Claims-Daphneblake

Posted on February 17, 2019 by daphneblake25

“If she’s not saving lives on the phone or blogging, she’s offering support via Facebook, where thousands of Family of a Vet users and nearly 500 FOV volunteers congregate and commiserate.”

-the author uses an evaluation claim for this sentence. “thousands of Family of a Vet users and nearly 500 FOV volunteers”, are the witnesses and the evidence that she does this on her spare time.

“I am now more hypervigilant than my husband,” 

-this is an analogy claim because Kateri Peterson is comparing her hyper vigilant to that of her husband’s.

“Kateri’s eight-year-old son now also counts the exits in new spaces he enters, points them out to his loved ones, keeps a mental map of them at the ready, until war or fire fails to break out, and everyone is safely back home.”

-there is a vague use of numerical claims here with “eight year old son now also counts new spaces…”

-an evaluation claim is also present with, “points them out to his loved ones”, the loved ones are the evidence of this scene.

“She’s not a normal kid. She does things, and says things. She’s a grown-up in a six-year-old’s body in a lot of ways.”

-this would be a categorical claim since she’s not grouping the girl in the category with normal kids.

“Katie Vines.” Brannan is stern but impeccably patient”

-could be seen as a factual claim or definition claim to her personality

In the wake of Vietnam, 38 percent of marriages failed within the first six months of a veteran’s return stateside; the divorce rate was twice as high for vets with PTSD as for those without. Vietnam vets with severe PTSD are 69 percent more likely to have their marriages fail than other vets. Army records also show that 65 percent of active-duty suicides, which now outpace combat deaths, are precipitated by broken relationships. And veterans, well, one of them dies by suicide every 80 minutes. But even ignoring that though vets make up 7 percent of the United States, they account for 20 percent of its suicides—or that children and teenagers of a parent who’s committed suicide are three times more likely to kill themselves, too—or a whole bunch of equally grim statistics, Brannan’s got her reasons for sticking it out with Caleb.

-lots of numerical and quantitative claims;

-“38 percent of marriages failed within the first six months”

-and also multiple factual claims

-“active-duty suicides, which now outpace combat deaths, are precipitated by broken relationships.”

“That’s when her symptoms got worse, precipitating another meltdown, this time at a steak house where she took him to celebrate his newfound calm. “

-this is a causal claim. The cause of her symptoms getting worse was another meltdown.

 

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Stone Money-rowanstudent

Posted on February 13, 2019 by rowanstudent2

Money Deception

Money is a synthetic concept that holds no value. It’s an abstract idea that we as people made and put worth to. Prior to our creation of this concept, the world ran smoothly. Ever since currency came into the world, it has provoked a series of new beginnings such as the economy. And what really is the economy? Another concept that holds no value, yet we measure it with numbers that are produced by money that again, holds no value. It has become apparent money causes a chain of unfortunate events, but we still long for these priceless pieces of paper.

As I read Milton Friedman’s essay “The Island of Stone Money”, it occurred to me that money is only what we make of it. In other words, we only give money its value according to what we think it should have. We give items its value only on the basis of what we think that item is worth. Also, other factors like inflation contribute to its worth, but it’s solely determined on its intrinsic value. On this island of Yap, their currency consisted of large, round stones with a hole in the center to stick a pole through for easy transportation. These stones called fei were delivered by a raft from a distant island miles away. It was said that it wasn’t necessary for the owner of a stone to display it physically as long as its known by the community that they own that stone. There was a family who had irrefutable wealth, reason being, they had an enormous fei that their ancestors acquired generations before. When the German government arrived, the conditions of the pathways in Yap were bad so they claimed ownership of the stones by marking them with a cross painted black. Once the people fixed up their island, the government was to take away the crosses and the people believed that their wealth came back to them. As simple as that, that was the currency of Yap. An exchange of labor for a stone. Now how crazy is that? All the government had to do was put a mark on the stone or take it away to indicate the ownership. Money in it of itself, has no value, but it does in fact have exchange value. You can look at money and say it’s worth this much, but in reality it’s not until you put it to use it then has value. What really has value are the gold and silver that were used way back when.

Your wealth is only measured by the money you have physically, which makes wealth only a mere idea. Money is what deceives people into actually believing you are wealthy. If you own a lot of money that means your wealthy. But do you actually own all that money? No, not really. Here’s a scenario. Say you go out to lunch to buy food. You sit down and enjoy that nice Panera mac and cheese. You go home and boom that mac and cheese goes down the drain, literally. It has no value to you now. It is gone. Yeah you can say it has filled you up, but where is it now? Nowhere because it has no value. Now let’s take money for example. Once you put those green paper things with numbers on it in the bank, the bank now owns it, and the longer you keep it in the bank, the value of it starts to decrease. Eventually, that money you had initially put in the bank will lose all of its value and you are left with absolutely nothing. And this is because of what you might ask? One word, inflation. Almost everything in life loses financial value. Some lose its value in as quickly as day just like that mac and cheese. Going all the way back to around 1929, the worst economic event crashed America, The Great Depression. It wasn’t until this event that the word economy revealed importance to Americans. The government then came up with GDP or the Gross Domestic Product, which is basically a sum of all the goods and services produced in the country calculated through a period of time, usually annually. In an NPR radio broadcast by the correspondent and co-host of Planet Money podcast Jacob Goldstein, says GDP measures the economy. It ultimately affects how the economy is set up. If GDP goes up, the economy goes up as well. If the economy goes up, prices goes up. And if prices go up, Americans are left struggling trying to keep up with the economy. Just like money, GDP is only an idea. Both have no set value because they are always changing.

