Needs a Title

Bartering was originally replaced because of the coincidence of wants, which is when two people have goods but one party does not need or want the other’s. Because of this problem, money was made to be a medium that both parties would have a desire for. In recent times, money has evolved into numbers in a database. Much like the Yap Islanders, we own currencies that are often not physically accounted for, in their case it was stones; in ours it’s credit for online transactions.

As humans are unable to see directly in the past, mankind can only guess how bartering and transactions occurred in early recorded times. most believe that money isn’t intrinsic and that it was created to buy goods with inherent value, but I beg to differ. The Yale– New Haven Hospital conducted an experiment with capuchin monkeys where are they gave the monkeys Silver discs and traded them back for food. Most of the monkeys caught on to this concept pretty quickly, but in one instance a researcher observed a specimen confronting a female and I attempting to trade with her. But this monkey wasn’t interested in food, he offered a disk to the female for sexual favors, the female complied, and then she traded the disk back to the researchers for a grape. A similar situation was observed by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for evolutionary anthropology where they observe males with more food tended to have far more sexual partners then their counter parts with less food. This leads me to believe that the inherent value of money is purely social, until it is traded for a service or good with sustenance. Even today our world is some what similar, the more money someone has the less they have to worry about how theyre feeding their family or paying their bills; moneys inherent value today is mainly for sustainability. for instance you cant buy or build a house without money thus you cant support a family or yourself unless you have a job or own a business.

As faith in the Brazilian crosaro plumitted the need for an economic savior was high. For decades different leaders tried multiple tactics to fix brizils financial problems. First leaders tried freezing prices so there could be a set price for good, but retailers hid, stockpiled, and didn’t sell merchandise because they thought that the value of the goods would skyrocket.Next they tried to confiscating the civilians money and redistributing it but the plan was flawed from the beginning because no one wanted to trust the government with their money. Finally the president of brazil reached out to a university teacher for help with the economic crisis. The teacher, along with some old grad school buddies, proposed a plan to help the Brazilian people. The started by saying that the government needs to stop printing money and that the peoples faith in the currency needed to be sustainable. These four men founded a virtual currency called the unit of rio value or URV, then they started documenting wages, taxes, and the store prices in URV. Each week a conversion rate diagram was made and distributed to help locals understand and trust the currency more. When buying goods from the store URV prices always stayed the same bought the cruzeiros reais conversions changed. So as more people started thinking of prices in URV the more faith was put into a currency that didn’t change. As their plan unfolded and as people slowly came to trust URV’s inflation rates started to go down, eventually dropping close to 40% inflation. After they phased out cruzeiros with URV, a new currency called Rio (the real) or BRL was made and equated to one US dollar, then they equated one URV to one BRL. Soon they released BRL to the populace with high hopes and then instructed the government to balance its budget and to stop printing money at a rapid pace.

References

NPR broadcast: the lie that saved brazil; https://www.thisamericanlife.org/423/the-invention-of-money

Sex for meat – how chimps seduce their mates https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/sex-for-meat-ndash-how-chimps-seduce-their-mates-1665356.html

The Cambridge student online: Dosser sexologiques special: prosotution in animals

https://web.archive.org/web/20110907215023/http://www.tcs.cam.ac.uk/the_bridge/science/dossiers-sexologiques-special-prostitution-in-animals/