I suppose you can say that my thinking of money has changed, because I really had not thought about it until talking about Yap. At first, I was thinking how ridiculous the trading of large stones was, and how even if the stone was not in the possession of the owner, it could still be common knowledge in the population to whom the stone belonged. Then the idea of comparing the Yap’s currency to ours flipped my initial view.
Today, society does the same exact thing. We put money in banks, and even if that money is not in our physical possession, we know it is ours. Society requires a form of tracking on the wealth of individuals. With every action comes an equal and opposite reaction, or in this case, every credit on one side of the ledger has a debit on the other side. In society, the action is work and the reaction is payment for the work done. That is what money always did and still does represent…work (even if the money is inherited…work was still initially done to earn it). The idea of tracking wealth is important, because it establishes socio-economic classes, which inevitably shapes society, for better or worse.
It is kind of funny to think that we use a dollar bill that is essentially worthless if not for what it stands for. Even if what money stands for is never seen, the fact that society accepts it, makes the representing factor important.
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Counterintuitivity 
Thank you for being first, Joe, and for getting us off to such a good start!
You’re not alone, I’m sure, in not having given money much thought before yesterday. The everyday world is full of peculiarities we barely notice because they’re so familiar. They only seem odd when someone points out their oddity.
Your experience is most likely the prevalent one: Yap seems so strange that at first we don’t notice the obvious parallels between their use of money and ours. Once we do see the connection, our way seems stranger still. For example, our dependence on credit stretches the concept of money even further. When we swipe a credit card, what have we given in return for the iPod we’re taking?
And of course banks are very little different from stones at the bottom of the ocean!
I like very much that you’ve identified the “value” of money as the amount of work it represents (and begun the conversation about inheritance). You might also have raised the issue of interest, and stock ownership, and the entire concept of investing capital, which earns money because of the work the money does . . . ?
But did money always represent work? Friedman says gold coins are valuable not because they’re gold but because of the effort expended in mining, refining, and casting or carving them. Similarly, the huge limestone disks, he says, are good choices for money again because of the enormous effort expended in quarrying, carving, polishing, and transporting them. But before there were coins, barter occurred using items that could be, for example, eaten: cattle and grain. No doubt those commodities represented the work of raising the animals and crops, but were they valued for the effort put into them or for their deliciousness?
I’m intrigued that you think money is necessary to shape classes, as if the classes were essential to society. Are they? Or are they just a byproduct of the money? In fact, do they even exist, or are they just mental constructs of our own prejudices? In other words, do they mean anything other than: has money, doesn’t have money? We could probably do without classes more easily than we could do without money.
But yes, certainly, as you say, money is important only for what it represents, and that is entirely dependent on our shared faith in the representation. I highly recommend you listen to the Act Two story about the lie that saved Brazil, if you haven’t already. It stretches our understanding of this representation beyond the breaking point.
Would you also like some comments about your sentence techniques and paragraph organization? I’d be happy to weigh in on those this afternoon.
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Anything to make my work better would be appreciated. Do what you wish 🙂
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Thanks, Joe. I’ll do what I can.
An entry the length of yours will benefit from paragraph breaks to separate the various arguments it makes. As a general rule, sentences should occupy the same paragraph only if they contribute to a single clear claim, one that is usually found in a topic sentence. Following too long an argument violates the paragraph’s unity. It’s not a big problem in your entry, but you miss a chance to guide your readers better by separating the ideas.
The other missed advantage of failing to use paragraphs is that, when they’re single sentences inside a block of text, your ideas will often be undeveloped. If they stood alone in paragraphs of their own, you’d recognize that they needed support. Surrounded by other arguments instead of white space, they’re harder to recognize as important claims worthy of development or examples.
At the sentence level, I noticed this:
. . . even if the stone was not in the possession of the owner, it could still be common knowledge in the population to whom it belonged.
Your its create confusion here, Joe. The first seems to refer to the stone (at least temporarily). The second does refer to the stone, but could also apply to the common knowledge. Readers who take the time to unravel the meaning will figure it out, but you can easily avoid the confusion.
1. . . . even if the stone was not in the possession of the owner, it could still be common knowledge in the population to whom the stone belonged.
2. . . . even if the stone was not in the possession of the owner, to whom it belonged could still be common knowledge.
3. . . . even if the owner did not possess the stone, its ownership could still be common knowledge.
Your Newtonian metaphor of actions and reactions does the job pretty well, but more appropriate to this essay would be an accounting metaphor, since for every credit on one side of the ledger, there’s always a debit on the other side.
Your last four sentences contain several essays’ worth of ideas: 1) that money represents work; 2) that tracking wealth makes classes possible; 3) that money is faith-based. That these ideas don’t lead logically to the next is a concern.
Money represents work. So it’s important to record and compensate for work with money. So that money can establish wealth which we recognize as class. From there I’m lost. I don’t see how to get to the rest of the claims.
Is there anything here you can use?
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Thanks, Professor! I tried to take everything you said into account. Instead of taking away my initial metaphor I just added the new one along side it. Hope this is better 🙂
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It is better, Joe. Your second paragraph still crams in too many major ideas that don’t naturally follow. That money isn’t physical. That it represents work. That it tracks wealth. That it creates social classes. You try to contain them and circle back with references, but it doesn’t develop. It’s ambitious, I grant you. 🙂
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Paragraph 2, Sentence 6:
Without money to represent work, a farmer would have to represent the countless time put into raising a cow, with the cow itself. Money merely represents the work and time spent on raising the cow, where the more effort and time, the better cow, and therefore the more money it is worth. Less effort and time will result in an inferior cow, and thus, is compensated with less money than the other cow.
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Yeah, that’s the idea, Joe!. It’s very illustrative to consider that cows aren’t identical and therefore have relative values. When we try to talk about barter, we often oversimplify, as if every cow were worth one cow, and 5 bushels of wheat could always be traded for one, whereas undoubtedly cows and wheat varied in value based on quality. Money is eminently more convenient and objective.
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