Money is weird

When I first read this assignment I didn’t quite understand what was meant by “Stone Money” but now that I have researched and read, I have a better understanding. I never thought about it but money has an interesting historical background, beginning from how it was even thought of and first created.

When reading the article by Milton Friedman, Frances situation with gold and the U.S. is the same as what the Germans did. For example, the Germans claimed the stones as theirs by marking them with a black cross. Similarly the French put the gold they took, into a bank and labeled the drawers they were in as Frances property. But exactly what was the point in this? All the French wanted was for people to know they were “wealthy” or that they had gold but the gold wasn’t used. It just sat in a bank labeled. The Yap islanders wealth was much different than the French, they believed stones were their “manifestation of wealth”. Countries have different ways in interpreting the idea of money. In the U.S. we have grown up to the idea of money being controlled by a system but others may think differently, or have different beliefs.

In the podcast I listened to, it really made me think twice about money. You may think money’s value can’t disappear but how come when housing markets collapsed, they were worth a lower amount afterwards? Money seems to be all just a big fiction, that we have come to believe. At some point paper was swapped for gold but that changed and they decided dollars couldn’t be traded for gold, dollars were just going to be an idea of money. An example used in the podcast Invention of Money states that even when you pay for a bill online, it’s just information, money isn’t getting passed from the bank to pay your phone bill. Money doesn’t exist. Now that I think about it, it makes so much sense. Money isn’t much different than the stones at the bottom of the sea that the Yap islanders believe to be just as wealthy. It’s kind of scary how easily people are convinced things just because the government says so.

It’s also interesting how ownership of stones could be anyone even without moving the stone, it would just be your property no matter where it is. The Yap used the stones to get back the bodies of their loved ones that died on other islands. They would make a swap, and then that stone would be someone else’s property. There was also an attempt to transfer a stone across the sea and the people had to drop it in the water because it was too heavy but it’s still used as a manifestation of wealth. These islanders aren’t much different from us, although they use stone for money, we use paper to represent money. Money is just an idea.

In addition, I read a speech stating how much money’s appearance has changed over the years. In the Money and the importance of confidence speech, Governor Oystein Olsen explains how bank cards and mobile phones are used to transfer money. Its all just digits on a screen. He believes that money will retain it’s value over time. The monetary systems history is “an account of how the authorities at various times have tried to build confidence in the value of money.” We are told to trust the process of it basically. Many wars have even broken out due to the money issues over around 500 years. There’s still money issues to this day.

After learning so much more about money, it has really opened up my eyes and come to a realization that money’s value is very difficult to understand. I believe that everyone has been scammed and they’re too blind to see it, we have been raised to believe that this is normal so I don’t think anything will change. It’s too late for someone to try to even make an opinion, money is used for so many things, the government wouldn’t be able to have some type of control over us if there was no money. I will never understand how people were so easily convinced into this decision though, to just use a piece of paper to symbolize the value of money is absolutely insane. The government also makes sure to make dollars a certain way so that we can’t make duplicates.

I believe that the world would be more fair if everything was equal. Money causes so many problems. It’s only going to get worse because now the price is going up dramatically on everything but the work salary is the same, how is it that they expect people not to struggle when the pay isn’t being evened out. And the only thing thats controlling the way we live is paper. Nothing makes sense. Money is very weird.

References:

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

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

Olsen, Oystein. “Money and the importance of confidence” At the Museum of Cultural History, 3 June, 2014.