For a long time now I've been having a deep personal struggle trying to wrap my head around money. It is striking how something so ubiquitous could be so poorly understood Despite years of searching I have come up empty in my search for someone who could explain to me what it is.

Not too long ago I was sitting on my back porch with my dear friend Matt Gallagher talking about this very topic, and I mentioned that it certainly seemed true that money is a measure of something, but that calling this thing "value" didn't help me feel any more confident, since value is a term just as mysterious as money. Instead, it seemed to me that what money measures is related to the ability to change the state of things in the future. I suggested that the unit of money would should be the joule rather than the dollar.

So it was with great excitement that a hear about Dr. Warwick Powell's book, Thermoeconomics in the Time of Monsters.

In the preface, Dr. Powell shares the story of how a conversation he had during his postgraduate work at Griffith University with an older classmate named John back in the 1990's stayed in the back of his memory. John told him that "there's a given amount of energy in the universe and energy is actually what we humans call 'value'."

Needless to say, I am incredibly excited to read this book, and plan to do that during my Summer vacation. I'll make posts about what I learn as I go.