Inflation like any other monetary term previously mentioned is only an idea. Prices go up, which means money value goes down. Imagine being in a country where inflation rapidly occurs every second. That’s exactly what happened in Brazil in 1990. 80% a month, inflation arose. In the NPR Broadcast “The Invention of Money” they gave an example of how fast the price of sunglasses rose. Say a company is selling sunglasses for $10. A month later, those sunglasses are now $18 because of the 80% increase. Now that still seems like a reasonable price, right? Now fast forward six months from that point. Those sunglasses are now $340. In a year, they become $10,000. Think about if that was food. Eventually, those people are going to have to starve and live pay check to pay check just to survive in a booming economy. And it all comes back to the idea that money has no value. Prices will go up, value of money goes down. Since the world still exists, the economy will continue to grow. Nothing is stopping it from thriving.

As I conclude the concept of money, I now have a much more clear understanding of how it actually works. It really only is an idea when you think about it until you have it physically in your hands represented by pieces of paper. Money has no value, yet we as people still value it. We need it exclusively for exchanging goods or services, but we don’t need it to live. Money is abstract. You can’t hold it, you can’t see it, you can’t smell it, but you think about it because it purely is just an idea.

References

Friedman, M. “The Island of Stone Money”. Diss. Hoover Institution, Stanford University , 1991. https://counterintuitive2015.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/stonemoneyessay.pdf

“The Invention of Money.” 423: The Invention of Money. This Is American Life, WBEZ. Chicago. 7 Jan 2011. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/423/the-invention-of-money

Goldstein, J. 28 Feb 2014. “The Invention Of ‘The Economy'”. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/02/28/283477546/the-invention-of-the-economy

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Stone Money– G90

Posted on February 12, 2019 by g903254

Needs a Title

What is Money? In any society there is a need for currency for the trading of goods. Whether it is a large stone, gold, silver, electronic currency, or a paper currency there has always been a currency. Goods themselves were used as currency. This is called bartering, however in a modern day society most transactions occur through the purchasing of a good with a currency of some kind, but what is money? What makes the value of money? How is there trust in a currency? Is it perceived or is it an actual value? Most human beings don’t think about how a currency functions or the origins and trust of a currency, but looking to how other currencies work can help human beings fully grasp the concept of currency.

If we were to ask, “what is money?” we would have to look to our bank accounts. Looking at your bank account you see only numbers. To us humans there is a value in these numbers, but there is no physical currency tied to those numbers until you personally withdraw it. If someone added twenty zeroes to the end of that balance on accident you would be considered the richest person ever, however the amount of money you have hasn’t actually changed. Now yes, you could try withdrawing this money and you may be successful in getting quite a bit, but once someone sees the mistake it would be corrected rather quickly and your monetary value has dropped considerably. How can this happen? This can be rather difficult to wrap our heads around so let us look to the Yap. The Yap are a group of people who’s currency are giant stone discs. Milton Friedman’s paper, “The Island of Stone Money” describes how this currency works. Milton explains how a resident named Fatumak explains how it works within his community, “My faithful old friend, Fatumak, assured me that there was in the village nearby a family whose wealth was unquestioned, — acknowledged by everyone — and yet no one, not even the family itself, had ever laid eye or hand on this wealth.” This is a great example on how this currency and any currency works. The numbers in your bank account are perceived as wealth, but you can’t actually see this wealth. For all we know the stone on the bottom of the ocean doesn’t exist. This perceived wealth is based only on trust and trust alone. Our economy works this way as well. Most of our currency is digital, not physical so the trust in the United States Dollar isn’t backed by anything. Just trust that our perceived value of the United States Dollar never changes radically.

We can look at the trust of a currency by looking at the Brazilian Cruzeiro. This currency as told in the NPR article, “How Fake Money Saved Brazil” was falling into what I would call an inflation spiral due to building a new capital in Brazil. This inflation spiral led to the dramatic rise of the price of goods. As the article explains, “Twenty years ago, Brazil’s inflation rate hit 80 percent per month. At that rate,  if eggs cost $1 one day, they’ll cost $2 a month later. If it keeps up for a year, they’ll cost $1,000.” This extreme rise in inflation led to the loss of trust within the Brazilian Cruzeiro. The economy of Brazil due to this extreme inflation started to stall and crash. The solution was to create a new currency. This new currency had no backing except trust. One day it was a fake currency the next day it was the official currency of Brazil. This currency, the Real, stopped the inflation spiral overnight and the economy of Brazil slowly started to recover. This is a prime example of perceived wealth. The immediate trust of a currency can seem insane to some people. This is very understandable as the ability of to do this can be out of desperation. When your economy is crashing adopting a new currency can be the only way even if it has no actual backing besides the trust of the populace.

