It is one of the minor curiosities of our age that we tolerate uncertainty more readily than we tolerate indifference. A storm may cancel our plans, a train strike may scramble an afternoon, but we do not feel personally slighted; weather and timetables are disinterested. Yet let a currency falter or an interest rate edge in an unexpected direction, and we demand to know what the movement meant. We assume the presence of an intention. Someone must have erred, or foreseen badly, or spoken out of turn. A shift without authorship seems a breach of good manners. Markets may move on their own, but we expect central banks, treasuries, credit institutions and even digital ledgers to behave with the decorum of hosts at a well-managed gathering: uncertainties are permitted so long as they can be explained afterwards in a tone of sober regret.

This expectation has not arisen by accident. For more than a century, public life has encouraged the habit of viewing the world as a series of managerial tasks: tendencies to be guided, externalities to be corrected, equilibria to be restored. Even when the guidance falters, the vocabulary remains intact. A tremor in bond markets is translated into an “unexpected response,” a fiscal misfire becomes a “communication challenge,” and what was obviously an accident is retold as a lesson in institutional foresight. The work of supervision may be difficult, but the appearance of supervision must not falter. We are creatures who have grown fond of an intentional universe.

Among the more earnest advocates of such a universe was Friedrich Hayek, who hoped, in his way, to protect monetary life from the caprices of discretion. His Good Money essays press the case that if only our institutional hands were sufficiently tied—if rules replaced judgment, and discipline replaced improvisation—money would cease to behave as an instrument of political whimsy and recover a measure of dignity. Hayek worried less about mistakes than about arbitrariness; he preferred the errors of principle to the errors of purpose. But behind this preference lay a deeper conviction: that money, to be tolerable, must not drift. It should reflect an intention, however modest, and its movements should be answerable to some discernible rationale. A disciplined mechanism, even if austere, honours our need for explanation.

More contemporary voices speak with a different urgency. In Resistance Money, Andrew Bailey and his co-authors set aside the old suspicion of political discretion and emphasise instead a moral claim: that money, left in the wrong hands, becomes a tool of domination, and that a decentralised alternative offers not only technical advantages but a form of personal integrity. Here too, intention figures prominently. A currency, in their telling, ought not to be neutral or indifferent; it ought to embody a stance. Where Hayek sought relief from mischief, Bailey seeks relief from injustice; but both imagine money as something whose movements can and should express a guiding purpose. Even the aspiration to decentralisation is cast as an intention—a refusal to cede one’s fortunes to opaque authorities.

One might admire the ambition while noticing its symmetry with the very managerial spirit it resists. To treat money as a site of moral self-definition is still to shrink from the possibility that outcomes might lack a legible author. It is an attempt to recover meaning where indifference threatens. For all the differences in temperament between the neoliberal guardian of rules and the digital dissenter of the blockchain age, they share an unease with the mute facts of distribution. Gains and losses that arrive without deserving, without rationale, without a story—these are endured only when they can be redescribed as temporary quirks in an otherwise intelligible order.

But this unease is hardly confined to the theorists. It surfaces daily in the way we read financial news. No headline is complete without an implied intention: “policy signals,” “market expectations,” “reassurances,” “reactions,” “disappointments.” Each term cushions the blunt admission that prices often move for no reason available to human interpretation. Even the most banal fluctuations are recast as messages or mistakes. If the pound rises against the euro, we search for the remark or event to which it was responding; if yields fall, we seek the anticipatory mood they supposedly expressed. What would it mean to accept that such movements may not signify anything at all? That they occur without conspiracy, without wisdom, without design? We rarely let the thought linger.

This preference for intention over indifference has been reinforced by the languages of risk and prediction that now dominate public life. Probability models, scenario analyses and central-bank forecasts promise a discipline of uncertainty: the world may be unpredictable, but its unpredictabilities can be mapped and managed. These tools offer a form of consolation; they reassure us that even when events surprise, they can be placed within a structure of expectation. What they do not encourage is the simpler, more disquieting thought that some outcomes refuse to be domesticated by reason. They are not the tail-end of a distribution; they are just what happened.

The managerial mind, accustomed to interpreting every deviation as a lapse of control, finds little comfort in such reflections. It would prefer accidents to be legible, or at least remediable. Even randomness is acceptable when confined to modest duties: shuffled into risk models, harnessed for cryptographic puzzles, or tamed as “volatility.” But randomness treated as a principle—an organising presence rather than a temporary inconvenience—feels altogether too stark. It strips away the little dramas of intention to which we have grown attached.

Our notorious appetite for explanation is, in this sense, a defence. It protects us from the embarrassment of admitting how much of our shared economic life already proceeds without permission or justification. The early arrival of credit in one quarter, the late arrival in another; a sudden surge for reasons that dissolve under inspection; a liquidity drought that no one seems to have intended—these phenomena are familiar enough, yet they are continually redescribed in the idiom of responsibility. One suspects that if a deity were discovered to be treating our financial affairs with impartial neglect, we would immediately invent a committee to interpret its silence.

We may not be suited to a world in which events simply happen. But our dislike of such a world has become a kind of presumption: that money should behave as if it were thoughtfully supervised, even when it is not; that institutions should speak in the grammar of explanation, even when they can offer none; that fortune should apologise for itself. And perhaps we need these courtesies. They spare us from confronting the indifference that sits, quietly and without ceremony, behind so many of the stories we tell about our economic arrangements.

F. A. Hayek, Good Money, Part I: The New World, University of Chicago Press, 1999. A. M. Bailey, B. Bentley & C. Miceli, Resistance Money, Routledge, 2024.