Concluded …

He felt that most of our depression troubles had been caused by a universal desire to get as many tokens as possible in return for as little work as possible — that too many men were trying to get lots of tokens without doing any work. He said men should cease to think in terms of tokens and think, instead, only in terms of work performed as conscientiously as possible.'

'Just how did he figure the depression was caused, in terms of tokens?' Mason asked, interested.

'By greed,' Sabin said. 'Everyone was gambling, trying to get tokens without work. Then afterward, when tokens ceased to represent honest work, men hated to part with them. A man who had performed slipshod work in return for a token hated to part with that token in exchange for the products of slipshod labour on the part of another labourer. In other words, the token itself came to mean more than what it could be exchanged for – or people thought it did because too many people had become economic counterfeiters.

‘That’s interesting,’ Mason said.