The economy we live in is a rigged game, established around the time of the Renaissance in order to promote the welfare of early chartered corporations and the monarchs who gave them license to monopolize world business. Until that time, there were many kinds of money in use simultaneously. People used centralized currency to conduct long-distance transactions, and local currency to transact on a more day-to-day basis.

Most people, in fact, never used centralized currency at all. They simply brought their season’s harvest to a grain store, then got a receipt for the amount of grain they had deposited. This receipt was currency, redeemable at the grain store for something everyone knew had real value. but since a certain amount of grain went bad or was lost to rats, and since the grain store had some expenses, this money lost value over time. Since the money would be worth less the following year than it was worth that day, the bias of the money was towards spending and reinvestment. That’s why medieval towns built cathedrals: as a way of investing in the future with excess money from the present. They were that wealthy. Women were taller in medieval england — a sign of their good health and diet — than at any other time before the last two decades.