Money is Truly Fictional
Money is something that is involved in all aspects of life around the world. What does a new mother in France trying to get formula for her baby have in common with a young man fresh out of college in the US in search of a suit for an interview? Well the answer is they are both in need of money, because everything out there cost money. Even though each country uses a different type of currency, they all still use a form of money to be able to live their everyday life in society. What really makes each type of currency different though is how exactly each economy values the money they have and in what way they use this currency to trade.
The island of Yap is a great example of how their form of currency is not only limestone rocks but may also never be in their physical posession. Yap does not value direct ownership of money in their hand to know that they are wealthy, yet they value the idea of ownership even when it is not their direct possession. For some that may seem very odd, the idea that I own this stone that is worth so much but I may never actually have it in my hands or may not even see it. While this seems very far fetch to some it is not much different from what we do here in America with bank account and dirrect deposit or what Brazil does with URVs.
As they talked about in the NPR broadcast this is really not much different from what we do here in the United States. When we get paid from our jobs and it is deposited directly into our accounts. We see that we have this money digitally but we never actually physically possess this money. Then we pay a bill from our account and now that company has that money yet no one has ever physically held this money in their hands, which really means it may not actually exist. This just proves that what we do here in the United States is not all that much different from what the people of Yap did, just their basis of ownership is based on trust and is not done electronically.
This is also similar to the Brazilian currency of URVs. URVs was a fake currency designed to help the economy grow and the value of something be consistent. All of this was done virtually creating a sense that there was money even when nothing physically was being traded, it was all just numbers on a screen. This also helped the Brazilian economy realized the worth of certain things and helped their economy flourish instead of becoming more and more in debt.
The way people trade and value their money is something that is all very abstract and obscure but is not different from a child who trades and values a trading card. We view money in the same way a young child values their Pokemon Cards, where one child values a Pikachu more than the other child who values their Charmander. In a sense it’s viewed the same way that the way one person values a stone can be the same way another values a dollar, or the way someone else values gold locked in a box three thousand miles away. Money is really just fictional and is only worth whatever the person viewing it perceives and values it.
Work Cited
Friedman, Milton. “The Island of Stone Money.” Diss. Hoover Institution, Stanford University , 1991.
Joffe-Walt, Chana . “How Fake Money Saved Brazil.” NPR.org. 4 Oct. 2010. 30 Jan. 2015. <http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/10/04/130329523/how-fake-money-saved-brazil>.
“The Invention of Stone Money.” 423: The Invention of Stone Money. This Is American Life, WBEZ. Chicago . 7 Jan. 2011.
Rowan Counterintuitive 
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Hey, JSoccer, I didn’t provide you feedback on your original Stone Money post, so this is my first chance to comment on your work on this topic. It has a title and a credible-looking Works Cited, but its citations are nonexistent. Your Works Cited is a fraud because it is supposed to identify the sources for WORKS that you CITED. You cite none. I’ll provide a model citation, again, in the Mechanics section below. Please fix these. Currently your lack of citiation leads readers to believe that the material you include in your essay is owed to no one. Scholarship requires you to reveal the sources of your information.
As you know, you’ll receive initial grades in four grading criteria: Argument, Rhetoric, Mechanics, Scholarship (ARMS). Grades can always be improved by revision. To understand your grades, you need to know your Grade Code, which I shared with you in class MON SEP 19. I’ve numbered your paragraphs for easy identification. The Writing Center offers free peer-to-peer writing instruction appointments to suit your schedule. And additional feedback is always available from me upon request.
Argument (Grade G)
Your first paragraph is a bit wordy, but it serves the purpose of introducing the notion that money is essential. That we all understand. The more intriguing point you want to make, that economies “value money differently,” has potential to capture your readers’ attention, but it’s entirely unclear what you mean by it. It could easily mean that money is more important to some societies than to others (meaning some societies are more money-driven). If that’s not what you mean, your meaning is ambiguous.
Very confusing. The “not only, but also” construction should indicate that two terms have something essential in common. If you’re trying to communicate that the Yap’s money is “nutty” in two ways, it’s not working, because we don’t understand either concept on first glance (unless we’ve listened to the NPR broadcast you listened to). You can’t assume that. It’s your obligation to provide readers with the background information needed to understand your claims.
Again, JSoccer, this is impossible to understand for general readers. You haven’t explained that small limestone disks ARE transferred like coins for small transactions. You haven’t indicated that the big stones are so MASSIVE that moving them is an insurmountable chore. Before we begin to understand the oddities of the Yap currency, though, you’re telling us that ours is just as weird, but similar by analogy.
In short, what I’m saying is that you’re trying to shortcut your explanations. Nobody loves brevity more than I do, but you can’t achieve effective brevity by leaving out the essentials.
In what sense does the money “not exist,” JSoccer? If you mean there aren’t enough physical dollar bills in the country to represent all the debts, payments, and obligations, that would surely be true. But the point is trivial. If I lend you five dollars by handing you a five-dollar bill, then you do the same with your brother, and he does the same with his wife, there’s only one five-dollar bill to represent four transactions. But if the debts are retired in reverse order, everybody gets satisfied by temporarily possessing a single fiver. Does that make sense? If so, does the five dollars your brother owes you “exist”?
With reference to the Pokemon cards, money doesn’t work the way you describe it at all. Of course one child can value a Pikachu more than a Charmander, but everybody values a $100 bill more than a $1 bill, to precisely the same degree: 100 to 1.
You need to be more demanding of your own logic, JSoccer, and put your sources to better use. Readers will be impressed with your revelations about what you’ve learned from your study, but only if you share it with them.
Rhetoric (Grade G)
For the most part, sentence structure and fluency are not problems for you, JSoccer. But rhetoric is hard to grade in the absence of strong argument. I sense from the authority you command with your author’s voice that you’ll be able to be persuasive in leading readers to conclusions, but for the moment, you haven’t given them the information they need to agree with you. I’ll revisit this section when you’ve repaired the weaknesses of your argument.
Mechanics (Grade H until you fix your citations)
You haven’t cited sources in your essay except to mention that some material came from an NPR broadcast. You MUST repair this lack.
EXAMPLE: Ownership of the stone could change without the stone ever moving from its original locations. “They often talk about the stones themselves not changing hands at all. In fact, most of the time, they wouldn’t,” says Milton Friedman in “The Island of Stone Money.”
Only when you’ve cited an article or other source in this way can you include it in your Works Cited. It’s not enough to have consulted a source; a citation to it must appear in your essay for you to include it in your WC.
Scholarship (Grade H until you repair your citations)
You aren’t giving your sources the credit they deserve. You’ve clearly absorbed a good bit of information from them, and I don’t think you’re trying to deceive your readers. But we get no indication from your paragraphs that the material you’re sharing came from anywhere but your imagination. This should be an easy grade component to fix.
OVERALL
Take heart, JSoccer. Your current grade is a reflection of how this work would be graded if it were submitted as part of your Portfolio. The semester is young and help is available. Every post can be endlessly revised. I will meet with you any MON or WED in personal conferences and provide continuous feedback in and out of class. Furthermore, you can enlist the FREE help of a peer writing counselor through the Writing Center for one-on-one sessions on your schedule. You may request a grade update in the Reply field for this post, but only after you’ve made substantial changes to your entire essay (not merely corrected the grammar and mechanics).
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