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the labour market - a market in which humans lacking access to land or tools must survive by auctioning off their labour, by commodifying their toil.

slowly, over generations, the inhabitants of these societies managed to adjust to cholera, typhus and the flu and became more resistant to them. Of course, when they encountered tribes and communities that had not yet developed agricultural production, because of the millions of deadly microorganisms they now carried with them a handshake was enough to wipe most of the tribespeople out. In fact, both in Australia and America many more of the native populations died from contact with bacteria and viruses carried by invading Europeans than from cannonballs, bullets and knives. In some cases the European raiders even engaged knowingly in biochemical war: on one occasion a Native American tribe was devastated when a delegation of European colonists gifted them blankets knowingly seeded with smallpox virus.

Writing We know from archaeologists that the first forms of writing emerged in Mesopotamia, which is where Iraq and Syria are now. But what did they record? The quantity of grain that each farmer had deposited in a shared granary. This was only logical: it was difficult for each individual farmer to build a granary for storing their surplus, and simpler if there was a common granary overseen by a guard, which every farmer could use. But such a system required some sort of receipt, for example, that Mr Nabuk had deposited a hundred pounds of grain in the granary. Indeed, writing was first created so that these accounting records could be kept - so that each individual could prove what quantity they had stored in a common granary.

Without a large surplus there would be no capacity to create religious institutions with complicated hierarchies of clergy, since the 'holy' men and women did not produce anything. At the same time, without organized religion the rulers' authority over the generation and distribution of the surplus would be very unstable and prone to insurrections by the majority, whose share of the surplus was usually tiny. This is why for thousands of years the state and the clergy were one and the same.

Many blood donors take pleasure from the idea of giving blood, but when they are offered a monetary sum for it, the shift from contribution to transaction ruins the pleasure, while the sum being offered isn't enough to make up for it, let alone the time and pain of having a needle stuck into one's arm.

The one thing that bankers hate most is cash: money sitting around in their vaults or on their spreadsheet not being lent in return for interest. But as has hopefully become clear by now, banks become precarious and vulnerable if even a few depositors want their money back all at once. At that point bankers need to have access to something that they can sell in a jiffy so as to pay demanding depositors. Government bonds are perfect for this. To the extent that everyone trusts the government will be true to its word, its bonds will always be in demand. Indeed, they are exceptional in this way - no other debt can be recycled quite as easily. This means that bankers love government bonds: not only is a bond a loan than earns a nice rate of interest very safely (so much so, in fact, that it can also be used as collateral for taking out further loans from other banks), it can also be used as a commodity - a piece of property exactly like a painting or a vintage car that can be sold immediately if the banker is in urgent need of cash. Bonds are, in bankers' parlance, 'the most liquid of assets'. As such, they lubricate the banking system to keep its cogs and wheels turning.

Now the thing about virtual currency and these IOUs is that to work they need a great deal of ... faith. Mr Nabuk had to believe - he must have had faith - in the willingness and capacity of the controllers of the granary to give him the grain he was owed once it was produced. And others must have believed that too before accepting Mr Nabuk's shell-IOUs in exchange for oil or salt or in order to help him build his hut. This is the origin of the word 'credit': it comes from the Latin credere, which means 'to believe'.

the geographical conditions in Eurasia - the nature of the land and the climate - meant that agriculture and surplus and all that went with it took hold with great force, leading to the emergence of rulers of states in command of armies equipped with technologies such as guns and made even more lethal by the biochemical weapons they carried in their bodies and on their breath.

The weather and other natural phenomena do not give a monkey's about what we think of them or what we predict they will do. If it is to rain, it will rain regardless of what the Met Office has said or what you and I expect. But as we know from Rousseau's stag hunt and from the two Oedipal markets, the economy, unlike nature, is influenced, buffeted and indeed shaped by what we think of it.

Cigarettes have emerged as currency units in concentration camps and jails the world over; for those at liberty there is a wider choice of materials to choose from. Shells, salt and precious metals such as iron have all been used. Gold's magical chemical properties, which prevent it corroding and allow it to retain its shine, has made it an all-time favourite.

Farming took hold where humans would have perished otherwise. Gradually, through experimentation and observation, the technology that allowed us to farm more efficiently evolved. But in the process, as we developed the means to grow food, human society changed drastically. For the first time agricultural production created the basic element of a true economy: surplus.

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

All babies are born naked, but soon after some are dressed in expensive clothes bought at the best boutiques while the majority wear rags. Once they've grown a little older, some get annoyed every time relatives and godparents bring them yet more clothes, since they would prefer other gifts, such as the latest iPhone, while others dream of the day when they might be able to head to school without holes in their shoes.

The reason the machines cannot afford to let us die out is that, before they took power, we humans had exhausted the Earth's energy resources and covered the planet in an impenetrable black cloud that blocks solar energy. The only power sources that remain are our human bodies. Having imprisoned us in special pods, where we are fed and watered like hydroponic plants, and from which the heat generated by our metabolism can be captured and harnessed to power their machine society, the machines have found that, even if we are fed all the right nutrients and kept in optimum conditions, humans encased in pods, denied interaction, hope and freedom, die quickly. That's why the machines create the Matrix: a computer-generated virtual reality that can be projected into the brains of the enslaved humans, allowing our minds to experience life as it was before any of this occurred, keeping us unaware of our state of absolute slavery and exploitation.

Oscar Wilde wrote that a cynical person is someone who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.

'The love of money as a possession ... will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.'