They both exist in measurable quantities.
They also both exist with varying qualities.
Energy has a quality. It can be organized or disorganized, and it can degrade from organization to disorganization without requiring more energy. But it canot increase its quality without the input of external energy. We call this tendancy to degrade “entropy”.
Does money also have a quality?
Absolutely it does.
A bill you find on the street – a windfall – has a completely different quality than one earned. It has a different quality than one that is given as part of an inheritance.
The money you get from winning the lottery is toxic. You might say it is cursed; it has a distinctive destructive quality among those who receive it.
Stolen money has a different quality entirely. It seems that pirate money is spent in consistent fashion, regardless of greater context.
It’s tempting to say that once you throw money into an account or a pool, it loses its particular quality and becomes disorganized.
But once you start thinking about how money can have a high or low quality and mean more or less, independent of its quantity, life in general starts to make more sense. It explains why a labourer’s twenty dollar note means more than a bank’s million.
The next logical question is, of course,
“Can money have that most remarkable quality – holiness?”