It seems counterintuitive that an item with supposed value truly has no value, but money is the epitome of this statement. We all have dollar bills, whether stored in a bank or under our mattress, but what is it? I agree with Richard Davies, who stated in a book review for the New York Times that “money is a confidence trick: an i.o.u. printed on cheap material that promises the holder nothing more than paper money.” There still must be some money value; we use it daily to buy goods and services.
However, Jacob Goldstein writes in Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing that “money is a made-up thing, a shared fiction.” Money is nothing more and nothing less than paper printed at will. As Davies explains in The Fiction That Makes the World Go Round, money is perceived as valuable because we use it to exchange goods and services, but the days of actual valuable money seem to be long behind us.