We can even look to cryptocurrency and Bitcoin. Bitcoin had reached up to $20,000 and then dropped dramatically. This currencies perceived price had dropped dramatically and people lost a lot of money. Those who were made millionaires lost a majority due to this extreme drop in trust. This is a bubble bursting. This has happened before, but in different markets. Whether it be the housing market or the tech market when there is a drastic raise in interest of a certain product or currency it can cause dangerous results. The housing market caused a recession causing the loss of millions of jobs. The tech bubble to less of an extent, but still a noticeable extent. Perceived value can be extremely beneficial, but it can be extremely horrendous. When the markets reset and the perceived value drops we can see the losses. Loss of jobs, loss of acquired wealth, loss of life, etc.

So what is money? Money is whatever the majority says it is. If tomorrow the United States Dollar consisted of beanie babies then you better acquire beanie babies. The stones of Yap, the Real and Cruzeiro, Bitcoin, and your bank account help show just how must perceived value can have an effect on an economy.

References

Friedman, Milton. “The Island of Stone Money.” Diss. Hoover Institution, Stanford University , 1991

“The Invention of Money.” 423: The Invention of Money. This Is American Life, WBEZ. Chicago . 7 Jan. 2011.

Renaut, Anne . “The bubble bursts on e-currency Bitcoin.” Yahoo.com. 13 Apr. 2013. 30 Jan. 2015.  https://sg.news.yahoo.com/bubble-bursts-e-currency-bitcoin-064913387–finance.html/ 

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Stone Money-Chavanillo

Posted on February 12, 2019 by chavanillo

Money is crazy!

Before this assignment I thought that money really meant something. After this assignment might think changed dramatically. It changed because I always thought that making more money will cause everyone to have a better salary, but I never thought that pries also will go up. Specially it could corrupt the value of money. In Milton Friedman point of view in his essay “Stone Money” he talks about the difference between the limestone wheel and the electronic banking. They are considered money because Friedman says that limestone was pass generation to generation making wealth without even touching it. While the electronic bank just click a button and they will have billions of dollars because of the central bank or federal reserve. They just trade the gold for money saving it in banks. As Friedman explains in his essay, U.S. was doing it with France in a point that in 1933 their United States gold was drowning making France banks succeed more with our gold. All because of the Stone Money.

This two are considered money because of the value is producing but the big reason is because of trade. Money, wealth, cash, value, worth, are terms that are different from each other. Wealth is not what you have and how much is what we have in stock that you don’t even touch. Cash is the dollar paper printed from the central bank. Money is the numbers of cash or electronically is what you must buy something. Money is basically the value of something you could by with. Value is what something is worth and the importance of it.

Money is a big concept especially to the islanders, German government, French bank, US treasury and Brazilians are a great example how all this people really look at what is the real concept of money. In the “NPR Broadcast.”  gives us a description on how money value depends on people. In act two of the broadcast 4 man in Brazil and the government made a lie that saved Brazil from falling apart. It had high inflation making the money not worth it anymore. Money was losing value until 4 man came up with the idea of making money with something called URV. This process led to the success and brought back the real value of money It brought back balance. What is said here is that money is valuable this day is because of the people. If people didn’t believe in it wouldn’t be money. Remember the Fed is not the federal government. They rule themselves. The government don’t need to debate how much money they should make or what to do with it. The fed doesn’t even need the approval from the president. They are their own boss. The federal reserve is known as making money out of thin air. In this time like money the 2008 fed did things that before they wouldn’t even think about doing it. At the end all financial crisis was solved by the fed, but they are also the reason why the crisis began. especially Alex Blumberg believe in this. They say that is so crazy how money is made with just clicking a button. Just of dollars are sent to banks in a quick click. Even money made in the central bank you just click a button and the machine starts working producing billions of dollars.

Like in the article “The Trouble with Trillions” it talks about how millions and billions are not value that much as before because now there are millions of people with millions of dollars and 1000 with billions. Making trillions the only high valuable money in US. At the end of the day adding just zeros is the process of making money more valuable. This is all to blame on the positional arithmetic like Daniel Rockmore as a math professional.  For him or for her just adding zeros is a way to get another order of magnitude. “For example, I think that to get 1 million in Roman numerals you’d need to string together 1,000 Ms, and to get 1 billion you’d need 1 million Ms — roughly 1,000 pieces of paper filled with Ms!” The meaning of this is that the difference between billion and trillion is just 3 zeros imaging going more than that. Just do a “flick of the wrist” At the end of  the day money is simple. It just needs to be control exactly right. This is Rockmore point of view. Money could be so confusing that in some cultures counting system goes to 1 to 2 many. Money basically has value on how much effort the humans put into it. Like in the future millions are not going to mean nothing like now they still are a big thing, but we must have in mind that the more people get more money the zeros just will keep adding.

