Stone money- brettbcomp2

Posted on February 2, 2015 by brettbaumbach

When first being introduced to the story of the Yap it had seemed very far fetched from reality and laughable.  The notion that one could be considered wealthy just based on something you cannot see or touch is senseless and seems like an idea a child had come up with. After an analysis of this concept of wealth it can be correlated to our very own society. Our very own concept of wealth is not far off from the yaps. Our society almost completely circles around the dollar. Our dollar is backed by gold, a shiny metal rock.  This as a matter of fact is extremely similar to the yaps concept of wealth.

In the 1980’s, to save Brazil’s economy the government had created the Unit of Real Value.  This was another from of wealth that was completely imaginary and in reality has no actual value. The only thing that makes the US dollar valuable is the ability to use this made up currency to obtain goods.  Also these currencies only have value based on the fact we ‘say’ it has value.  As explained by the professor, money has no value at all, the objects that you buy with the money that is almost the same as monopoly money is what has value.

Works Cited

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

Joffe-walt, Chana. “How Fake Money Saved Brazil.” Planet Money. 4 Oct. 2010. Web. 1 Feb. 2015.

Joffe-Walt, Chana. “The Invention of Money.” Thisamericanlife.org. N.p., n.d. Web.

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Stone Money – madewithrealginger

Posted on February 2, 2015 by madewithrealgingercomp2

Out in the Pacific Ocean, there is a tiny island called Yap which used a currency that would seem crazy to most of us. The people of Yap, known as Yaps, used limestone wheels as a form of payment, just like the dollar in our society. These limestone wheels were knows as Fei. But in order to acquire fei the Yaps would have to sail out to big limestone deposits on other islands hundreds of miles away. Then they would have to cut out wheels of varying size, and sail them all the way back to Yap. Since this wasn’t exactly an easy process, it was agreed that the bigger the fei a person owned, the wealthier that person was. The fei got to be so big that people wouldn’t even bother moving them when they exchanged them. The wheel would just change possession.

‘One time, according to the island’s oral tradition, a work crew was bringing was bringing a giant stone coin back to yap on a boat. And just before they got back to the island, they hit a big storm. The fei wound up on the bottom of the ocean.The crew made it back to the island and told everybody what happened. And everybody decided that the fei was still good — even though it was on the bottom of the ocean.’ (Island of Stone Money) And so today, due to inheritance, there’s someone who owns the biggest fei in the history of Yap, and nobody who’s alive had ever seen it.

At first after hearing this, I was very surprised. It didn’t make sense to me that the fei was still acknowledged after being lost at sea. After all, the crew that was supposed to come back with it could’ve just lied and nothing would be any different. But after some deeper thinking, the idea came to me that this lost fei is not very different from our modern system of credit. I mean what really happens when you buy something with a credit card? Basically you, the buyer, are telling the seller that you have enough money to pay for the item. But the money is in some box miles away. The seller, without ever seeing this money, trusts you and accepts the swipe of a tiny piece of plastic. And then you go on your way while the only thing that changes is a few numbers on some computer somewhere. No one really bothers to think too much about credit, but in reality, your ‘money’ might as well be at the bottom of the ocean next to some big old limestone wheel.

Up until our last class discussion, I never really took the time to think about the concept of money.  After learning about currency in other cultures I realized how fragile ours was. Our entire economy revolves around pieces of paper. These small pieces of paper have virtually no value in and of themselves. But when someone hands me a dollar, I can’t help but feel wealthier. Why is that? The dollar can’t directly bring me happiness. Only when I’m able to exchange for something else does it appear valuable. However, the only reason I put such faith in this paper is because I know that everyone else will accept it as payment. Without this abstract ‘guarantee’ the dollar would be useless.Ultimately, our money is only as valuable as the faith we put into it.

Works Cited:

Kestenbaum, David. “The Island of Stone Money.” Planet Money. 10 Dec. 2010. Web. 1 Feb. 2015.

Friedman, Milton. “The Island Of Stone Money.” The Hoover Institution, 1 Feb. 1991. Web. 1 Feb. 2015.

“Money and the Illusion of Wealth.” Enough Already. Web. 1 Feb. 2015.

