909, and he gets what we used to call the mail boat from Hollyhead to Dun Laoghaire.

29:19David McWilliams: I don't know if any of you have suffered on the mail boat over many, many years. It can be a very choppy... It's only 50 miles across, but it can be actually very choppy. So Joyce is traumatized by the journey, but he comes home to Ireland. And the question is, why does Joyce come home to Ireland at the age of 28? To answer that question, you have to go back to Trieste about four or five weeks before. Joyce's father, who's been sending money over to James, with no response as to what he's doing. And as the father of a 24-year-old man-child, I understand exactly this dilemma. Where is all the money going, Cal?

29:57David McWilliams: Oh, I don't know, Dad. You know, man, I don't know. So I'm feeling for Joyce at this stage. And Joyce's dad sends his sister, Eva, over to Trieste to find James. See what the hell he's doing. And for two days, she can't find Joyce at all. She doesn't know where he is. Nobody knows where he is. And he comes home to be draggled and a little bit worse for wear. And she goes, where have you been? And Joyce said, I've dreamed this new thing. What new thing? This thing called the cinema, right? It's new, it's newfangled, it's amazing. There were 36 cinemas in Trieste in 1909, 36. And Eva says to him, by the by, Jesus, James, you know there's no cinemas in Dublin.

30:41David McWilliams: And Joyce says, what? There's no, there's not one. And Joyce says, well, why don't we set up a cinema? So he was an entrepreneur. He was an entrepreneur. So Joyce comes and actually sets up the very first cinema ever in Ireland called the Volta Cinema, which is on Mary Street, which is in the centre of Dublin. The key point there about Joyce being an entrepreneur and seeing how entrepreneurship could work meant that he began to believe that money was not so much just corrupting, but liberating. Enabling, yeah. And he expressed a lot of that, didn't he, through his book about Leopold Bloom, the advertising salesman.

31:23So tell us why that book that many of us may have read at school for O-level or A-level, we might have hated it, we might have thought it was just a literary text, but that book actually encapsulates a vision of money that's radically different from Dante.

31:38David McWilliams: I think that, so because Joyce started out as an entrepreneur, what has fascinated me was that the mind that wrote Ulysses, think about the brain that wrote this book that absolutely disrupted the English literary canon, was the same mind that set up cinema. And when I was told when I was a kid by third-rate Marxists that artists and entrepreneurs were actually opposed to each other, that the artist was over here and the entrepreneur was over there. But what Joyce was talking about was fusing the two of these characters together. And what he was basically saying, what he did say was that artists and entrepreneurs, if you actually think about people you were in school with, the people who ended up being artistic, and the people who ended up running their own businesses, they were very similar psychologically.

32:30David McWilliams: These are people who didn't want a wage, they didn't want a boss, they didn't want an insurance policy, they certainly didn't want anybody telling them what to do on a Monday. They were happy to live in the theater of risk. They were happy to be judged by their peers. They were happy to be optimistic about the future. In fact, they had to be optimistic because in a way, the sort of optimism of their will, to quote Gramsci, the Italian communist, right? The optimism of their will subjugated the pessimism of their intellect. And that is what entrepreneurs are. And that is what great artists are.

33:07David McWilliams: So when you're writing a book or when you're writing a poem or when you're writing a piece of music, you have a voice inside you that says, I have to do something new. Yeah. Creating something new out of the air. It's about business change, but also economic change and then social change. And the reason I believe Joyce was so fascinated by this was he was living in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, which was the most interesting place in the world between 1900 and 1920. So you had Freud, you had Wittgenstein, you had Klimt, you had all sorts of amazing things, but all of it was based on modernism.

33:43David McWilliams: So destroying the old, creating the new, not looking backward, not looking forward. And in Joyce's mind, through Bloom, money was the propulsive force. It was money that allowed, again, it's no surprise that he made his hero an Adma, a man who lived inside the heads of other people, a man who sold dreams to people, who sold images to people. And I, as an economist, came to this and said, wow, this is a really, truly unusual man until you see Joyce as a man of his time. And that was modernism. And I put him together with Keynes. I put Joyce and Keynes. These are modernist thinkers who said, you know, that old classical economic stuff Have you learned about Adam Smith?

34:32Yeah. I'm a passionate believer we have to get the next generation excited about entrepreneurship. Yes. To try and, you know, have more change. But yeah. I like that sense of the money that, you know, we think of as a bad thing, but it can be a liberating, socially equalizing force. Back in the day, even when Joyce was around, if you were born a peasant, you probably died of peasants. Yes. That's how society worked. And money and finance has been a way of actually unleashing, you know, sometimes, you know, the creative destruction, sometimes the destruction gets more emphasis, but also the creation part needs to get put back into the story as well.

