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.

However, the real question at hand is not whether the possession matters. Instead, it is what are we actually possessing?. 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). 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. Money just makes transactions easier.

Society requires a form of tracking on the wealth of individuals. The idea of tracking wealth is important, because it establishes socio-economic classes, which inevitably shapes society, for better or worse. In social environments people generally know where they stand with everyone else around. At the beginning of a society, there are those that establish themselves as hard workers. That is not to say everyone one else is lazy, but it means there will be that one group (future upper class) that makes more money, due to the more work they did. The lower classes will be established by those that do lesser amounts of work. This abstract thought of money is essentially what fuels society.

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.