Ray, Roger. “The Truth About Money: It’s Just a Concept” Springfield News Leader. 6 Feb. 2014. 2 Feb. 2015

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Style Lessons from the Posts

Posted on February 2, 2015 by davidbdale

Throat Clearing

Even good writing can be slowed down by the perceived need to prepare readers for the point that is about to be made. Such preparation is the written equivalent of clearing our throats, which should be done offstage before our big entrance, or in this case, practiced and discarded in drafts.

Example of throat clearing:

The cruel murder of the 12 employees working for Charlie Hebdo magazine was devastating, but also brought unexpected positives to a dark situation. On January 11th, 2015, over 2.5 million people and over 40 world leaders, met in Paris for a rally of national unity. People from all over the world showed empathy and compassion for the victims and the victims’ families.

Throat clearing eliminated:

The cruel murder of the 12 employees working for Charlie Hebdo magazine was devastating, but the outpouring of compassion for the victims and their families was an unexpected positive in dark situation. On January 11th, 2015, over 2.5 million people and over 40 world leaders met in Paris for a rally of national unity.

In other words, instead of first introducing the vague idea that positive outcomes resulted, then naming one of them, give the example immediately, identifying the category only if it serves your needs.

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Stone Money- taddo

Posted on February 2, 2015 by taddocomp2

When I first listened to the story of Stone money and the people of Yap, I automatically thought it was fake and made up. I actually opened up a search bar on my computer and looked up Yap and Micronesia to see if it was real because I honestly could not even take it serious. When I searched it and something actually came up, I knew it was real. I continued listening to the story and could not grasp the concept of money that these people were living by. They had gigantic pieces of stone and that is what they used to purchase things. It’s is interesting how different that is from the United States. I act like it is insane that they have stone for money, but at the same time we have a piece of paper that is supposed to have all this worth.

I really used to think that money controlled the world we live in. I had a teacher my sophomore year of high school that had a funny saying that I never forgot. He was my history teacher and he was always say C.R.E.A.M which stood for cash rules everything around me. This little phrase is something I always remembered from his class because he said it so much. This contributed to me thinking that money was so powerful.

The broadcast really portrays money to be fiction which I thought was very interesting. The value of money is different all around the world so reading about how other countries deal with money and the type of currency they use is always worth reading. It shows that even though we believe all countries want to be like the United States, they have their own sense of individuality.

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Agenda MON FEB 02

Posted on February 2, 2015 by davidbdale
  • Open My Notes
  • Clear the Uncategorized posts
  • Explain Grade Codes
  • Explore new pages Mechanics and Writing
  • Differences between Portfolio and Non-Portfolio Assignments
  • Review Stone Money posts
  • Introduction to Counterintuitive topics
  • Preview Purposeful Summaries assignment
  • Cows and Chips Exercise
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Cows and Chips

Posted on February 2, 2015 by davidbdale

Nothing enlivens a dry conceptual essay like a cow. So, if you have to keep your readers awake long enough to follow a detailed abstract argument, hire as many cows as you can afford. Also consider providing refreshments. A bag of chips is nice (but not cow chips).

For dramatic evidence that this is good advice and that clever professionals use it all the time to good effect, breeze back through Milton Friedman’s brilliant brief essay, “The Invention of Money,” which blew our minds about the trippy-ness of currency without ever having to resort to esoteric terminology. Instead, it made excellent use of dramatic, tangible illustrations and allowed us to draw our own conclusions about the abstract thinking that underlay the drama.

We remember the shipwreck, the stone tablets as big as a car, the labeling of the drawers in the gold vaults. We use those physical objects and events as touchstones to remind ourselves of the entirely cerebral drama that makes them so significant. The concepts alone we might forget; the details stay with us and guide us back to the ideas.

Here are some examples of animated language that could improve essays about Stone Money:

