When I first heard the story of Yap and the stone money it sounded like the beginning of a bad joke. I couldn’t really understand how a society could be so trusting or naïve. The idea of the fei didn’t make too much sense either. The bigger the stone the more value it has, but no one actually has to see it. One of the richest men of Yap didn’t even have his fei with him, it was at the bottom of the ocean somewhere but everyone believed that he was the wealthiest without actually seeing his fei. This sounds crazy but if you compare it to the way money works in the US, it makes sense. When you get a paycheck at the end of the week from your job, more than likely you never see that money it just goes into the bank. You never see it but you know it’s there, just like a fei. The people of Yap were doing this hundreds of years before the US caught on.

The value of a fei is determined by several factors, like the number of lives lost on the journey to get the fei, the workmanship, and the size (Tharngan). Getting fei was an adventure in itself. You’d have to travel to another island in the middle of the ocean on a bamboo ship and then make the fei out of limestone. The value of the fei was determined on how much work went into it and a lot did. Once you made the fei you then had to transport it back on your little boat across the ocean. Fei could get very big and weigh up to a few tons (NPR).

In the US we don’t go to an island in the middle of the ocean to make our money so how does our money get it’s value? Our money doesn’t have any value besides the paper it is made out of (Moffatt). When money was only used with coins it was valued for the metals it was made out of. But now, according to economic expert Mike Moffatt, the reason money has value is because everyone wants it. If someone wants something it has value to them and since everyone wants money it creates value for the money.

Work Cited

Tharngan, John. “Stone Money.” BBC News. BBC, n.d. Web. 01 Feb. 2015

Moffatt, Mike. “Why Does Money Have Value?” About Economics. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Feb. 2015.

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

Goldstein, Jacob, and David Kestenbaum. “The Island Of Stone Money.” NPR. NPR, n.d. Web. 01 Feb. 2015.