Fire is an icon for technology as knowledge of how the world about us works, in various specific and practical ways, and how we can take the world about as we find it, in some specific way, and change it to be more a way we choose to make it, in that way.

Technology gives us choice, in how to make the world in which we live out of the world of Nature into which we each and all are born.

It requires the concentration of time and effort.

It produces a surplus of artifacts, as the work of human hands, in abundance that can be shared with others, through exchange, as expressions of that knowledge of how the world works, and how we can change the world to make it work more a way we choose to make it.

A catalogue of the choices that you make, personally, and individually, for constructing the personal and private world in which you live can be a good way to build your own personal sense of what the economy.

That list will begin with Food, that we get through technologies for growing crops and "animal husbandry".

It will include cooking the food we get from farming, and the entire panoply of technologies involved in "the comforting sounds of domesticity".

It will include all the tools we use in life and work, including all the tools we use to make those tools.

It will include the building of spaces and places in which we live our everyday lives, learning, earning, spending, saving and investing money, as economically social creatures, and all the stuff that goes into building and maintaining spaces and places.

It will includes vehicles for transporting ourselves, and our stuff.

It will include all the accoutrements nets of knowledge and learning, from paper and pencils to books and other publications to digital technologies for information and communication.

It will include all the technologies of enterprise and commerce for buying and selling all the stuff that we make, including the most complex and sophisticated of all our technologies: out technologies of social choosing through institutions of Civil Society for organizing inquiry and curated knowledge; of Finance for aggregating savings and deploying those aggregations as money for Enterprise; of Enterprise for exchanging abundance through price; and of Politics for spending the public fisc and expending public force in furtherances of our shared interest in public health, public safety and social cohesion.

When we reduce the economy to a number, like GDP, or the Dow Jones Industrial Average, or Inflation or even Unemployment, we de-humanize it, and in the process, make incompehensible to ordinary humans.

But at its core, the economy is really just about Food, and Fashion, and Fun, and people living our own best lives, as best we can, under the circumstances then prevailing.

We make these choices, personally, and socially, using money as a legal instrument for effecting transactions between people who are separated from each other by distances of time, place and social connection ("you don't have to trust the other person, if you can trust their money").

We also use money as the social energy that directs our individual insight and initiative towards some activities ("you can make money doing that") and away from others ('there's no money to be made there").

• learning about the choices that are available to us, from Nature and through technology;

• earning by contributing our own personal and individual time, effort and expertise to Enterprise for making an abundance of artifacts as expressions of technology available to others, for their choosing, through exchange;

• spending what we earn (or otherwise come to control) to acquire the artifacts of technology we choose to acquire through our own exchanges with enterprise

• saving what we choose not to spend, currently, for another time, and a mother propose; and

• investing what we do not spend, in new learning that can empower new earning that can empower new spending that can empower new savings tat can empower new investing, and so on and on an on, indefinitely

Because quantities of money are directly connected to the quality of life we each, and all, can live, through learning, earning, spending, saving and investing.

• biological: air to breathe; water to drink; homes to live in; and ways to move around, and learn things;

• sociological: places and processes for being together, and getting along with each other, as we go about our uniquely human activities of learning, earning, spending, saving and investing in technology for abundance fit to the circumstances then prevailing;

• transactional: money, and other mechanisms for moving stuff from where it is to where it can be used for abundance, and living well;

• psychological: being seen, and being connected to others through Food, Fashion and FUN (which is, after all, the whole point of the whole adventure of being human

Are you beginning to see?

The economy is not some hard-to-fathom, inhuman and inhumane "other" that only experts can understand. Buying and selling securities to extract maximum profit from price movements in the securities buy and selling markets may be. But the economy is just you and me living our best lives, as best we can, by sharing an abundance of technology solutions to the everyday problems of our everyday lives.

Exchange is how we spend.

Earning and spending is how we share in the abundance of technology solutions for living well under the circumstances then prevailing that is the design brief for the economy.

Earning and spending happens within a network of networks of connections between people for enterprise and exchange.

We call these networks Markets, to make them feel like something other, that only experts can understand.

