Nothing enlivens a dry conceptual essay like a cow. So, if you have to keep your readers awake long enough to follow a detailed abstract argument, hire as many cows as you can afford. Also consider providing refreshments. A bag of chips is nice (but not cow chips).
For dramatic evidence that this is good advice and that clever professionals use it all the time to good effect, breeze back through Milton Friedman’s brilliant brief essay, “The Invention of Money,” which blew our minds about the trippy-ness of currency without ever having to resort to esoteric terminology. Instead, it made excellent use of dramatic, tangible illustrations and allowed us to draw our own conclusions about the abstract thinking that underlay the drama.
We remember the shipwreck, the stone tablets as big as a car, the labeling of the drawers in the gold vaults. We use those physical objects and events as touchstones to remind ourselves of the entirely cerebral drama that makes them so significant. The concepts alone we might forget; the details stay with us and guide us back to the ideas.
I’ve been giving this advice for a couple of semesters now, since I started assigning brief essays about Friedman’s paper. Here are some examples:
- Suppose, instead of your first three sentences, you expressed yourself like this: “Ever since reading about The Invention of Money, I can’t look at a dollar the same way. These flimsy slips of linen covered with silly green symbols seem so worthless; do I really work hard at my job to earn a handful of these?” See what I mean? Readers are much more likely to be engaged with your topic (and even feel some of the alienation from their money you’ve been feeling) when you can put something tangible in their hands. Make them visualize that odd slip of paper, feel its flimsiness, and they might start to ask themselves: hey, yeah, what is this really worth?
- Before there were coins, barter occurred using items that could be, for example, eaten: cattle and grain. No doubt those commodities represented the work of raising the animals and crops, but were they valued for the effort put into them or for their deliciousness?
- I wonder if you would consider their beauty and rarity intrinsic values? Diamonds aren’t utterly useless, even if we’re being uncharitable about them. They are attractive adornments. Less defensibly, perhaps, it’s hard to understand why they’re “worth” more than extremely good fakes only a jeweler can distinguish.
- We mostly care about government backing for our money only when the government is our customer. If you give the barber money in return for a haircut, the government’s hardly involved; the barber’s only concern is that the sub shop will accept the money you gave him as payment for a sandwich.
- The real value of any money is that the society that uses it is willing to accept it as payment. For example, cab drivers in Egypt LOVE to be tipped in American dollar bills, much more so than in Egyptian pound notes, but they won’t take a US dollar coin because they know nobody else will take a dollar coin.
- Baseball cards are pretty worthless pieces of paper until somebody is willing to pay a lot of money for them. And by and large the only reason they’re willing to pay is the faith they have that somebody else will pay them even more. I couldn’t use baseball cards to buy my groceries though, unless the grocer agreed to their value. So we use money for convenience in both transactions.
- If you want to say that our currency has no value independent of the valuable things it represents, or that it is merely a form for presenting value, readers will have an easier time understanding you if you introduce a cow. Money is not a cow, you say. Money is valuable and a cow is valuable, but a cow’s value is that it produces milk, and eventually meat, and therefore directly helps a body survive, whereas money has no nutritional value. Its value is only symbolic of someone else’s willingness to trade it for a cow.
- Readers love a literal clue. The dollar bill is not a pack of chips, but it’s almost as good as long as the Wawa will accept it in return for a pack of chips.
- This is a really important point. Wawa decides that a dollar bill is worth a pack of chips, but the government (the issuing agency of the currency) decides that one bill is worth 100 of the other bills. That relative value of the bills is the only way the government “decides what the money is worth.”
- Even with currency, our system permits a good deal of negotiation too, because market value is local. Today in South Jersey a farmer will get widely different prices for a squash, depending on what farmers’ market he’s selling at.
- On Yap, stealing would have been meaningless because physical possession was irrelevant. The stone outside my house might not be my stone, so there would have been no point in rolling someone else’s stone to my house if everybody knew it belonged to someone else. Our money is different primarily because, except for the serial numbers, our dollars are identical.
- I completely appreciate the oddness of the wealth conveyed by that stone on the floor of the ocean, but what is it you see that convinces us we have money? That little slip of paper at the ATM that tells me my current balance is pretty flimsy evidence, don’t you think?
- Your first few sentences are the written equivalent of warm-up throws, or rubbing your hands together to improve your grip before picking up the sledgehammer. Both serve a purpose, but they don’t compare to the live action. We can do something else while you’re getting ready. For example, that slip of paper with numbers on it. That’s a nice curve ball. Serve that up. A good first sentence that uses it might be: “The little slip of paper from the ATM that tells us our current balance is as close as most of us get to holding our wealth in our hand.”
- Our dollars today are almost purely instruments of faith, I think. On Yap they would have been useless because the Yap would not have traded for them. But here Wawa accepts them because Citgo accepts them out of faith that Citibank will accept them.