The Yap concept is basically that to be a stable economy everyone as to be boring in the sense that we must be careful on how we produce money how lees or much the federal reserve is making. Remember they make money out of thin air in the yap concept. I believe that the yap concept is more abstract than ours because is a way of looking money in a way that we control it doesn’t control us. So, we have the mind set that the money control us, but we must have in mind that the money is valuable in this country is because of us. We are the reason why the money is very important in his economy. Having a lot of money could drown the government and the country as well as not having enough. Now that the Fed threw out a lot of money to the economy they must find a way to get it out. At the end of the day money depends on trust. If there is no trust the value of money just goes away.  The only thing we could do is just trust PhD professionals because this is how the Unites States system works.

Reference

“The Invention of Money.” This American Life, 19 Feb. 2018, www.thisamericanlife.org/423/the-invention-of-money.

“Island of Stone Money.” Milton Friedman, Feb. 1991. https://counterintuitive2015.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/stonemoneyessay.pdf

Weeks, Linton. “The Trouble With Trillions.” NPR, NPR, 22 Aug. 2011, www.npr.org/2011/08/22/139846133/the-trouble-with-trillions.

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Stone Money- yourfavoriteanon

Posted on February 12, 2019 by yourfavoriteanon

How Much do you Believe in Money?

My main goal in life is to land a well-paying job and love what I do. Money is definitely something I care about and would want to make a lot of for my future. When considering starting a family, buying a new house or renting a new apartment, the first thing people think about is finances. Finances control how many groceries we can buy, how many cars we can own or how much time we could have. Our society revolves so much around currency and we lose the thought of what money actually is in its physical form.

The physical aspect of the American dollar comes down to ink and paper. Anybody can go out and buy some ink and paper, but they cannot make it into money. American dollars are specifically made with specific designs that must be printed perfectly but when it comes down to it all, money is just paper. What can possibly be so special about paper? The ideas behind paper are simple but hold a strong purpose. A one-dollar bill has no difference then a 50 dollar bill other than design and resemblance. Why should they be considered so different when they are made of the same materials and transferred the same?

The importance of dollar bills and coins are starting to dwindle. Personally, I don’t think they will go away but the demand for cryptocurrency is rising. Online paying is starting to take the world and the money being transferred is virtual. Amazon is a huge example of an online service that you can find almost anything and order it to your house. Different shipping methods can determine when it gets to your location. Clothes stores, such as Sears, are getting hit hard because their business is being dealt online. Occurrences like these bring up questions like “is physical money actually important?”

When you leave money at the bank they keep it in a vault. Banks let people who take out loans and money to use your money but the concept of your money always stays in the bank. The money you entrust in the bank does not actually exist anymore due to it being spent and borrowed elsewhere. I can write a check to someone giving them $500 dollars but the money in my account technically never gets damaged because it was never there. The physical money we have with ourselves is the only physical proof we actually have money. Now does physical proof actually matter? Can the price of something be swayed on the sentimental value of it to the buyer and seller? What if the seller doesn’t believe something has much value to it but the buyer thinks otherwise?

There is an island in the pacific named Yap. The people of Yap have a much different economy than ours physically but the concepts may not be too far off. The currency of Yap includes giant rocks of limestone carved into wheel-like shapes. These boulders of limestone never originated from the island of Yap which make them special. If I were to want to buy a house I would lay ownership of my limestone to you. Now that I don’t own the limestone, it is not my priority to move it.

Logically you would think that cause a problem. because how would one move it without heavy machinery? No need to panic, you don’t actually have to move it at all. The rocks are much too heavy to move and nobody would want the chore of moving these weighted rocks after every transaction. The people of Yap just pass around ownership rather moving the rock. There was once a case of people sailing back from an island with the freshly carved limestone but a nasty storm flipped the boat. The people made it back to Yap safely but the rocks were lost forever. Referring back to their economy, that did not matter as long someone had ownership of those rocks. Someone somewhere on Yap has the ownership of those rocks and they will continue to be passed on through transaction.

Rocks and the economy of Yap may seem to us as a much different system but the rocks are no different than the banks. You may not have the rocks yourself but the value placed on them is yours to keep. The values of different things can be very subjective but we need to keep a price so that the economy can hold a system. Different economies have their ups and downs. Brazil’s economy was saved by 4 scholars and is now a well respected economy to follow. Inflation is always a risk we do not like to talk about but the solutions may not be so difficult to find ourselves. It all comes down on how much you believe in money.

References

Friedman, Milton. “The Island of Stone Money.” Diss. Hoover Institution, Stanford University , 1991

“The Invention of Money.” 423: The Invention of Money. This Is American Life, WBEZ. Chicago . 7 Jan. 2011.

Reeves, Jeff. “Bitcoin Has No Place in Your – or Any – Portfolio.” MarketWatch, MarketWatch, 31 Jan. 2015, www.marketwatch.com/story/bitcoin-has-no-place-in-any-portfolio-2015-01-28.

