In interviewing ten people about money my first question was when was money invented, and it quickly became clear that nobody, uh, knows, including members of my family who possess advanced degrees. Which is not to say that I didn’t get some educated guesses, because educated people are loathe to admit that they don’t know something. Most answered, sensibly enough, that money was invented by the ancient romans, greeks, or chinese, and that it probably evolved from peoples annoyance with the whole exchanging of goods thing. But nobody had a clue when it was invented. Similarly, when I asked what turns an object into money – and to a person they all picked up the object closest to them, held it out and repeated the question as if that would help them make sense of it (right!) the almost universal answer was that what turns an object into money is the value attached to it. And who assigns the value? Blank stares. Ummm….society? Ok let’s move on. As for the question do they imagine a time in which people might not believe in money, I received quizzical looks, but several respondents tentatively said well, haven’t there been several instances in recent times when you could posit that (if i understand your question). They cited, for just one example, the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998 (and I’ll fill in the details now) which reduced, for one, the Indonesian rupiah’s value by over 80% in a few months (and was a major factor in the overthrow of President Suharto’s government). The rupiah had traded at about 2000–3000 rupiah per 1 USD, but reached a low of 16,800 rupiah per dollar in June 1998. The currency, which had been relatively stable in prior years, had its value destroyed. The government did not take any action to demonetise or revalue the banknotes. Others pointed to citizens of formerly communist countries, which required that all means of production be controlled by the state and no one could own his own business or produce his own goods, because the state owned everything. So the belief in the value of money was probably not a prevalent one. And the rest answered no, no of course not…..dumbass. (Since nobody could answer the first question – I will! After ancient people got past that annoying bartering and commodities thing, metal objects were introduced as money around 5000 B.C. By 700 BC, the Lydians (who?) became the first in the Western world to make coins. Countries were soon minting their own series of coins with specific values. Metal was used because it was readily available, easy to work with and could be recycled. Since coins were given a certain value, it became easier to compare the cost of items people wanted. Some of the earliest known paper money dates back to China, where the issue of paper money became common from about AD 960 onwards. There now you know.
The first of my own questions, and I asked because this is something I’ve considered many times over the years, is what would you do if you woke up one morning and there was $100 million (just seems like the perfect goldilocks number, not too warm not too cold) in your bank account? The answers were all a variation on the theme of separating yourself from society at large, creating distance and barriers, constructing a virtual moat so, basically, you don’t have to put up with anybody’s s–t anymore. Quit your job, cloister yourelf in that huge house on the hill, rent the private rooms at the clubs….and of course fly first class everywhere. Richard Seaford points out in Money and the Early Greek Mind that money transformed social relations and contributed to the individual becoming alienated from his own kin and from the gods, as found in tragedy. He mentions similar effects of money when he says that its possession renders unnecessary in principle all pre-monetary forms of social relationship: reciprocity, redistribution, kinship, ritual, and so on. Money “allows you to fulfill all your needs. It provides the power to increase itself. And it tends to promote predatory isolation. Hence the focus of much Athenian tragedy on the extreme isolation of the individual.” Am I really stretching this analogy? Yes I am.
The other question, and it’s an obvious one, is what does money mean to you. Again the answers mostly revolved around the themes of freedom, security, independence, the usual bourgeois drivel, with nobody mentioning the obvious answers of power, respect, or for that matter, happiness (i mean who’s gonna admit that money makes them happy?) I delved deeper into their answers by asking what is important about freedom, security, etc…what that freedom and security means to them, what it allows them to do, whereby discovering what that person’s values are and what matters most to them in life.
