It’s cliché to say that money can’t buy happiness, although nobody denies that lack of it can cause a lot of misery. Perhaps surprisingly, economists spend very little time thinking about money, let alone the power it can have over us and relations with one another. The more you think about this omission, the stranger it becomes. Doesn’t everyone know friends and family members whose relationships have been damaged over disputes about money?

In Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, the novelist Margaret Atwood recounts a horrifying story in which the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton’s father was given a strange gift for his twenty-first birthday. On reaching adulthood, Seton’s father handed him a bill for the total cost of raising him, including the hospital fee for his delivery, all of which his father had diligently catalogued in preparation for this moment. After paying the bill, Seton never spoke to his father again. It’s hard to read this story and not be filled with a combination of secondhand disgust and sadness — although you will search in vain for an explanation of this attitude in mainstream economics.

This anecdote is mentioned, via David Graeber, in Against Money, a brilliant analysis and critique of money by J. W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev, professors of economics at City University of New York and Azim Premji University, respectively.