- If you want to make a point about a concept we use subconsciously, so that we no longer notice it, you need to put something in our hands. We’re more likely to think about the unthinkable if you make us handle it than if you ask us to think about it. If it were thinkable, we’d have thought it. So, instead of a series of rhetorical questions, how about a quick illustration: If I want to build a house on the island of Yap, I hire some islanders to roll a huge limestone rock, almost the weight of the house I want to build, to the contractor’s hut and leave it there. And the islanders I hire? They get paid in limestone rocks too, or maybe one that they’ll share until they figure out how to divide what it can buy.
In-Class Assignment:
Once you’ve read through enough of these examples to be comfortable with the technique for using concrete examples to illustrate abstract concepts, go back to your own Invention of Money post and find the abstraction most in need of illustration. Using the Reply field below your post, write a revision that improves your post by adding cows. Of course, I’m only half serious. Cows are often a good choice, but you can use other farm animals, semi-precious stones, warm sandwiches, an ounce of ceviche, or MORE COWBELL!
Assignment Update
So far, I’ve collected and responded to Replies from:
- Taylor
- Marcus
- Drew
- Angela
- Stephen
- Josue
- Luke
- Benjamin (but not Ben)
- That’s not 20.
- Where are the rest of these?
- If you posted one below your own “Invention of Money” post, remind me and I’ll update this list.
- If you haven’t posted one yet, now’s the time, before the next snowday.
- Thanks.
alwaystired247
AnonymousStudent
azntaco
beforeverge
BigBabyBaller
bitagaming
breakingbad1820
Caravan
cinderella1013
davidbdale
Yankeelover18
fatboy489zt
giantsfan224
glacierfreeze21
gobirds17
green0728
gymrat230
Gir
jerseymikes1106
jesusisking1738
jetsfan806
Kenneth Alex Krug
manipulator66
mercythyhealer14
McCormick Karner
mochaatrain
oni
powerranger
peanut2348
pinkcottoncandy4
princess01430
redbird1123
rubes1256
shxrkbait
sillyinternetperson
soulpond47240
spatel8267
stingingcrib5
tacotyphoon
thepersonindisguise
usmnt23
worldofjuice999
xephos1
Counterintuitive Fall 2022 
In the story of the Island of Yap, although at first sounding obscure, tells the story of an island civilization that uses large lime stones as their form of currency. These lime stones may be rolled around from person to person, constantly changing ownership, and the Yap accept whomever the stone belongs to. The paper that we put into our purses, wallets, or pockets everyday constantly change ownership, whether buying a car or a some chips from a vending machine. Many observations and questions have been posed on this weird, little island and the stones, but upon further examination, the fei is much similar, if not completely the same as a Euro, dollar, or pound.
The several physical descriptions are helpful in getting us to visualize, even feel, the currencies as they roll, fold, literally change hands, Taylor. Note that the technique is useful only in discussing currency (the physical object), not money (the abstraction), so you’ve used it just right.
(to save room here is just the idea and how i expanded it)
Money is based on trust; we trust that what it’s backed by is where it’s supposed to be. Say if you clean out a friends house. In return he gives you a cow as payment. We can see if the cow is in good health, if the cow has a broken leg, or if its in its last days. This is not true with our current currency. We don’t have a little clock attached to it; telling you how much the worth has gone up or down today. It is much easier to see with a cows worth.
This is fascinating, Marcus, but your back-and-forth from “money” to “cow” to “currency” is confusing.
Since the cow example has nothing to do with money, it shouldn’t be located where I expect to find an example of how money is “backed” by something I can examine.
Start instead with the cow: Before money, we traded labor for a cow. We could examine the cow’s age and health and decide how much labor it was worth. For time, a dollar was worth an amount of gold, which felt like a substantial and stable value. Today’s money, though, is based on nothing but our mutual faith in its value.
See what I mean?
Though it seems logical for systems of trade to be conjured, monetary systems are almost entirely illogical. Value should only indicate the worth of some necessity, yet we assign value to pieces of flimsy green cloth. Put a caveman into the modern world, and attempt to explain the concept of money. He would likely grab the money and attempt to light in on fire for warmth. After the source of heat had been disintegrated, the caveman would quickly realize that it had stayed lit for a short time, and likely have no interest in more of such perishables.
They’re not delicious either even as wraps.
I love the word conjured here, Drew, but the abstractions systems of trade and monetary systems are harder than necessary to visualize. As you do with the caveman later, put something in our hand.
It seems logical to trade cows for honey, or to conjure exchanges where cow holders can get honey without traveling to the beekeepers’ place. It seems illogical to accept a flimsy piece of paper for the cow under any circumstances.
Later, consider putting the dollar in the caveman’s hand yourself (illustrating this assignment nicely) instead of describing the abstract concept of money to him and hoping he snatches the dollar from you.
Finally, not to be too picky, I hope, have him burn it for warmth, not attempt to. We know he succeeds since you tell us the flame soon goes out.
If such a foolish thing as fruit roll-ups, or rocks or stamped pieces of paper could become so valuable to a society, imagine what the world would be like if there was not even a tangible object to be transferred and physically handed from one to another. According to The Bubble on E-Currency Bitcon, there is now such thing as internet money, which seems like more problems than it’s worth. E-currecncy’s tangibility goes only through bits of internet code that are configured through the desktop’s electronics and transported from one person to another…
Too much faith is heavily placed on e-currency and its ability to be configured through a computer systems electronic hardware.