But they are really just people earning and spending for sharing abundance, and living well, together, and apart, socially, and individually, publicly and privately.

It is a social configuration of Knowledge + Networks + Routines for paying cost-for-value in order to exchange value-for-price by putting technology into action constructing surplus of choices in abundance for sharing through exchange.

It is a quintessentially human thing that every human has direct personal knowledge and experience with as part of our everyday human experience, as earners and spenders.

That knowledge gets a little bit abstracted when we participate in Enterprise as savers and investors, but even saving and investing is rooted in our everyday experiences, as earners and spenders.

Which makes money a problem, because money is the power to acquire solutions.

Which shows us that money matters.

Because if we do have the money to pay the price, we cannot acquire the solution.

Money is freedom to choose in the markets.

The absence of money is the absence of freedom.

This is a truth that we all know is true, from our own personal experience.

So how do we make sense of the prevailing nonsense of Neoliberalism, that wants us to believe that money doesn't matter; that merit and morality are all that really matter, and that money is just a measure of our merit, and or morality?

Within this partnership, we choose new beginnings from time to time to fit the circumstances then prevailing through inquiry for insight and new learning that can inform innovation.

Episodic innovation makes new choices more popular, as better fit to the circumstances then prevailing, while letting previously popular choices fade into history, as a good fit to circumstances that were prevailing at an earlier time, driving the flourish and fade of the social contract between enterprise and popular choice that is the true engine of our prosperity, and the real story of our human history.

• inquisitively, through institutions of Civil Society for organizing inquiry and curating knowledge and norms;

• predistributively, through institiutions of Finance for aggregating money set aside by others as savings for investment in financing for enterpise, and deploying those aggregations as money made to flow into enterprise for its use in doing its work of paying cost-for-value to exchange value-for-price, for a time, at a cost and on terms that inform the businesses that inform the technologies that inform the choices tha inform the economy the inform society that inform our future possibilities for living a dignified quality of life;

• distributively, through institutions of Enterprise as self-organizing social configurations of Knowledge + Networks + Routines for constructing surpluses of artifacts of technology in abundance for sharing with others by paying cost-for-value in order to exchange value-for-price; and

• redistributively, through Politics, and the spending of the public fisc and the expenditure of public force to right the wrongs to public health, public safety and the cohesiveness of society.

1. Private Money set aside to provide for our own, that gets aggregated through Family & Friends and allocated to enterprise as patronage for IMPACT;

2. Civic Money set aside to provide for others, that gets aggregated through Church & Philanthropy and allocated to enterprise as grants for MISSION;

3. Public Money set aside to provide for our public health, public safety and social cohesion, that gets aggregated through Taxing & Spending and allocated to enterprise as subsidies for POLICY;

4. Working Money set aside for safekeeping and future transacting, that gets aggregated through Banking & Insurance and allocated to enterprise as monetization of PROPERTY;

5. Mad Money set aside to put money to work making more money, idiosyncratically and opportunistically, that gets aggregated through Exchanges & Funds and allocated to enterprise as securitization for speculation on SCALE; and

6. Fiduciary Money set aside to programmatically provide certainty against certain of life's future financial uncertainties, that gets aggregated through Pensions & Endowments and allocated to enterprise through negotiation for sufficiency to LONGEVITY.

But here's the problem.

We have not yet figured out how to allocate this money for its programmatic purpose, of income security in a dignified future, for all, forever.

Instead, we have allowed our common sense:

• of prudence in the exercise of capacity derived from the unique character of a social trust invested by social license with vast size, programmatic purpose and forever time,

• in undivided loyalty to the legally constituted aims of these trusts, which is to invest money for income as well as safety to assure income security in a dignified future to some, directly, as a private benefit, and to us all, consequently, as a public good,

to become corrupted by the special pleadings for the special interests of securities trading professionals in exercising monopoly control over the investment of the tens of trillions aggregated into these social trusts, solely in the financial best interests of securities markets trading professionals,

in reliance on the axiomatic assertion that more fees and profits for securities markets trading professionals will also always mean a better quality of life for the rest of us.

It does not.