Going to class on the first day, I was paying close attention and I heard something be told about the concept of money. Trying to get a clear grasp around the the ideas and questions being brought aloud in class, i started to put two and two together and realize that it all makes sense and was quite tricky yet very clear.
Because of the assignment told to read about in class which was “Stone Money”, i came across a bunch of ways that the strategy they had for using giant stones was actually quite similar to how we use money today in our world. Some people don’t understand the true value of money. What is money? To some people, its the reason why they get up every morning to go about starting their daily grinds. To some people, this piece of paper runs the world.
In the article “How Fake Money Saved Brazil”, they say,”you have to slow down the creation of money, they explained. But, just as important, you have to stabilize peoples faith in money itself. People have to be tricked into thinking money will hold its value.” This was fake money that everyone believed to be real after time. This is a stone money story because you can question what money really is besides a piece of paper or just metal. Could money be anything?
A term GDP was created along with the economy after the great depression to try to save the country. This term means Gross Domestic Product. This was created to stand for the value of all the goods and services produced in the country in a years time. A problem shortly arose from this says the article, “The Invention of the Economy.” In this article, they state,”rather than a limited measure of the economy, it becomes this Cold War gauge of who’s doing better, who is winning.” This could obviously cause wide problems throughout the world if everyone is trying to compete. There is something else told from this article that you would not know at first glance. They state, “GDP isn’t a thing, its an idea in which keeps changing. Just last year, the US tweaked the way its calculated and instantly, it was $500 billion bigger.
This all has something to do with how we as people together can not see certain things. To answer questions brought up earlier, we don’t really know what money is. To be completely honest, numbers are made up, money is made up. They’re just things that someone had created and got everyone to believe. People don’t realize that about money. It is not the key to life. To bring my argument back to our class discussion, id like to bring up something said about how money and work actually works. You as a human go to work, you get paid through and online account in which someone made up and got people to believe in. The irony of it is that the person or people together paying have an account that just shows a lower amount of money and the person who is being paid has an account that went up some numbers. Then from there, you just swipe a plastic card somewhere to get something of value out of it. So money started from being a stone, to paper and coins, and then to being in an online account and using a piece of plastic. So again to bring it back, what really is money?
WORK CITED
Goldstein, Jacob. “The Invention Of ‘The Economy'” NPR. NPR, n.d. Web. 13 Sept. 2016.
Joffe-Walt, Chana. “How Fake Money Saved Brazil.” NPR. NPR, n.d. Web. 13 Sept. 2016
Goldstein, Jacob. “The Island Of Stone Money.” NPR. NPR, n.d. Web. 13 Sept. 2016.
Rowan Counterintuitive 