This is my interpretation of Alan Watt's concept of abstraction of wealth. You can't eat money, it's just paper or coins with no inherent value in and of itself. More than that it's also a unit of measurement, which is an itself an abstraction.
The leaning I've been having is that money is a signalling mechanism. Bankers like to say they're the heart of the economy. I prefer to think of them as the pituitary gland. Money is somewhere between ion-exchange signalling and hormones. You can use it to get what you want, but it's not the thing you want in and of itself. Accumulations get out of whack, people become insensitive to it, or there's not enough of it, and things break down. But it's not of and by itself what drives the economy, and money (or hormones) without real resources still lead to failure.