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Stone Money- pomegranate

Posted on February 12, 2019 by pomegranate4800

Where Did The Money Go?

What really is “Stone Money?” After hearing the term, I was confused and questioned what it actually was. I pictured a literal stone. I pictured someone breaking down a huge rock and making it into smaller pieces, and these pieces end up having value. I also questioned the fact if this was a real story or just fiction. Furthermore, to my surprise, Stone Money is a real thing that happened at one point in history. According to Milton Friedman’s, “The Island of Stone Money” essay, what I pictured Stone Money as is exactly what it was. However, I imagined it to be similar to our money system in the United States. It has its similarities, but it definitely has its differences.

While I was reading Friedman’s essay, I was amazed at some of the information he provided. After going on about how they did not use metal, he mentioned that they had to turn to stone to make their currency. Hence the name “Stone Money.” However, this is not what surprised me, what surprised me really was when he said that these stone wheels they call “fei,” can range from one foot to twelve feet. How are you supposed to carry something like that around? It is essentially a twelve-foot coin, and what are you supposed to do with that, strap it to your back and drag it around the grocery store? Actually, the coin is just left with a certain marking indicating it has been used for “trade,” let’s say. It then is left on the property of the former owner. It is probably hard to transfer a twelve-foot coin from one property to another without an automobile. To get these stones to the island of Yap, they had to transfer stone from another island that was 400 miles away.

In the NPR podcast, there is a question of “Where does the money go?” The money that is lost during the collapse of the housing prices. Where does it all go? Why does money disappear? There is always that one person that’s like “Why can’t we just print more money?” Why doesn’t it work that way? Why do we live in a world where there is so much debt but we have the capability to erase that debt? Jacob Goldstein said when he was with his aunt and asked the question of “Where does all of that money go?” She replies with “Money is fiction.” After hearing this I had to pause and think, what could this possibly mean? Our world revolves around money. We need money to buy essentials to survival, but why? Why are we being charged on the basic things of life? Why are we being charged for things that we can’t control? We’re being forced to pay the money that we had to work for just to buy the thing that keeps you working that job. It truly doesn’t make sense to me. I truly do believe that if this world didn’t have money, obviously things would be very different, but maybe in a way better.

Back to the statement of, “Money is fiction,” it still makes me question what this actually this means. It turns out, the money was in fact never there in the first place. So, if it was never there, it couldn’t have anywhere to go. To make it easy for someone to follow, the podcast uses a scenario where person A takes a loan out from person B to buy a house from person C, so you can clearly see where the money from person B is going. Person A no longer has it. Now person A has to pay person B back but how are they going to do that if they gave the money to person C, and if the money isn’t really there. Money can disappear, its value, to be more specific. As time goes on and say you don’t touch your bank account at all, all of the money you have in there will eventually not mean as much as it did when you first put it in the bank. It’s honestly scary to think that one day, and it could very much be one day very soon, the dollar bill will be worth just as much as the penny does now. Inflation is scary, there has to be something someone can do to stop it, so we don’t find more lower middle-class people eventually falling into the deep end and losing everything. It isn’t fair, and all for what? In my opinion I feel like there is no benefit to anyone if inflation occurs, it makes everyone feel like their making less. This world is so money hungry that there are people who will have the need and the undying want to make more just so they will not be considered middle, or low class. Now that I am done ranting, it is easy to tie debt into the idea that money is fiction and isn’t actually there.

Back in August of 2011, the national debt was $14.4 trillion and counting. Now, in 2019, it is climbing its way up to very soon be $22 trillion dollars. Our country owes that much money. Why? Well, because money is fiction, and it was never actually there in the first place. It is so interesting that a country that now has a business man as a president, continues to climb up the national debt scale. What even is debt? Why does it exist? It is hard to understand. There is no point of debt because, I am going to be “that guy” can’t we just “print new money?” I do not understand what is so difficult about this, if I am being honest.

To reiterate, money is fiction. Money is basically fake. The question, “Where does all of the money go?” can easily be answered with, it was never there to begin with. It is a hard concept to understand, I don’t even get it myself. What makes it the most confusing is how are we able to get paid and go shopping and do certain things if the money wasn’t actually there. Money is fiction. People get so caught up in being materialistic that it blinds them from the fact that there are so many people who wish that they could fill their shoes, because it seems as if their money is there. For most people, it really just isn’t fair that their money isn’t there.

References

Friedman, Milton. “The Island of Stone Money.” Diss. Hoover Institution, Stanford University , 1991

“The Invention of Money.” 423: The Invention of Money. This Is American Life, WBEZ. Chicago . 7 Jan. 2011.

Weeks, Linton. “The Trouble With Trillions.” NPR, NPR, 22 Aug. 2011, http://www.npr.org/2011/08/22/139846133/the-trouble-with-trillions.

