The 300m or so people who were alive 2,000 years ago are each reckoned to have had access to goods and services worth, on average, about $800 a year in today’s prices. It was not an opulent lifestyle but, for the first millennials, making money was not an all-consuming concern.

In the east Buddhism taught the virtues of renouncing worldly things and earning a livelihood without doing harm, the so-called Noble Eightfold Path. Hinduism taught that artha (the pursuit of material advantage) must take second place to dharma (morality), which included charity and compassion. Confucian ethics promoted ren (humaneness), a form of altruism.

Such ideas still find expression in some quarters – even in the US, where the average income now stands at $53,000 a year. But, by and large, they live on as empty words. Modern men and women have found a common philosophy. It is revealed in the way they act, and its central tenet is that more money is better than less. Apple founder Steve Jobs may have been a Zen Buddhist but that did not stop him from amassing worldly possessions with an estimated worth of about $11bn by the time of his death in 2011.