David Lang

And so my first reading of The Wealth of Nations was reading for every incidence I could find of sheep because sheep play a prominent role in the Messiah.

And I thought, okay, I'm going to make a joke out of the connection to sheep.

And of course, being from Scotland, there are a lot of sheep used in examples in The Wealth of Nations.

There's the woolen coat.

The woolen coat.

Eventually, those sheep ideas fell by the wayside and the jokes ended up getting edited out of this piece.

But that was the original idea.

I was reading for, like, what's the thread that I'm going to be able to pull through this book?

At first, I thought I was going to be dealing with the factory images, the division of labor, creation of wealth.

And then I just realized maybe that wasn't as interesting as the idea that trade connects us and that money itself doesn't really have any value, but money exists as a kind of token that goes from person to person as we are connected through trade.

Money doesn't really represent anything by itself, but it represents the amount of labor that we put into doing something.

And to me, that was much more interesting and much more provocative.

Once you start with this idea that I'm connected to people, then the next question is, well, how far does that connection work?

If I love my neighbor, well, who's my neighbor?

How big is my neighborhood?

I'm not sure that I got changed by anything that I read because I read it with a particular eye from the beginning.

I'm not that interested in money, to be honest.

I mean, are you interested in having some?

Well, that's an interesting question.

I'm interested in having enough.