The Invention of Money

When The Man With the Money made his appearance, we not only did not know his name, we also did not know where the money came from.  We didn't at that time care where the money was coming from, as that it was being handed out to us free of charge.  I think even in the realm of the conscious we don't care where the money we get comes from, as long as it comes out of someone else's pocket and finds its way into ours.

Have you ever stopped to consider where money comes from?  Well, some of you will tell me that it comes from the mint, and/or the Bureau of Engraving and Printing if you're resident stateside.  Others are aware that it is issued by banks, and others will say that you get it by working.  There are all sorts of answers to the question "Where does money come from?" and I think that you will also get several answers if you ask the question "Just exactly what is money, anyway?".  I think in order to get a grasp on how to answer these two questions, we need to examine just how it was that money came to be invented.

It is commonly accepted that as of this writing, we have had 5000 years of civilization.....maybe 6000.  Well, let's split the difference and say that civilization itself was invented 5500 years ago, OK?  I think it's safe to say that 5500 years ago the human species were speaking languages, organized into families and tribes, and that the prime function of your average human being was day to day survival.  Survival would have come from learning how to harvest food, learning how to hunt for it, and also in the domestication of livestock in order to get food and clothing.  Somewhere along the way some trades emerged, as that people were figuring out how to make bricks and cut wood.  They were figuring out how to dig ore out of the ground and to convert it into metal.  Various occupations were beginning to emerge.

The thing of it is about specializing in an occupation, is that if you're a builder, what you build isn't something that you can eat.  So what you do is you build a house for somebody, and that somebody gives you some food, or maybe some livestock with which to turn into food.  What you have now is trade.  In this simple example, trade is done by the barter system.  There isn't any money involved since no one commodity has yet emerged as a common commodity to trade or to use as a reference in fixing a value onto something or some other commodity.

About 3000 BC or thereabouts, the Egyptians were aware of gold.  It was first used as a form of adornment but it also emerged as a measure of wealth.  It wasn't the only measure of wealth.  In the Book of Genesis, Chapter 13, Old Testament patriarch Abram, as he was then know, is described as being very wealthy in livestock, silver, and gold.  What this is telling us is that wealth, at that time, was viewed in terms of two precious metals and livestock.  Any one of these commodities could be traded for any of the other two commodities, as well as for any other commodity.  Thus, we already have a system of economics in place, and although it was still based on barter, gold and silver start to emerge as a convenient medium of exchange. I guess that you could call this "money" in a somewhat loose sense, but if you're defining money as "coins" of a uniform standard or of a common currency (cigarettes and whiskey have been known to function as money) we're not quite there yet as far as money being invented.

Around 600 BC, that began to change.  The historian Heredotus credits the Lydians of Asia Minor as being the world's first producer of coins.  They were made out of electrum, a gold-silver alloy that flowed to them out of a nearby alluvial plain.  They found that these were convenient units of exchange, and they also found that those they traded with to obtain their goods also liked these units of exchange.  Coins quickly spread to being used by the Greeks, and later on, the Romans, as well as other kingdoms.

With the invention of coins, some other things were invented too.

That will be the subject of my next entry.

The Man With the Money

Way back when I was in the fifth grade, the 1968-1969 timeframe, I had a dream one night that I remember well to this very day.  There are a few others from my childhood that I could reminisce about, but this particular one seems to stand out from the rest, and also seems to have a relevance to our current events that no other dream from that time period has.  It might have inspired an episode for the Twilight Zone, or a short story, but it did neither of those.  As that I have been thinking on and off about that dream a lot lately, it is inspiring a blog post.  I'm even going to give this dream a title.  The title of this dream is "The Man With the Money".

In this dream, The Man With the Money came to our fifth grade class.  He was wearing a short sleeve blue shirt, red bow tie, white pants, a straw hat, and he wore a smile that would have caused the CrackerJack Man some intense jealousy.  He was in his mid 50s or something like that, cleanshaven, white/gray short hair, with radiant blue eyes to match his smile.  The Man With the Money didn't tell us his name.  We never knew what it was nor did any of us ask.  It didn't seem to matter.  He was The Man With the Money.  The Man With the Money seemed to have an unlimited supply of money, and he was giving it to us.

The Man With the Money gave me a fifty dollar bill.  He also gave me a few twenties, tens, fives, and ones.  He handed me a half dollar, which was also neat because when I was a kid you just couldn't get a Kennedy half dollar.  The Man With the Money not only gave me a shiny new half dollar with Kennedy on, he also gave me some quarters and some other change.

The Man With the Money also gave away money to the other kids.  He had a lot of it.  It seemed that once you got done looking at the money that he gave you, that you could go back to him and he would give you even more money.  It wasn't like anything I had ever seen before.  The Man With the Money had this endless supply of the dough and he was willing to give it away!  And more importantly, he wasn't going to run out of it either. 

Needless to say, The Man With the Money was very popular with us.  We loved him.  We were glad that he came to us!  I mean, this guy was better than Santa Claus.  Forget about the toys or our other wants.  Forget about what we needed.  The Man With the Money was visiting our school, and he was going to make sure that we had all the money that we wanted!

As what happens with all dreams of this nature, it came to an abrupt end.  I found myself in my bed.  I was so sure that I had some money that I looked under the covers for it.  I asked, "where did my money go?"  It was gone!  It had disappeared!

I remember feeling cheated.  I had had, in my possession, a whole lot of money that had been freely given to me, and all of a sudden, it was gone.

OK.  So why did I post this?  Where am I going with this?

Stay tuned.