Money: Just a Way to Keep Score
My thinking on the concept of money has not changed drastically. I, and I am sure others, were already familiar with the idea that money does not have a non-assigned intrinsic value, that it’s essentially an agreed upon system on which to keep track of purchases and labor and such. However, what I did come to realize was that an essential part of money that allows agreement of the system to happen in the first place entails more nuance than just an agreement itself, it requires a faith that the system will uphold.
In a game, like a sport or a video game, we keep track of progress by quantifying it as points or touchdowns. To my previous understanding, that’s exactly what money is, it’s a real-life point system used to give an easy numerical value to your contribution to society, in order to keep track of it. When you score a touchdown in football, you don’t get a “thing”, we just agree that you are now doing better by a discrete value of 6, and as long as everyone in fact does agree to that, and to whichever specific point system you may be using as a whole, then you indeed now have a value of 6. Now a field goal, on the other hand, is not as hard and is not as valuable to the progress of the game, so we’ll give it a lesser numerical value of 3. Similarly, in real life, we will give a good or service that’s not deemed as valuable a lesser number relative to those that are more valuable. As long as everyone agrees on the means of keeping track of these quantities, whether it be giant rocks, pieces of paper, or electronic signals in a computer, then they have value, because they are serving the role of quantifying and keeping track of value.
Online in game currencies work relatively the same way. They aren’t much more abstract than bitcoin, and not much more abstract than physical currency either for that matter. Both serve the same general purpose of a point system used for keeping track of contribution or progress that allow for the purchase of products.
The idea of labeling gold in a vault, or painting a cross on a rock are essentially the same. The seemingly meaningless acts are representation of people asserting their authority or possession of the goods and services that they represent. The people of Yap accepted this assertion by giving up their services through making the roads and highways that the German people demanded. In this and many other cases, the authority was not earned through contribution to society, but rather taken by force. So it’s not the labeling of stones or moving gold from one drawer to another that people freak out about, it’s the new authority that is crowned through this symbolic gesture.
Now like anything, there are still going to be important comparisons and contradictions between the different forms of currency. Let’s take crypto and physical currency, for example. While they are seemingly the same in concept, they can differ in practice. Some cryptocurrencies like bitcoin have been shown to be more volatile than other currencies. For example, as noted in AFP News in 2013, “The price of the virtual “geek” currency had soared through the stratosphere in recent weeks, trading for a high of $266 on Wednesday — only to come hurtling back to Earth in just three days. By Friday, a single Bitcoin was worth just $54.” Volatility is not unique to crypto, however. There have of course been many cases of physical money, such as paper money, going through the roof for example, the German mark in the 1920s, for example, had skyrocketed post WW1. As Weidenhammer noted in The American Economic Review, “In November, 1923, forty two billion marks were worth but a single American cent.” So, while crypto may very well be volatile, we mustn’t forget that any other currency is susceptible to the same volatility, based on the circumstances that arise (in this case, the great war).
However, this does not mean that currencies that lack a commodity cannot work. In 1980s Brazil, the way they fixed the economy was through a “fake” currency, the URV. Now, they say it was fake, in the sense that it did not physically exist, but in concept and in practice it was as real as any other currency, because it was a point system that everyone agreed on, and trusted. As Joffe-Walt 2010 put it, “You have to slow down the creation of money, they explained. But, just as important, you have to stabilize people’s faith in money itself. People have to be tricked into thinking money will hold its value.” Any type of currency can work, as long as people agree and trust its value.
We seem to like to contrast our money with the people of Yap’s Money, but I don’t think that our currency would seem that strange to them. It shouldn’t take long for them to come to the same understanding as us that the object representing currency is completely arbitrary, as long as it’s agreed upon; it didn’t take us very long, why should it be different for them? I mean, who, as a child, didn’t realize that a piece of paper doesn’t actually do anything? They will probably find our electronic currency to be difficult to understand because of its abstractness, however that would just be due to a larger misunderstanding of modern technology in general. Our paper money might just seem too lacking in visible beauty and craftsmanship to seem to have value.
References
Friedman, Milton. “The Island of Stone Money.” The Island of Stone Money(1991): 3-7. Web. 10 Sept. 2016
Joffe-Walt, Chana. “How Fake Money Saved Brazil.” NPR. 4 Oct. 2010.
Renaut, Anne, “The bubble bursts on e-currency Bitcoin” AFP News, 13 April 2013
Weidenhammer, R. (1932). [Review of Exchange, Prices and Production in Hyperinflation: Germany, 1920-1923, by F. D. Graham]. The American Economic Review, 22(1), 146–149. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1807287
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Counterintuitive Spring 2024 
UNSOLICITED FEEDBACK ON THE FIRST DRAFT.
You didn’t ask for Feedback on your Draft, Temporal, but that’s not going to save you. 🙂
I need to seize this opportunity to signal to your classmates what feedback will look like when it’s requested.
I very much appreciate that you’ve provided me such a high-quality sample to praise and critique. I hope everybody who reads this exchange will notice that even though I am tremendously impressed with your work here, I won’t hesitate to identify problems or opportunities for improvement when I see them. It’s my job. And I love my job.
