Money is needed to allow transactions, to measure values of items. Without it, trading would always require possessions. The value of items are priced by many factors, such as supply, demand, or rarity. 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.
However, over time money went from being something with actual value, to being an abstract representation of wealth. Money cycles through people and banks, as described in “423: The Invention of Money.” The money be lent from a bank to a storeowner, who then pays the employees, who then preforms a transaction elsewhere, and the money is re-banked into an account. Without money, people would still have to trade possessions to preform transactions, similarly to how cows and produce were used in trades and barters.
Everyone lives off money, with a similar concept worldwide. In “The Island of Stone Money,” Milton Friedman tells a story of the Yap, people living on an island using large limestone rocks cut from a cave hundreds of miles away as a currency. Just the acknowledgement of ownership of the unmovable stones was satisfying enough to the Yap to withstand their currency. However, now banks and smaller currencies are used to represent money.
Friedman also reiterates the story of the French’s gold reserve in the US before the Great Depression. The French asked the US to convert their values into solid gold bricks, and store them in a vault still on US grounds. Even though the gold was still on US grounds, the French’s gold reserves went up, and the US’ down, which also helped usher in the Depression. Similarly, the Germans marked the Yap’s stone currency with paint as a fine for the Yap not building the previously demanded roads. This caused the Yap to feel impoverished, and hastily build the roads. The events show that the concept of money is absurd. The valuables being marked as belonging to another caused the Yap felt impoverished and the US’ reserves to decrease.
Money is powerful. It can manipulate people, cause events, and much more. Money even has the power to change the economy that affects us. Such as Japan, who recently approved for $116 Billion to be spent just to help stimulate the economy, which will help many small businesses.
However with passing time, money became more digital. Money is now commonly transferred through virtual transactions, where amounts are digitally moved between accounts, which makes money even more conceptual. In “The bubble bursts on e-currency Bitcoin,” cons of online currencies are revealed. A Bitcoin is an online currency created by a programmer who wanted a currency independent of banks. There are no actual ‘coins,’ just code. The currency had fluctuating values, and was soon mined by hackers. The e-money, anonymous to banks could also be easily used for drug deals and money laundering. Recently, the 1,000 dollar-bill had been discontinued to attempt to create problems for dug deals and other large “transactions.” The Bitcoin allows these transactions to continue take place, finger-print free.
In the end, money is nothing more than a representation of wealth. Originally used to represent a fixed amount of gold, money now represents nothing but the amount on its face, after the gold standard was dropped in most countries. With a fixed amount of it in the world, people have just agreed to used it as a measure of wealth.
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Counterintuitive Fall 2022 
Starting was STILL a struggle… Even having A02 to reference to!
Well, Professor, what do you think?
Feedback please! 😀
P1. You’ve managed to eliminate all the extraneous material from your paragraph, Stephen. Now, it’s time to decide what it’s really about and make a provocative claim you can then prove.
I agree money is needed to allow transactions, but that’s pretty obvious, right? We can’t buy goods and services without offering something of value in return and we’ve decided to use money.
Is money needed to “show wealth”? That would presume that “showing wealth” is a goal, like performing transactions.
If “the only representation of wealth” is our possessions, what difference does that make?
Do you see the problem? You’re combining two very different premises; 1) that money performs an essential service, and 2) that it is a way to show off.
Which one do you want us to care about? Or do you want to show us only that money has both essential and nonessential functions? Which claim really interests you, Stephen?
When you conclude with “however,” you prepare us for a contradiction. What is it? You’ve already called money a “representation,” so calling it an abstract concept is no contradiction at all. Then you repeat verbatim that it’s a representation of wealth for the third time.
I’m going to read the rest of your essay now, Stephen, then come back to finalize my reaction to your introduction.
OK, I suggest you try hard to write a topic sentence in each paragraph that makes clear that you’re writing “episodes” of a series to demonstrate the money has evolved from a tangible piece of something intrinsically valuable (a shaped bit of a precious metal stamped with a head to help authenticate it) to a tangible object of no intrinsic value (a shaped bit of linen printed with a leader’s head) to something entirely intangible (a bit of digital code stamped with no image at all).
Your introduction therefore needs to alert us to your plan. You could say, for example: ever since humans have wanted to trade valuable items (cows for potatoes, for example), we’ve had to somehow measure the values of the items being traded. How many potatoes a cow was worth was decided by a local market for cows and potatoes. Their relative rarity and deliciousness were among the many factors that set the price. Over time, the questions and answers have become increasingly abstract. How many bitcoin a cow is worth depends entirely on how strong is our faith in the bitcoin today. The cow has a fairly steady value, but the bitcoin can buy a cow one day, only beef broth the next.
Do you see my point? With an introduction like this, we haven’t told the whole story, only created interest in it. But the intro’s observations are more coherent, and much more closely related to the subject matter that follows than: Money is only a representation of our wealth.
I hope this helps you, Stephen.
I tried to make P1. more clear.
Paragraph Objectives:
P1. Intro.
P2-P3. Show how money is used/Has been used.
P4-P5. Impact/Power of money.
P6. Show how money has become more “abstract” with bitcoin as example.
P7. Conclude.
^ That’s what I had tried to do throughout my rewrite.
Feedback?
I see that those were your objectives, Stephen. My point is that’s too many individual objectives for a coherent essay.
An essay requires a primary theme, thesis, argument that draws readers through by promising a resolution to a question or problem. There is no problem to: Let’s talk about money, how it’s used, what powers it has, how it has become more abstract.
Those paragraphs need to be points on a journey (the landscapes got less wild, more “civilized” as we traveled from the highlands to the outskirts of Paris), not random reports from a moving car (France has lots of different areas, some hilly, some flat plains, some suburbs like American cities).
I suggested the theme that money has become increasingly abstract since we traded cows for potatoes because much of your essay supported that theme. It still does, but your revised introduction continues to make a variety of claims that don’t.
This time I suggest starting with your final claim: “Over time money has evolved from something with actual value to an abstract representation of wealth.” Why did that happen? is the question your readers will want answered. You have answers to that question.
Trading cows for potatoes is very clumsy. The guy with the potatoes might not want a cow. (I imagine the first solution was to create exchanges where I could bring my cow and find potatoes. Somebody at that place would make the trade.) Once you have a starting point and a direction, you can plan a smooth journey to Paris and point out only the landscape features that reinforce your progress toward that destination.
Conference notes: For rewrite…
-Reorganize the clusters of information
-Transition between the clusters
-Be clearer with wording
(Exercise practice from conference)
P1. People used to use livestock and bartering to trade because they needed a way to measure the value of items, therefore money was created.
P2. Money cycles around because it is a representation of wealth, therefore one did not need to always use items or bartering for transactions.
P3. The Yap used large stones to represent wealth, similarly to banks now, which shows that people live off a similar concept of money.