Our power over money is real only inasmuch as we are able to understand its power over us. Man has sought to understand the essence of money for many centuries. Philosophers and economists, statesmen, writers, even poets have written about money. Money has been lauded and cursed, it has been dreamed of and disdained. It brings stability and instability and makes people looking for and running away from it.
Money is capable of creating and destroying, of uniting and disuniting.
It makes people partners and rivals and can influence the fate of individuals and whole nations. People obtain money working hard and playing and spend it with joy and sadness. Money is capable of invoking the whole range of emotions. Money as the object of cognition enter the realm of a special branch of knowledge, economic science, which, like every other science, has its own subject matter, methods of inquiry and pursues its own goals. The tasks of economics are to explain how much money an economy needs and what factors influence the fluctuation of money supply and demand.