Fruit roll-ups is a delightful idea for currency, Angela. Beyond that, there’s not much you could do to introduce tangible details since your topic is literally an item that has no physicality. So it’s impressive that you manage to find a chance for: not even a tangible object to transfer from hand to hand. That reminder of a coin or bill trading hands is—even in its absence—a nice physical detail.
A money is needed to allow transactions and show wealth. Without it, there would be no representation of one’s wealth besides what is already physically owned. People once used cows and produce for trading. People would trade the physical object they had for what was wanted. For example, a farmer could trade his cow to another farmer for a sack of potatoes. However, both sides had to come to an agreement of the value of their items for the trade to be equal. That is where money comes in. Money would be used to equal values in place of produce or livestock. Money actually used to represent a gold and silver equivalence, but after many countries dropped that standard, money represents the amount printed on it, used as a showing of wealth, agreed on by the people.
I love the preponderance of cattle and spuds, Stephen. I would advise you to stick to the specific cows once you get there instead of going back to the herd. Here’s what I mean:
1. People once used cows and produce for trading.
You start your example with cows (not livestock) and produce (not potatoes): one specific animal and one general class of objects.
2. People would trade the physical object they had for what was wanted.
Then you step back from the cows to a VERY general class: physical objects (which would include coins, by the way).
3. For example, a farmer could trade his cow to another farmer for a sack of potatoes.
Then you move back to cows and this time swap out produce for potatoes.
Instead, you need just one sentence:
Before money, people traded what they had for what they wanted: a cow for a sack of potatoes, for example.
This technique has the added advantage of raising the question: What if the value of the two things didn’t match? To which you can offer: Or two sacks of potatoes, or a wagonload of potatoes, depending on the value of the cow.
From there, it’s easier to appreciate the value of paper money with its variety of denominations. SOOOO much easier to carry slips of paper representing the value of a wagonload of potatoes. (Easier to make change, too.)
Nice work getting all that livestock and produce in!
As a young boy my classmates and I loved yugioh cards.We loved them so much that we traded them, not only for other cards but for toys, comics, and even snacks. Looking back I realize that we formed our own money. As soon as the first boy in the class traded one card for a can of soda, a universal agreement was made in our community that determined the worth of the card. Sure it might seem silly now, but at the time it was valuable, only because we perceived it as so. Besides it was either the cards or dollars, and no one wanted dollars. I mean, you can’t play with a dollar.
This is a sensational illustration, Josue. I particularly like: we formed our own money. Great moment. (We were minting our own money?) Sorry, can’t help myself. More specifically, that universal agreement established a rate of exchange.
Can you clear up the four its?
IT might seem silly now (the triviality of trading cards for cans?), but at the time IT was valuable (the exchange protocol, or the card?) only because we perceived IT as so (the exchange protocol, or the card?). Besides IT (what we accepted in return for soda?) was either the cards or dollars.
I’d love to see a revision. Already very fine.
Thank you for your feedback. The “it” totally slipped past me.
You’re welcome. If you choose to revise, notice that you call you and your classmates “a young boy,” only possible if you suffered a severely split personality.
As a child money was an easy way to get the necessities in life: candy and toys. in a world without a set currency system those valuable objects could become the currency like the fei on the the island of yap.The candy, toys, or jewels, we valued so much could be traded for other things we wanted. Although it seems primal it is just the same as paying with money today. All we want the money for is to buy what we really want. Currency can be whatever we value whether it be a fabric bill, a giant stone, or the candy and toys we grew up wanting.
Please note you call money a child in your first few words here, Luke.
I admire the way you’ve populated your entry with lots of tangible stuff. I disagree with your analogy between candy, toys and jewels on the one hand, fei on the other, because as you say, the candy is intrinsically valuable while the fei—limestone rocks?—are not.
Reduce your use of “it” whenever you can, Luke. “Although it seems primal it is just the same as paying with money today” is much clearer when the nouns (and other antecedents) appear directly. “Paying with candy would be no more primal than paying with money today” eliminates both “it”s and is easier to understand.
Your thoughts?
Thanks for the feedback, rereading through it I am noticing my slip ups.and mistakes quite clearly
At first one may laugh at the Yaps for having such an outrageous form of currency, but their system is actually not much different than ours. Money and banking today is based on numbers in cyberspace, and most everyone’s money is stored in a bank. Someone’s whole life savings isn’t in his or her back pocket all the time. It wouldn’t be possible. Imagine a world of people with back pockets stretched from containing cold, hard cash, with people reaching into wallets flipping through a vast amount of 20 dollar bills just to buy some groceries.
Benjamin, this is just fine. Your example is amusing and effective. I wonder if I can persuade you to avoid several wandering pronouns by using the magical “we” throughout.
—in place of one
—in place of most everyone’s
—in place of someone’s
—in place of his or her
—in place of people and people again
Does it encourage you to want a single solution when you see how many makeshift constructions you’ve used to replace it?
One more thing: we sort through either a vast amount of money or a vast number of bills.
Otherwise very nice.