  1. Ever since reading about The Invention of Money, I can’t look at a dollar the same way. These flimsy slips of linen covered with silly green symbols seem so worthless; do I really work hard at my job to earn a handful of these?
  2. Before there were coins, barter occurred using items that could be, for example, eaten: cattle and grain. No doubt those commodities represented the work of raising the animals and crops, but their value didn’t derive from the effort put into raising them; they were valued for their deliciousness.
  3. The little slip of paper from the ATM that tells us our current balance is as close as most of us get to holding our wealth in our hand.
  4. Money is not a cow. Money is valuable and a cow is valuable, but a cow’s value is that it produces milk, and eventually meat, and therefore directly helps a body survive, whereas money has no nutritional value. Its value is only symbolic of someone else’s willingness to trade it for a cow.
  5. Our dollars today are pure instruments of faith. On Yap they would have been useless because the Yap would not have traded for them. But here Wawa accepts them because Citgo accepts them out of faith that Citibank will accept them.
  6. The dollar bill is not a pack of chips, but it’s almost as good as long as the Wawa will accept it in return for a pack of chips.
  7. We mostly care about government backing for our money only when the government is our customer. If you give the barber money in return for a haircut, the government’s hardly involved; the barber’s only concern is that the sub shop will accept the money you gave him as payment for a sandwich.
  8. The real value of any money is that the society that uses it is willing to accept it as payment. For example, cab drivers in Egypt LOVE to be tipped in American dollar bills, much more so than in Egyptian pound notes, but they won’t take a US dollar coin because they know nobody else will take a dollar coin.
  9. Wawa decides that a dollar bill is worth a pack of chips, but the government—the issuing agency of the currency— decides that one bill is worth 100 of the other bills. That relative value of the bills is the only way the government “decides what the money is worth.”
  10. The end of barter is not the end of negotiation. Even with currency, our system permits a good deal of negotiation too, because market value is local. Today in South Jersey a farmer will get widely different prices for a squash, depending on what farmers’ market he’s selling at.
  11. On Yap, stealing would have been meaningless because physical possession was irrelevant. The stone outside my house might not be my stone, so there would have been no point in rolling someone else’s stone to my house if everybody knew it belonged to someone else. Our money is different primarily because, except for the serial numbers, our dollars are identical.
  12. Baseball cards are pretty worthless pieces of paper until somebody is willing to pay a lot of money for them. And by and large the only reason they’re willing to pay is the faith they have that somebody else will pay them even more. I couldn’t use baseball cards to buy my groceries though, unless the grocer agreed to their value. So we use money for convenience in both transactions
  13. If I wanted to build a house on the island of Yap, I hired some islanders to roll a huge limestone rock, almost the weight of the house I wanted to build, to the contractor’s hut and leave it there. And the islanders I hired? They got paid in limestone rocks too, or maybe one that they’ll share until they figure out how to divide what it can buy.

Some examples of advice I have given to students for getting more cows and chips into their essays.

  1. Readers are much more likely to be engaged with your topic (and even feel some of the alienation from their money you’ve been feeling) when you can put something tangible in their hands. Make them visualize that odd slip of paper, feel its flimsiness, and they might start to ask themselves: hey, yeah, what is this really worth?
  2. When we question the value of money, we start to question the value we place on everything. Regarding diamonds, for example, would you consider their beauty and rarity intrinsic values? Diamonds aren’t utterly useless, even if we’re being uncharitable about them. They are attractive adornments. Less defensibly, perhaps, it’s hard to understand why they’re “worth” more than extremely good fakes that sparkle just as much and that only a jeweler can distinguish.
  3. If you want to say that our currency has no value independent of the valuable things it represents, or that it is merely a form for presenting value, readers will have an easier time understanding you if you introduce a cow. Here’s how it looks: Money is not a cow, you say. Etc. (see above).
  4. You and I both appreciate the oddness of the wealth conveyed by that stone on the floor of the ocean, but what is it you see in your life today that convinces you that you have money? That little slip of paper at the ATM that tells you your current balance is pretty flimsy evidence, don’t you think?
  5. Your first few sentences are the written equivalent of warm-up throws, or rubbing your hands together to improve your grip before picking up the sledgehammer. Both serve a purpose, but they don’t compare to the live action. We can do something else while you’re getting ready. For example, that slip of paper with numbers on it. That’s a nice curve ball. Serve that up. A good first sentence that uses it might be: “The little slip of paper from the ATM that tells us our current balance is as close as most of us get to holding our wealth in our hand.”
  6. If you want to make a point about a concept we use subconsciously, so that we no longer notice it, you need to put something in our hands. We’re more likely to think about the unthinkable if you make us handle it than if you ask us to think about it. If it were thinkable, we’d have thought it. So, instead of a series of rhetorical questions, how about a quick illustration: If I want to build a house on the island of Yap, I hire some islanders to roll a huge limestone rock, almost the weight of the house I want to build, to the contractor’s hut and leave it there. And the islanders I hire? They get paid in limestone rocks too, or maybe one that they’ll share until they figure out how to divide what it can buy.

