Stone Money-theshiftyyman

“What is Money?” is a question that many people brush off, but when some thought is put into that question it becomes an enigma. Money is something we use as a reward for a good or a service, but why does money have worth? Money had worth because it was backed by gold from the government until 1971 when president Nixon took the USA off of the gold standard(Moffatt 1). That meant however many dollars somebody had they had that amount of dollars worth of gold. That also meant that the government got to decide how much gold one dollar is worth. The government decided the worth of gold, but what is golds actual worth? This is the conundrum most people arrive at when they analyze the question, “What is money?”.  It is hard to fathom that any random object can have any kind of worth unless they have some kind of value. Value of course is the use that something has, for example a car has value because it can be used as a mode of transport (Moffatt 1). Paper money itself holds no value because it is just paper and ink, and that doesn’t have very much use at all. The USA now uses fiat money, which isn’t backed by any commodity. This means that paper money truly isn’t anything other than paper. The only reason people want paper money and accept it is because other people want it (Moffatt). This concept is very primitive, in fact there is a great example of a similar system used by people on the island of Yap.

The people on the island of Yap used large circular stones as currency. These stones were nothing other than stones so it was odd that they were excepted as legal tinder. The stones varied in size to ones that could fit in a hand to ones that were twelve feet in diameter. The reason that these stones, called rai, held value was because they were big and shiny and other people wanted them. They were in reality huge chunks of lime stone from a neighboring island roughly 250 miles away called Palau (Stone Money).  The large stones would be carved into circles with holes in the center probably used to help transport the enormous stones. The value was decided by the size, style, and how many people died on the journey to retrieve the stone (Stone Money). Basically people wanted this “money” because it was something different and shiny and everyone else wanted it, which sounds inherently similar to the aforementioned paper money.

It’s very strange to think that random objects can hold so much worth in the eyes of people. It doesn’t take much for something to become valuable. Someone could just take a rock and say this rock is worth that house, and if enough people grew to accept that a rock could become a new kind of currency. So “What is money?”, money is something that we decide is worth something else at a rate of exchange. If something has value to you it is worth something to somebody else. Money is something that everyone decides has value, and in the case of the USA, that thing is paper with pictures of dead historical figures on it. Money is a strange thing, but it has worked in the world up to this point. It just becomes a question of when people will stop accepting paper as a currency? When that moment comes perhaps we can resort to using large circular stones like the ones used by the people on the island of Yap.

Works cited

Friedman, Milton. “The Island of Stone Money.” The Island of Stone Money(1991): 3-7. Web. 13 Sept. 2016.

Moffatt, Mike. “Why Does Money Have Value?” About Education. About Education, n.d. Web.

 “Stone Money.” BBC News. BBC, n.d. Web.