35:04David McWilliams: If you look at it, maybe the most convincing economist who scribbled was Schumpeter. Another Austrian, by the way. Joseph Schumpeter. Again, somebody who would have seen the Vienna of the time, lived through it. And his idea was that, and I find it as an economist, the most persuasive idea in terms of how the world works. That basically, good stuff, companies, art, literature, innovations is superseded by better stuff. And that is an ongoing evolutionary process, almost, it's evolutionary economics. That is how the world moves forward. And the great enabler of this, the Promethean force that propels it forward, isn't just the psychology of the entrepreneurs, isn't just the sociology of the country or environment they're from, but it's the financial propulsion that money does because money animates human endeavor.

36:01David McWilliams: It animates human concerns. It animates us to take those risks. And that is where I think money belongs in this big story. So it's basically a catalyst. But that has a really interesting question for today, which is that as we look at the current financial system, as we look at the politics in our modern world that are so often so poisonous, as we look at the generational war in attitudes between older generation, young generation. Today, are we, should we be looking at money and finance through a lens of Dante or through a lens of Joyce? Joyce. You should actually just look at the whole world.

36:42David McWilliams: The whole world through the lens of Joyce. And then you'll, no, I think because Dante comes from an old world. He comes from a world where the classical status quo of the kings and the papacy. Basically, if you want to get economical, the vertical hierarchies. So if you think of there's two ways to operate societies, two main ways. One is vertical and one is horizontal. One is network economics and one is top-down economics. So God bless poor old Dante, he's living in a world where top-down economics was the order of the day. So the squire said to the peasants, as you were talking to me, this is how you're going to do it.

37:26David McWilliams: The priest came along, blessed the squire, was in a pretty much symbiotic relationship with the warrior, and they ran the country. The fascinating thing about money is it is this social force that makes horizontal the organization structure that operates and keeps us together. So I think that Dante is just caught at a time which is relevant for many ideas, but irrelevant for the present world. But Joyce is in the modern world. He's in the modernist world. And I think that it's crucial. And I remember thinking of this when I was working at the Central Bank and teaching the kids in Trinity and whatever, is to give them this sense that the promise of money, when I was a kid, the priests used to come in and they'd say, money is the root of all evil.

38:19David McWilliams: Say that after me, David McWilliams. Money is the root of all. And I said, oh, Jesus, that sounds right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But in actual fact, there's another view, which is that the reason that humans adopted money was it was an alternative to war because it allowed us to trade. So there's a French sociologist called Marcel Mauss who did lots of things on gifting and very early. So you'd probably read all this. He was actually an anthropologist. Marcel Mauss said, in order to trade, man must first throw down the spear. and I found that a very interesting idea that trade is an alternative to war and that is why humans maybe willingly adopted money because it was actually a survival tactic and if you look at it in that context that money allows collaboration, cooperation, then you begin to wrestle it away from the jaws of Aquinas and Saint Augustine and you bring it back into the realm of our modern world, which is that money is an extraordinary public good.

39:27David McWilliams: It is not a private good. It is a public good that is so precious and is so vital and is so extraordinarily urgent that in order to give it away to privateers and crypto characters and all these sort of characters would be a massive betrayal of what it is. So I would think, you know, when you're teaching it and when you're thinking about it, you realize that this is the most phenomenal weapon, tool, implement that democracies have and that we should really guard it preciously. So Dandy thought money is the root of all evil and social disruption in a negative way. Joyce thought that money is the root of liberation and you're arguing that money can also be the root of more collaboration for today's world and more peace and potentially even social stability if we trust money.

40:23Interesting to think about where today's politicians stand in all this. Well, yeah, if money is a shared story that we tell ourselves and it's shaped by actual literature, where do we sit today?

40:36David McWilliams: It's an absolute poison chalice to ask an Irishman to come to England and comment on English politics. I will leave that up to yourselves. Well, that's a very nice wiggle. If nothing else, David, you're an excellent operator. You know how to charm your audience and everyone else. But also, more importantly, You've Left Us was actually a very important theme here, Robin, hasn't he? In terms of how we imagine money. I mean, in our journeys, we've been trying to look at the different aspects of money. And where do you stand? On the Dante or the Joyce camp? Oh, I'm very much a Joyce camp. But I do think it'd be interesting to dive into more other stories at some point to look at how literature has treated finance and how we think about it.

41:17because it does shape how we think about it today. I mean, finance is still a dirty word. Usury is still a dirty word. And, you know... In many ways, it's becoming more highly charged. Well, David, as a consummate hustler, I can't finish without mentioning once again your book called Money. Not called The Story of Money. Money is not yet copyrighted as a concept. Thank you all very much.

41:47So that is all for this very first inaugural live episode of the Story Money here at the FT Weekend Festival. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe to the show, comment, I read them all. Try to be nice, you know. It does help also if you spread the word about it. I'm Robin Wigglesworth. And I'm Gillian Tett. And one last big round of applause for our wonderful guest, David Williams. And to all of you. Thank you. Thank you very much.

42:42Thank you. watching. Visit nuveen.com slash future to learn more. Investing involves risk. Principal loss is possible.