The Philosophy of Money: Reclaiming Value from Orthodoxy

“The philosophy behind wealth and worth.”

Money is often described as a neutral instrument — a mere facilitator of exchange, a technical device, a silent witness to our transactions. Yet beneath the spreadsheets and policy frameworks, money conceals a worldview. It encodes assumptions about human nature, power, virtue, and the meaning of value itself. The economic architecture we inhabit is, in truth, a philosophical architecture.

My own professional journey — spanning sixteen years in sales, marketing, and business development across Pakistan, South Asia, the UAE, and the UK — has forced me to confront this architecture not as an abstract theory but as a moral landscape. In that landscape I have repeatedly watched something unsettling: individuals rich in empathy, intellect, and capability often struggle to thrive financially, while those who master transactional aggression rise with uncanny ease. Talent and virtue, it seems, are rarely what the market rewards.

This observation is not a private grievance; it is the symptom of a deeper philosophical fracture. We inhabit an economic world that prizes the “foot-in-the-door” more than understanding, leverage more than listening, and extraction more than creation. The question that haunts me — perhaps the defining moral question of our age — is this: Does our current philosophical conception of money fundamentally reward the worst in us?

The Dualities of Monetary Philosophy: Scarcity vs. Creation

Behind the machinery of modern finance lie two competing visions of money — two ontologies, two ways of imagining what money is and how it ought to be controlled.

1. The Orthodox Vision: Neoclassical Theory, Scarcity, and Control

Orthodox economics, rooted in the Neoclassical Theory of Money, treats money as an external, scarce object. It is something poured into the economy from above — once from gold reserves, now from central banks. In this worldview:

• Money is exogenous and limited: Control is centralized.

• Its value comes from its scarcity: This forms the basis of the quantity theory of money (QTM).

• The philosophical principle is neutrality: The following QTM equation, 
  M × V = P × Y, serves as the creed of this orthodoxy, reducing monetary life to a controlled variable influencing only prices in the long run.

The most dramatic test of this belief came in the late 1970s during Paul Volcker’s monetarist experiment — a painful reminder that under orthodox logic, human welfare can be adjusted like interest rates to achieve a technical aim, often with profound negative social consequences. This orthodox structure inherently concentrates power, fueling the phenomenon I observed where talent is overlooked by those holding the reins of capital.

2. The Heterodox Vision: Endogenous Money and Ethical Risk

Then came 2008, and the façade cracked. The Global Financial Crisis revealed that money does not descend from the heavens but rises from the ground — the product of lending, credit, and the rhythms of human economic desire. In the heterodox view of Endogenous Money:

• Money is endogenous: Created within the private banking system by extending credit. The central bank merely influences the terms (like interest rates), it doesn’t strictly control the quantity.

• Credit becomes the pulse of economic life: It is shaped by risk, trust, and human judgment.

When the system froze, the old orthodox tools failed. Only radical interventions — such as Quantitative Easing (QE) — could resuscitate the economy. This shift reveals a profound truth: economic life is far more relational and human-driven than the neutral mathematical models of orthodoxy allow.

Philosophical Frameworks for a Just Ecosystem

Economic systems may claim neutrality, but they inevitably shape human behavior. The crisis is alarming across the developing world (South Asia, Africa, South America) and in the capitalist heartlands (Europe, North America, Middle East); it demands an ethical framework for repair.

1. Kantian Duty: Can Exploitation Be Universal?

Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative asks us to imagine the rule behind our actions becoming universal law. If we follow this test, much of the prevailing market behavior collapses instantly.

• The Failure of the Maxim: Can we will a world where success often requires manipulation, strategic empathy-suppression, or the exploitation inherent in the transactional ruthless that rewarded me in my career? No. Such a universalized maxim erodes trust — the very condition of any functioning market and community.

• Empowerment as Moral Necessity: A Kantian economy would demand structures designed not for dominance but for respect. To treat the workforce — especially those at the lower and middle tiers — as mere means to an end violates the foundational duty we owe one another. Empowerment is not an act of managerial generosity; it is a moral necessity rooted in the dignity of the human agent.

2. Utilitarianism: Measuring the Wasted Potential

Utilitarian reasoning exposes another failure: the deep inefficiency and moral cost of concentrated wealth.

• The Inefficiency of Inequality: Across continents, the pattern repeats: immense pools of ability and societal value remain unutilized while a thin layer of power captures outsized rewards. The failure to financially reward capable, ethical individuals — my defining professional frustration — is a colossal waste of potential social utility.

• The Community Imperative: A utilitarian economic design would distribute opportunity rather than gatekeep it. It must foster community-based structures of shared resilience and prioritize individuals who are more focused towards helping the societies or adding values for the whole ecosystem. Success is measured by the uplift and well-being of the many, not the insulation of the few.

Toward a More Human Monetary Philosophy: Inclusion and Empowerment

At its core, the dilemma of money is a dilemma of control. The orthodox structure maintains centralized control. The heterodox reality (endogenous money) points toward the possibility of a system where economic life emerges from the grassroots.

To build an ecosystem worthy of us, we must try to eliminate the mechanisms of control and enact structural empowerment:

• Diluting Central Control: The lesson of endogenous money is that innovation and resilience come from the base. Control must be eliminated totally whatsoever to prevent the distortion of incentives and the perpetuation of entrenched power.

• Empowering the Workforce: Structural empowerment is essential to restore the balance between contribution and reward. The lower or middle-level workforce must be given agency and genuine stake, as they are the ones who ultimately create and deliver value. Empowerment must be given to those who have the greatest capacity for communal contribution.

• Designing for Inclusion: Markets must be engineered to make transactional ruthlessness structurally unprofitable. A humane, philosophical approach means guaranteeing equality of access so that ethical, capable individuals are welcomed and rewarded without having to adopt the submissive or aggressive character traits currently favored by the market.

To reclaim the philosophy of money is to reclaim the possibility of a world in which value is not measured by what one can extract, but by what one enables — within oneself, and within others.