First Feedback and Grade.
As you know, for this first assignment, you’ll receive a quick grade that reflects your achievement in four grading criteria (ARMS). Grades can always be improved by revision. You’ll receive your feedback here on the blog if you request it, but a quick grade on your first draft, posted to Canvas, will reflect your achievement in the areas of Argument, Rhetoric, Mechanics, and Scholarship.
—If your classmates don’t ask for feedback on this post, they’ll receive just a grade.
—If they DO ask for feedback, they’ll be making a contract with their beloved professor to spend at least as much time on their revisions as he spends on writing their feedback.
—If they’re REALLY clever, they’ll give their beloved professor a time limit. 🙂
Earning Additional Feedback
—Additional feedback can be earned by making substantial improvements to your first draft.
—Following revisions, Update your post and put it into both the Feedback Please and Regrade Please categories. ,
FEEDBACK ON YOUR FIRST DRAFT
This is very high quality work, Temporal.
The arguments are thoughtful and smart (maybe wise), and some of the language use is really quite stunning. Examples:
There are more, but you’ll get a swelled head.
So, we’ve established your substantial language facility. How do you grade on Argument?
ARGUMENT
—You start very strong, with a BIG claim in your first paragraph, which you dismiss as if it were boilerplate everyone had already stipulated. Many Stone Money first drafts never get as far as acknowledging what you take for granted here:
—You could base an essay on just that observation, but you advance to (I’m paraphrasing):
Or maybe:
Or maybe some other version of that claim. You’d want to clarify what you mean in any rewrite.
In your football paragraph, you make the brilliant observation that
—But you don’t nail down the analogy with comparisons to the economy:
——1. When your house appreciates from $100,000 of market value to $200,000 of market value, you don’t get “a thing.” But if you sell your house for $200,000 that day, you get $200,000.
——2. You convert your completely abstract “value” into cash, which, even though it’s also quite abstract, can be spent.
In your Online In-Game Currency paragraph, you’re equally sharp at noticing that (again paraphrasing)
—But you don’t even start to track the levels of abstraction that you might.
—Or do you disagree that these things are different?
——Some currency might grant you power to control things in the game.
——Some currencies might exchange for more universally accepted currencies and therefore have transactional value outside the game.
Your gold in the vault paragraph makes the brilliant observation that users of any currency accept the concept that an Authority establishes the rules of ownership, transfer, maybe even the underlying value, of a currency.
—Does this apply to Bitcoin?
—The “origin story” of the currency is pure legend, right? And the “rules” as if they could be enforced, are myths about how many Bitcoin there will ultimately be, and how they can be mined, and . . . . other nonsense.
—So what possesses otherwise rational people to put their faith in a fictional currency run by a shadow under opaque and arbitrary rules and answerable to no one at all?
I’d love to spend just as much time on the rest of your paragraphs, and I pledge that I will if you’re willing to commit to the project as well. But, this is probably enough to demonstrate that I have questions and recommendations.
RHETORIC
Rhetoric is Posture and Pronunciation.
—I just made that up to meet the needs of this bit of feedback.
—The evidence is the evidence. How that evidence is RECEIVED depends on who the audience is and how the Speaker/Writer approaches that audience.
—Your Authorial Tone is both authoritative and collaborative, Temporal.
—You manage always to sound as if you have important observations to share.
—But you do so without preaching.
—Your posture is upright; your pronunciation clear; your patience unlimited.
—You say:
—In all the bold type phrases, you’re guiding, leading, taking claims for granted as a way of convincing your reader that “we’re all of one mind” about these funny money things.
MECHANICS
—I had to change some things about your Mechanics to be secure that none of your classmates would take your work as a model and repeat your mistakes.
—I don’t blame you for the mistakes. They’re only mistakes if I’m your professor. We haven’t had time to cover them yet.
—Thank you for including a real Title for your essay.
——All post have a “name”; in this case, Stone Money—Temporal, but that can’t replace the value of a real Title (in your case “Money: Just a Way to Keep Score”) for previewing your argument.
—I appreciate you’re using APA style for in-text citations and your References section at the bottom of the essay.
—Thank you for NOT USING parenthetical citation tags in the body of your text.
SCHOLARSHIP
—As far as I can tell, you’ve been scrupulously ethical in your use of sources.
—You introduced the statistical and factual evidence from relevant sources at times when they could support your argument.
—You don’t appear to have taken them out of context.
—There could certainly have been at least one reference to someone in the Online Gaming industry to add some substance to your brief treatment of online currency.
OVERALL ASSESSMENT
This is among the strongest first drafts I have read in many semesters of assigning the Stone Money essay, Temporal. That means you can probably cruise through most of this semester without challenging yourself much or refining your obvious ability. I hope you won’t. Cruise, I mean.
First Draft Grade 95/100
No revisions required for this assignment, but revisions are always encouraged.
Regrades always available for ANY work published to our blog following substantial improvement.
Should you elect to revise for a Regrade on this assignment, you’ll need to spend at least 90 minutes on revisions to match the time I’ve invested in your draft.
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