In praise of inefficient money
There is an old household habit that many of you will recognise from your own childhoods, of the woman who divided the month’s money into small cloth pouches the moment her husband’s pay arrived: one for vegetables, one for milk, one for the household help, and larger ones set aside for savings and for a daughter’s wedding. Anyone with a modern financial education looks at this and sees something uneducated, because the first thing such an education teaches you is that money is fungible, that a rupee is a rupee regardless of which pouch it sits in, and that keeping the wedding rupee apart from the vegetable rupee when both could be in one sensibly managed pool is the sort of thing beginners do before they learn better.
