3 - Body, motion, and value

Summary

Energy, someone may say, is a mere abstraction, a mere term, not a real thing. As you will. In this, as in many another respects, it is like an abstraction no one would deny reality to, and that abstraction is wealth. Wealth is the power of purchasing, as energy is the power of working. I cannot show you energy, only its effects … Abstraction or not, energy is as real as wealth – I am not sure that they are not two aspects of the same thing

[Soddy 1920, pp. 27–8].

Why is it that people in this way never ask what is the nature of gold, or what is the nature of velocity? Is the nature of gold better known to us than that of force?

[Hertz 1956, p. 8]

Historians of science often take for granted an efficient market theory of their own … But the history of ideas is not always so neat

[Gleick 1987, p. 181].

It is said that in Poland of the 1980s, when a director wants to stage a realist drama, he chooses Waiting For Godot. Let us say I have just subjected you to a similar sort of experience. I anticipate that you, especially if you are an economist, just want to understand the way things really are.