Invention of Money – Jonathan Otero

Posted on January 18, 2012 by oteroj40

At first, the story of the people of Yap sounded completely foreign and abstract to me. I thought they were some fictional people with very ambitious methods of presenting wealth because of the massiveness of their currency. I couldn’t grasp how these people could put so much trust in one another that they didn’t have to be in physical possession of the money to spend it. It had been my understanding that in today’s societies, money is really just a system of numbers that has arbitrary values depending on the society. Like why would five gold coins have more worth in one country than another? There is no method of precisely measuring the value of money. So it has been my assumption that the assigned worth has been chosen arbitrarily, which can easily explain why the values of different currencies fluctuate so often. It was then, while analyzing the way our own system works, that I realized we really are just like the people of Yap. There was no method or formula to say how much the beauty of the fei was worth in Yap, just as there is no method or formula that states a set value for the dollar. That is because the dollar has no value, other than what we’ve agreed it to be worth. There’s no material in the paper making one bill more valuable than another, it’s just the agreed value printed on it that makes the difference. Although new ways are being innovated to pay for things such as chips inside cell phones, they still are based on a system like that of the people of Yap. That is, we spend our money even if it’s not physically being exchanged. The people of Yap didn’t have to physically exchange their money because it was too tedious to actually transfer possession, while we give our money to banks for storage, and it’s our money to spend, even if it’s not in our physical ownership. Although the banks may not necessarily put our dollars in a box with our name on it, they do keep electronic count of how much money they have which belongs to us. So when we pay with a check or debit card, we, like the people of Yap, are transferring ownership of some of our wealth without physical exchange taking place. Human beings haven’t really gone far in terms of innovation, because we are still just transferring ownership without physical exchange, whether that is by trusted word, debit card, or any future method we come up with.

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2 Responses to Invention of Money – Jonathan Otero

  1. davidbdale's avatar davidbdale says:
    January 18, 2012 at 8:44 pm

    Thanks for posting early, Jon, so we can interact before the deadline. I invite you to make revisions if you wish before class tomorrow, either by editing this post or by publishing a revision called Invention of Money Revised. Of course, you may also elect to let this version stand, but I’m having trouble understanding some of your claims.

    I like “aspiring methods,” but I’m not sure I understand it. Do you mean ambitious methods?

    You say they put trust in each other when they spent money without possession of it, but I think you mean that they were able to spend it because of their trust. In your version, the cause and effect are not clear. Do you see what I mean?

    Your use of he/she is incorrect for three reasons. First, as objects of the preposition for, the pronouns you want would be objective, in other words, him/her. Second, because they would replace the plural noun people, they’d be plural, in other words, them/them. Of course, the plural eliminates the need for gender distinctions, so them would do the job by itself. In other words: “they didn’t have to be in possession of money for them to use it.” Finally, the pronoun is entirely unnecessary in a streamlined version of the sentence: “. . . so much trust in one another that they didn’t have to be in physical possession of the money to spend it.” OK?

    You don’t need past perfect for what you already knew. In fact, when you say “I had already known,” it sounds as if you knew it repeatedly, or that you had stopped knowing it. So: “I already knew . . . ”

    It sounds fairly reasonable, but is actually quite unclear, to say that money is a “system of numbers which had arbitrary values depending on the society.” Does that mean the numbers are rational and orderly within the society but that others would see them as arbitrary? Or does it mean that within each society the numbers are arbitrary, based on something other than logic or a system?

    And in what way are we (or were we) “just like the people of Yap”? If you already knew something about money was arbitrary, what new insight did you gain about our similarity to Yap that makes us more like them?

    When you claim our system is like that of the Yap because we “give our money to banks for storage,” you’re making an odd comparison, Jon. The Yap had no banks; perhaps they still have no banks. It may seem unfair of me to ask, but have you ever taken actual folding currency to a bank and deposited it “for storage”? It’s much more likely that you store nothing there; you only count on them to keep track of your “wealth,” not by storing anything at all. In fact, if they did have your dollar bills, their business model requires them to lend them to somebody else for a profit, not hold onto them.

    What do you mean by “we are still the same people that we were before”? It makes no sense to me.

    Does this critique seem unfair, Jon, or needlessly picky? I don’t mean it to, and I hope you’ll find it helpful. Precise, clear claims do not come naturally, I know, but they’re essential to academic argument.

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  2. oteroj40's avatar oteroj40 says:
    January 18, 2012 at 11:46 pm

    No the critique definitely helped me focus what I was trying to say and I hope my edited version is much more clear.

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