In-Class Assignment

Once you’ve read these examples and are comfortable with the technique for using concrete examples to illustrate abstract concepts, go back to your own Invention of Money post and find the abstraction most in need of illustration. Using the Reply field below your post, write a revision that improves your post by adding cows. Of course, I’m only half serious. Cows are often a good choice, but you can use other farm animals, semi-precious stones, warm sandwiches, an ounce of ceviche, or MORE COWBELL!

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Stone Money–mopar

Posted on February 1, 2015 by moparcomp2

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.

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Stone Money– Bglunk

Posted on February 1, 2015 by bglunkcomp2

When first hearing the stone money story I was very intrigued. Thinking about a place where word of mouth is stronger then actual evidence is almost mind blowing. Nowadays word of mouth is not worth very much, and we use things such as paper money with no actually value to purchase things. The difference between a fei and paper money are clear, with the fei it would take time and effort to make, it was something to be proud of. With paper money there is no background, no purpose, no value except for the value that you chose to give it. Maybe thats why with a fei word of mouth was acceptable, to be giving away something so important without even actually owning it just being able to say you posses it is good enough. All of this can be backed up by the information located in Milton Freidmen’s Stone Money essay. The way that stone money is looked at can be compared to the situation were the U.S  placed gold in vaults marked France, proving it was their gold, without actually moving it. This makes us think about money and the actual importance of it. Does money really need to play such a large part in society? What if we used currency such as fei, how would that affect people. In relation to the fake money in Brazil, that just proves how much money can affect a society. You can fix a whole nation by just pretending that money is available. Money is such a large idea in todays world. Without money many things are impossible, you basically can not live a happy life without money.

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Stone Money- thatdude

Posted on February 1, 2015 by thatdudecomp2

The intrinsic value of money is something extremely important to people. I don’t understand why individuals think this because money is only a symbol of the real wealth someone has as.

The Yaps would find our monetary system the most bizarre in the fact that people believe their money has an actually meaning or true importance, but really it doesn’t. The Yaps would create huge lime stones which would their measure of wealth. Even though a Yap might have the stone at home due to the large size, that person was known to have money even though he didn’t physically hold any currency. The Yap’s currency system seems bizarre especially because the richest family whom had the biggest stone ever made dropped it in the ocean. They do not hold the stone but somehow there family has been the wealthiest for generations.

Now how does this reality to American currency? Think about when you go to the store, you might only have a card no actual cash, but you still hold a value of wealth. This is very similar to the Yaps system of currency instead of our money being in banks their money is a stone at home. This is where public faith comes into play, which in America the value of currency is important because it helps people feel as if they achieve some type of worth. In my eyes and in reality there is no difference between our currency and those of the Yaps.

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Stone Money– Betterthanyou

Posted on February 1, 2015 by betterthanyouincomp2

Having faith in something we never see is a characteristic many people share. Our faith in religion, money and many other things differ from person to person. In the NPR broadcast it talks about how money was invented and the idea behind it very odd and interesting. It talks about a country in Micronesia using limestone rocks as currency. It was odd because the people of this Micronesian country rarely moved these stones when used to buy things. If one were to buy a chicken they would simply state that this rock is now in the possession of another person. This works because people have faith in their money that others will accept the currency. For something as useless as a rock people used it to trade for something like a chicken which can produce eggs and meat which is extremely useful.

Looking back at different currencies and systems of trading fro goods they all had the same basic principals, one being faith in the other persons good or currency. Without their faith it would be worthless. We put a price on the things we buy this creates the supply and demand. If a lot of people want something they put a higher price on it and if they were to have too much of something customers would go to the cheapest place to get it. It brings to question who puts the value of money such as the Dollar or others like the Fei. The value of money is given by the person using the currency and the local economy. If people are willing to pay more for something they will do it increasing the value of the money.

Milton Friedman also has a say on this topic studying the culture of the Micronesian currency and comparing it to the US Depression. Saying what the Germans did to their colony was very similar to what the French did to the US. Something so illogical caused a huge ruckus. It is pretty interesting how we can put our trust and faith into a money system that has no value other than what they think it is worth. The Fei was in essence is the very same as the US Dollar except in a different form. This form of currency one based on faith is very dangerous because anyone with enough power can control entire economy like the Germans did with the Yap and took away their currency. Until there is a perfect system it will always be a game of faith when it comes to currency.

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