For instance: if Jones is a good card player, the rich man Smith may pay him £500 a year to live in his house and amuse his loneliness by perpetually playing cards with him. I knew a case of a man in South Wales who did exactly that. It is an extreme case, but we all of us, all day long, are paying money for services which do not add economic values to things at all, and which yet must appear in assessment. All the money I earn by writing is of this kind. Now assessment of these services creates an enormous body of economic imaginaries, and to show you how they may do so I will give you an extreme and ludicrous case. Supposing two men, one of whom, Smith, has a loaf of bread, and the other of whom, Brown, has nothing. Smith says to Brown: “If you will sing me a song I will give you my loaf of bread.” Brown sings his song and Smith hands over the bread. A little later Brown wants to hear Smith sing and he says to him: “If you will sing me a song I will give you this loaf of bread.” A little later Smith again wants to have a song from Brown. Brown sings his song (let us hope a new one!) and the loaf of bread again changes hands and so on all day. Supposing each of these transactions to be recorded in a book of accounts. There will appear in Smith’s book: “Paid to Brown for singing songs two hundred loaves of bread,” and in Brown’s book: “Paid to Smith for singing songs two hundred loaves of bread.” The official who has to assess the national income will laboriously copy these figures into his book and will put down: “Daily income of Smith, 200 loaves of bread. Daily income of Brown, 200 loaves of bread. Total 400 loaves of bread.” Yet there is only one _real_ loaf of bread there all the time! The other 399 are imaginary. Now with a ludicrous and extreme example of this sort you may say: “That is all very well as a joke, but it has no bearing on real life.” It has. That is exactly the sort of thing which is going on the whole time in a highly-developed economic society. I go to a matinee and pay 10s. for a man to amuse me. He goes off himself in the evening and pays 10s. to hear a man sing at a concert. Next morning that man (I sincerely hope) buys one of my books, and a big part of the price is not paid for the economic values attaching to the material of it, but for the services of writing it, which is not a creation of wealth at all. The publisher pays me my royalty, and I spend part of it in looking at an acrobat in a music hall. The acrobat pays 10s. to keep up his chapel; and the minister of the chapel, in a fit of fervour, pays a subscription of 10s. to a political party. And so on. Here is a short chain of economic imaginaries: 50s.--five ten-shilling notes--all appearing one after the other in the assessment of the national income and corresponding to no real wealth.