Posted in pomegranate, Stone Money | 3 Comments

Stone Money–Daphne Blake

Posted on February 12, 2019 by daphneblake25

Currency Clashes

The dollar bill was never valuable, but it assures the promise of valuable things so it’s worth something. If you want an XBox that cost $300, the only reason you want the $300 is to receive the XBox. If there was another way of getting the XBox without having the $300, then depending on the circumstances, chances are the money wouldn’t even be considered. Say if you could get the XBox in exchange for 300 pieces of grass. The same grass that you walk on everyday just became of worth because it assures you something you value. In the podcast “The Invention of Money, the Planet Money team at NPR discusses an island called Yap that uses stones for money. The bigger the stone, the wealthier you are. But their stone system is no different than the use of money in America or any other country that uses currency. The stones are not valuable at all, but the fact that owning one gets you something you want, it’s worth having. The concept of money is actually false. The people on Yap proved it with their story of the giant stone that resides deep in the ocean a few meters out from their island. No one has ever saw the stone, but they still trade around it’s value. No one cares about physically having the stone, but that the idea of owning it gives you something you actually value.

It’s similar to if someone told you they had $20,000 in their bedroom closet. If they gave you a proposition asking for your house and cars in exchange for the money, you could choose to believe them and give away your possessions. Then if you wanted to buy a property for $20,000, you could tell the property owner about the money and if they believe you then you have a new property and they have $20,000. No one robs the bank just to have a million pieces of green paper. They rob the bank because they value what those pieces of paper can get them. So ripping a flimsy piece of paper that has the number $100 on it could be similar to throwing out all the food in your fridge and cabinets. Money only has value because people value that the money can get them something valuable.

The hard work and labor that goes into acquiring the money is already mentally engraved in our minds as being for whatever object or service we desire. According to the article by Milton Friedman titled, The Island of Stone Money, the people of Yap did not have the stone they used as their currency on their island. If you wanted more stones, you had to travel to an island 400 miles away, find the stones, and bring them back to Yap over dangerous seas. The people of Yap were never doing all that arduous work for a stone. But they may do it to retrieve a dead family member off of foreign land. The stone is just a physical representation for the work you had to do. Similar to people going to work and saving up for something they want. No on would work eight hours everyday just for a piece of paper, but they might to buy a new car, or a new house. Money holds the value for the things that people value.

This thinking begins to boil down to people making their own money. On Yap if you want more money, you can go to the other island that is 400 miles away and just bring back some more stones. But in countries that are like America where the people can’t just create their own money, how do they get more? Well they can work harder for more, but as aforementioned, the grasp on the concept of money is so loose that the question is hard to answer. In America you can loan money, which you can’t do on Yap. That’s why our country is trillions of dollars in debt, because we “borrowed money”. This is also a problem in Japan. In a New York Times article titled, Japan’s Latest Economic Transfusion, their prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is trying to rehabilitate the economy by putting a surplus of money into education, and healthcare, and other things that will potentially help japan from being stagnant. The problem is, so many other countries don’t agree with Japan’s decision. This is because Japan’s financial standings affect the countries that trade with them. So a false concept of money can start financial wars in a sense because of what people value. It almost makes you think the bartering system was better.

And to further the epidemic, Bitcoin, which is digital currency, is also available. In the MarketWatch article, Bitcoin has no place in your — or any — portfolio, San Francisco starts a $100 million company called “Coinbase”, which basically promotes online currency. As if the regular paper money isn’t complicated enough! I get the idea of online shopping and having money available for you in that regard, but what happens when people can’t distinguish their digital cash from their paper money. It will literally cause a currency clash.

The article from Planet Money titled “The Invention of Money” says it best. The economy is a 20th century creation. America was under the Great Depression so the country just made more money. The idea of money is so vague and abstract that it hurts to wrap your head around it. But in the end, the deciding factor for the future of money won’t be if it still has value, but do people still value it?

Reference Page

The Invention of Money

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/423/the-invention-of-money

The Island of Money-Milton Friedman

Click to access stonemoneyessay.pdf

Japan’s Latest Economic Transfusion
Jan. 13, 2013

Bitcoin has no place in your — or any — portfolio

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/bitcoin-has-no-place-in-any-portfolio-2015-01-28

The Invention Of ‘The Economy’

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/02/28/283477546/the-invention-of-the-economy
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Stone Money- nousernamefound1

Posted on February 12, 2019 by nousernamefound1

A Fool And His Money Are Soon Parted

Do you think money is real or fake? People in the US will believe that money is everything, but honestly, the value of money has fooled us for years. We have been tricked to believe that the value of money is superior. If all banks crash and you had 5T$ in your saving account, then tomorrow it is gone means that you never truly had it. It’s crazy that something so fake can be so dangerous in every country. Once people lose faith in the dollar, it will not have value. Bond issues by the US government is a way that money is processed so quickly. After its processed money is created, which is why many people believe that money is everything. Banks lead out money and that is how new money enters into the economy. Fed never loses money. In fact, they always increase by buying bank bonds. We will examine the island of Yap, the United States, and Brazil to figure out what turned the dollar into something bigger than what it should.

