Economists are just priests in the church. Their role isn't to explore the realities, so much as provide bandaids over the holes in the system.
We are linear, goal oriented creatures in a cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality, so while markets need money to circulate, people see it as signal to extract and store. The medium has become the message.
Money is an accounting device and contract, that enables markets to function, but we treat it as a commodity to mine out of the markets. The effect is like oil leaking out of the engine.
For one thing, ever more has to be added, creating large distortions, as finance becomes an ever larger part of the economy, like a metastatic cancer.
As well as having to find ways to store what has been extracted. Given money is a contract, storing the asset requires generating the debt to back it. So not only do we have to find ways to put much of the population in debt to those holding the assets, like the heart telling the hands and feet they don't need so much blood and should work harder for what they get, but the government has become debtor of last resort. The real elephant in the room is the financial markets could not function, without the government borrowing up trillions in surplus investment money. The wars are just an outgrowth of the need to then spend it. That's why they can be so monumentally inept and those responsible are not taken out and shot.
The economists tell us that money is both medium of exchange and store of value, but one is dynamic, while the other is static. Blood is a medium, fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. The hallway is a medium, the hall closet is a store. The average five year old can figure it out, but economists are paid not to.
As a medium, the functionality of money is its fungibility. We own it like we own the section of road we are on, or the air and water passing through our bodies. It's not our picture on it, we don't hold the copyrights and are not responsible for its value, like a personal check.
There simply isn't the investment potential for everyone to save individually, but we do save for many of the same reasons, so the premise of public wealth, aka, the commons, is a logical solution, but without a society based on collective responsibilities, with rights as reward, the effect is the Tragedy of the Commons.
Given when our nation was first being imagined, the irresponsible were likely to starve, the debate was over the allocation of rights. Now we have a society where rights are presumed to be universal, while responsibilities are optional.
That goes much further up into the priesthood, than the economists.