Barter or Buy

“Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves.”

Albert Einstein

As both the preceding quote and illustration would indicate, our thought experiment for the weekend shall involve the nature of money and man’s relationship to it. You are, as always, invited to explore this dark channel of human nature with us and share your reflective observations here.

As we pace with great anticipation through these last four days of the Old Age, awaiting the arrival of the New Age on January 20, 2009, it seems only fitting that our thoughts should turn to the subject of money. Once Barack Obama has ascended to the seat of power and my bailout checks begin to arrive, I can assure you that money will occupy a great deal of my time – spending it, hoarding it, thinking about it, looking at it, smelling it and, whenever possible, removing all of my clothing and rolling around in a large pile of it. (Readers with more delicate sensibilities will likely wish to stop visiting my YouTube channel at that point.) But what is this stuff of dreams and legends that we refer to as “money” and what significance does it hold for us?

Homocentric speciesists struggled for generations to define exactly what it was that set man apart from all the other animals and identified us as the smartest or most highly evolved. For quite some time they settled on what they perceived as mankind’s unique ability to use tools as the mark of superiority. This, of course, was eventually shot completely to hell by the chimpanzees and, somewhat later, even the dolphins. After that stunning loss, these same analysts seemed to give up on the question entirely, settling on the explanation that we were the most advanced by simple virtue of the fact that we were the only ones who had invented a printing press capable of publishing scholarly papers saying that we were the most advanced.

I would suggest, however, that another metric offers itself and will shortly be right under our noses. That, of course, would be money. I can think of no other example in the animal kingdom where creatures have come up with such a gloriously bizarre and arcane redefinition of an object’s inherent value than the human concept of currency. Money – along with its various relatives in the forms of stocks, bearer bonds and the like – stands alone as a physical object which holds great value based on nothing more than our belief that it has value.

Think, for a moment, of other objects such as apples. The apple itself has value because you can eat it, bake it into a pie or slice it up and dehydrate it for later consumption. Even if you don’t like apples you could readily find someone else who does. While it is true that you could barter the apple away for something else – thereby forcing upon it some semblance of the nature of currency – the value it holds for the recipient will still be its value as an apple and its potential for consumption. The beat up chair in your kitchen, as another example, might not fetch very much cash on e-bay, but it still retains its inherent value as an object you can sit on.

Not so with money. Yes, you could put it to some other use, such as fuel for a fire, wall covering or toilet paper, but there are far more efficient and less costly alternatives for all of those jobs. Nobody with the sense given to a chimpanzee would suggest folding money for any of these roles. The same may be said for coins. They could be stuffed in a sock and used to bludgeon people over the head, (probably in an effort to steal their money) but a common blackjack would again be cheaper and remarkably more efficacious.

No, money has a great amount of value only because the entity issuing the currency tells us that it has some set value, and we believe them. This just may be the unique defining factor which identifies human beings as the apex animal life form on Earth. (Oddly enough, the other unique human invention seems to be government, and governments are generally the ones issuing the money. A combination of the two may either be the ultimate proof of our superiority or the final definition of our self destructive tendencies. I leave that for the reader to decide.)

For an extra credit reading assignment on the topic, might I suggest “The Ascent of Money” by Niall Ferguson? I don’t know if any of his theories will amount to more than a pile of chimpanzee termite fishing rods, but he speaks with a Scottish accent and wears thin, wire rim glasses, so I assume he must be an expert on something.