When trying to figure out the answer to “what is money?”, Economist visits the island of Yap. Ira Glass claims, In “The Invention of Money,” that “at the time on this island, for currency, this pre-industrial person used something completely impractical and counter-intuitive, these massive stone sculptures in the shape of coins”. People that lived on the Island knew that they couldn’t carry the stones, but they still believed that the value of it can be used as money. This is the same thing people in the United States did when dealing with gold., “It’s unclear if these stones started as money. But at some point, we don’t know when the people on Yap realized what almost all societies realize. They needed something to store value. They needed something that everyone in the society agreed you can use to pay for stuff,” according to Goldstein in “The Island of Stone Money.” You did not need to have the stone in your position for it to be considered valuable, so this should tell you something about the concept of money. Yap used the stones as a way to pay off fines. Friedman claims, In “The Island of Stone Money,” that “the fine was exacted by sending a man to every failu and pabai throughout the disobedient districts, where he simply marked a certain number of the most valuable fei with a cross in black paint to show that the stones were claimed by the government.” Before you start criticizing the people of Yap, you must realize that other countries misunderstood the value of money also.

Just like the Island of Yap, the United States faced the same problem when trying to figure the real meaning of money. People believed that the American financial system was failing because of the loss of gold. Ira Glass claims, In “The Invention of Money/Act Two,” that “each dollar corresponded to a dollar of gold that in a vault somewhere. But when we went off the gold standard, somebody had to decide how much money there would be.” The United States had it all planned out. They knew that the Federal Reserve could create the dollar at any time, and they could trust any bank to make sure the money stays placed. This was all good until the United States hit a crisis. The money that we had was gone, and many people were upset. I think people were more upset that they didn’t have the 6 figures in their accounts, rather than being mad about being tricked. The Feds didn’t think of a backup plan and it showed when the window closed. The solution should have been according to David Kestenbaum, In “The Invention of Money/Act Two,” that “The Fed window is jargon for the Fed creating a bunch of money out of nothing and lending it to institutions in crisis who can’t borrow money through the normal private market. Sort of like a bank window where you could walk up and get an emergency loan from a magical genie.” Instead, the Fed treated the financial problem like the Island of Yap. David Kestenbaum claims, In “The Invention of Money/ Act Two,” that the Feds” would hold onto your grandmother’s antique earrings and in return, give you far less than they’re worth. And if you bring in cheap plastic earrings, the Fed wouldn’t give you any money at all.” The financial problem didn’t stop here, so the Fed brought home mortgages. This was another way to get money out into the economy. The land is valued by the production of homes or somebody willing to build houses on. Land can be worth nothing 10 years ago but can be sold for a bunch of money the next day. The recent events show that the Fed doesn’t care too much about money, so why do we still believe that money is real. The process of creating money on thin air is so easy for the Fed.

In Brazil, people lose faith in the dollar and it hurt the economy. Ira Glass claims, In “The Invention of Money,” that “the government tricked a hundred fifty million people into believing again, that their money was worth something when there was absolutely no evidence to support that claim.” Before, people believed that when money sits it will lose value. In fact, a lot of people hid products until the prize freeze went away. Brazilian inflation caused many suicides. This what happens when you play with people’s money. The government was in trouble and it needed help. They contacted Edmar Basha and his buddies for a plan. Chana Joffe-Walt claims, In “The Invention of Money,” that “they didn’t want to just change the underlying causes of inflation. They wanted to change people themselves. People were the problem. People had to be tricked into thinking money had value when all signs told them that was absolutely not true.” The four economists wanted people to talk in a virtual currency. They would get paid 1000 URV’s and see that milk will only cost 1 URV. The government started to see inflation decrease more and more each day. The plan was simple, “while they put the URVs in place, the group of four also made the government balance its budget and slow down on the money creation, “according to Chana Joffe-Walt in “The Invention of Money.”

In “The Invention of Money,” Chana Joffe-Walt claims: “Brazil went from being an irrelevant, economic basket-case to one of the most important economies out there. The eighth largest in the world.” The solution is simple, we must stop believing that money is real. The United States and the Island of Yap failed to realize, and it showed. It’s hard to lose faith in the dollar, but you see what can happen when you do. After reading this essay, you should be able to answer the question stated in the introduction. With that being said, Is money real or fake?

References

Friedman, M. (1991). The island of stone money. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

The Invention of Money. (2018, February 19). Retrieved from https://www.thisamericanlife.org/423/the-invention-of-money

The Island Of Stone Money. (2010, December 10). Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=131934618

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Stone Money Essay- HazelnutLatte

Posted on February 12, 2019 by hazelnutlatte123

Our Impact on the Value of Money

What is money? Although a simple question, it has a much more complex answer. People in today’s world are socialized to realize that money is important in many aspects, but nobody asks the question, what is money? This is because, all around the world, people share the basic understanding that you need money in order to purchase most of the necessities, and desires, in life. However, nobody sits back and thinks about why money holds the value that it does today, or our impact on the value of money.

