Pundits urge you to save more money for retirement. But you can't eat piles of saved money; unless this money is used to increase our ability to produce food, medicine and nursing, the money might as well be destroyed today and reprinted later. How is money saved today converted into something that will be useful decades from now? In the meantime, who benefits from these pools of saved money?

In a radical rethink, evolutionary biologist Joanna Masel uses insights about competition and demography to deconstruct the false economic premises behind our bloated financial system. By...