what is money

Take a banknote from your pocket and read it. "I promise to pay the bearer, on demand…" Pay him what? What Is Money? is a 25-minute animated history of money, and of the argument about what it is that has run since Aristotle: a thing, like gold, or a promise, like a debt. It is drawn in the style of banknote engraving and follows one coin through the whole story. Heads, a promise. Tails, a thing. Along the way: why nobody has ever found the village where barter came first. The clay tablets of Mesopotamia, where money was a unit of account long before it was a coin. Why coins appeared in Lydia and in China at almost the same moment. An empire that ran on knotted string. A stone at the bottom of the Pacific that was perfectly good money. Paper money in China six centuries before Europe. The notched sticks that burned down the Palace of Westminster. Locke, Newton and John Law. And six real experiments, from a prisoner-of-war camp that priced everything in cigarettes to an Ireland that shut its banks for six and a half months and hardly missed them. It ends with the question that matters now: where the money in your bank account comes from, and why every piece of money is a thing and a promise at once. CHAPTERS 0:00 The promise on a banknote 1:15 I. The Fable: barter, Adam Smith, and the village nobody found 3:20 The Kula ring 4:00 II. The Tablet: Mesopotamia, debt, and the oldest word for freedom 6:20 III. The Stamp: the first coins, armies and taxes 8:19 IV. Shells, Stones & Knots: the Inca, the Aztecs, Yap, the cowrie 10:42 V. The Paper: Song China, tally sticks, the Bank of England 13:05 VI. The Quarrel: Locke, Newton, John Law, gold, Knapp, Keynes 15:53 VII. The Experiments 16:10 A prisoner-of-war camp 16:50 Ireland without banks 17:31 The stamped money of Wörgl 18:04 The babysitting co-op 18:31 Strangers in a laboratory 18:46 Somalia without a state 19:24 VIII. The Two Columns: how banks create money 21:03 The pyramid of promises 22:09 Heads, tails, both, and neither 22:47 Money is memory 23:24 The Ledger: Bitcoin, and the lines on a banknote 24:44 Credits SOURCES AND FURTHER READING Aristotle, Politics I.9 and Nicomachean Ethics V.5 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book I, chapter 4 W. S. Jevons, Money and the Mechanism of Exchange (1875) Carl Menger, "On the Origin of Money" (1892) G. F. Knapp, The State Theory of Money (1905) W. H. Furness, The Island of Stone Money (1910) A. Mitchell-Innes, "What is Money?" (1913) Bronisław Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) J. M. Keynes, A Treatise on Money (1930) R. A. Radford, "The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp" (1945) J. and R. Sweeney, "Monetary Theory and the Great Capitol Hill Baby Sitting Co-op Crisis" (1977) Caroline Humphrey, "Barter and Economic Disintegration" (1985) Keith Hart, "Heads or Tails? Two Sides of the Coin" (1986) Milton Friedman, "The Island of Stone Money" (1991) Denise Schmandt-Besserat, Before Writing (1992) Narayana Kocherlakota, "Money is Memory" (1998) David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) Perry Mehrling, "The Inherent Hierarchy of Money" (2012) Camera, Casari and Bigoni, "Money and trust among strangers" (2013) Bank of England, "Money creation in the modern economy" (2014) W. Luther and L. White, "Positively Valued Fiat Money after the Sovereign Disappears: The Case of Somalia" A NOTE ON CONTESTED POINTS Historians still argue about several things in this film: how far silver changed hands in early Mesopotamia, whether soldiers' pay explains the first coins, when Indian coinage began, and whether early Chinese cowries were money or treasure. The narration says so where it matters. Corrections are welcome in the comments. #money #economics #history #animation