When thinking about the concept of money, I think of the paper money known as the dollar, and the piece of plastic we swipe, known as the credit card. To me, these concepts are simple: you give someone the paper or you swipe your piece of plastic and you receive whatever it is that you are trying to purchase. Even though this concept seems so simple, how do we determine the value within that piece of plastic. You don’t hand the cashier a piece of paper with the number twenty, meaning twenty dollars, but you immediately get twenty dollars taken out of your bank account. When listening to “Planet Money” on “The Invention of Stone Money,” Ira Glass made me realize that this concept is extremely similar to how the Yaps went about their system of money. Glass described how the Yaps created a giant stone that represented a certain amount of money, but when the workers began to transport the stone, from the island it was made on, to their own island, it fell to the bottom of the sea, but continued to represent a value. Much like how our bank accounts work, the Yaps had faith in simply saying that an individual who is said to own the stone, has the wealth that the stone represents. In “The Island of Stone Money,” Milton Friedman says how the faith in the stone led to its extreme value because others who saw the stone “…testified that the [stone] was of magnificent proportions and of extraordinary quality…” The magnificence of the stone increased its demand, which led to its increase in value. This concept may seem to be preposterous, but it is almost exactly correlated to how we evaluate the value of money in our banks, and how we share money electronically.

We are told from the start of our lives that money gets us the materialistic items that we desire in life. Much like how the Yaps use the idea of the stone to determine the wealth that an individual has, in modern times, we use electronic money. When sending money through apps like bitcoin, the user obtains a number on the screen, but not an actual dollar in their hand. When reading “The Bubble Bursts on E-currency Bitcoin,” Anne Renaut makes you realize that when we exchange money through this electronic process, we are essentially exchanging imaginary money. Renaut emphasizes that when using Bitcoin, you “…can only cash out [your] money if other people want to buy [your] Bitcoins.” This broadens the idea that the money is never actually there. Transferring bitcoins to the next user is virtually just giving them a number that has a value. Renaut says that a person can go their whole life spending their own money, and still having their bitcoin value in the bitcoin account. You could never touch this money, or you could send it to someone else, or to your own bank, but you will never obtain an actual bitcoin. We deal with this everyday when paying bills online or doing virtually anything through our banking system.

When dealing with transactions within a bank, money is transferred from account to account through numbers changing on a screen. Money is not directly and physically delivered to the receiver, but the receiver will see the number on their account rise. As said in “Planet Money,” in “The Invention of Money,” Glass tells us how this is because the money is not actually there; it is being passed on from loan to loan, but you still continue to hold the value in your bank account based on those numbers on your screen. Every time a transaction is made, money is not being physically picked up and taken out of a person’s account and put into another. This would be extremely time consuming and create chaos if money is misplaced. These numbers represent how much money you hold under your name. When listening to act two, “Weekend at Bernankes,” in “The Invention of Money,” Alex Blumberg and David Kestenbaum tell us how the federal reserve can essentially create money. The creation of money can make or break an economy. This closely relates to how Brazil went about their economic issues. The president wanted to create a new capital, so they began to create money to make this make this vision happen. When they began to create money, it started a rise in inflation, leading to the start of price freezing. This creation of money hurt their economy because the inflation was too large. This occurs throughout the world, especially in our own economy through the federal reserve. In the U.S., the federal reserve can decide to create money to make it easier to get loans and create businesses and jobs, but they must be aware of the possible inflation (Blumberg & Kestenbaum 2011). The value of money is determined by the demand of the dollar at that point in time. When inflation goes up, so will the value of the dollar throughout that country. We base our value of money off of what we are told that the demand is, and what we are told the dollar is worth.

The story of the Yaps, and their large valuable stone, may seem like an insane and unlikely process of how we determine the wealth of an individual. However, this story is not too far off from how we function as a society, and how we go about controlling our economy. With every swipe of a credit card, and every virtual bill or transaction being made, we are essentially giving someone invisible money that somehow has a value because we accept that fact. Without the acceptance of society, money would be worth little to nothing, and we could possibly have completely different currencies. Just like the Yaps, and the people of Brazil, we utilize our bank systems and our electronic transactions in ways that act as stone money.

References

Friedman, Milton. “The Island of Stone Money.” Diss. Hoover Institution, Stanford University , 1991

“The Invention of Money.” 423: The Invention of Money. This Is American Life, WBEZ. Chicago . 7 Jan. 2011.

Renaut, Anne . “The bubble bursts on e-currency Bitcoin.” Yahoo.com. 13 Apr. 2013. 30 Jan. 2015.  https://sg.news.yahoo.com/bubble-bursts-e-currency-bitcoin-064913387–finance.html/ 

 

 

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My Hypothesis. – halizzle

Posted on February 12, 2019 by halizzlee
  1. Abortion.
  2. Deciding factors of abortions should be limited to the mother.
  3. Effects of rape, postpartum depression and being in the foster system.
  4. Women being the only decision maker would lower the amount of children in foster systems.
  5. By allowing women to be the sole decider whether or not to have an abortion would lower rates of postpartum depression and children in the foster care system.
  6. Allowing private abortions and giving ONLY the mother the option would greatly decrease the negative effects of having an unwanted child.
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