(4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life. (5) Burn the mathematics. We don’t need to know math to understand economics, because economics isn’t about abstract principles, it’s about microwave ovens, cow howitzers, steam engines, wet knitting, snowboards, mousetraps, and Courtney Love on permanent tour in Japan. And this brings us to one more economic exception to common sense and a thing that requires all sorts of mathematics from us every day: money. Why is this soiled, crumpled, overdecorated piece of paper bearing a picture of a rather disreputable president worth fifty dollars, while this clean, soft, white, and cleverly folded piece of paper is worth so little that I just wiped my nose on it? And what exactly is a “dollar”? If it’s a thing that I want, why do I prefer to have fifty grimy old dollars instead of one nice new one? This isn’t true of other things—puppies, for instance. But money is not a puppy; it’s not a specific thing. Money is a symbol of things in general, a symbol of how much you want things, and a symbol of how many things you’re going to get. Money is a mathematical shorthand for value (and per Alfred Marshall, we seem to burn the stuff). But what is value? The brief answer is “complicated.” Value varies according to time, place, circumstance, and whether the puppy ruined the rug. Plus, there are some things upon which it is difficult to place a value. This is why we don’t use money to measure all of our exchanges. Kids get food, clothing, and shelter from parents, and in return, parents get . . . kids. Important emotional, philosophical, and legal distinctions are made between sex and paying for sex, even if the socially approved sex costs dinner and a movie. We need economic goods all the time, but we don’t always need money for them, and it’s a good thing, since for most of human existence, there wasn’t any. Money didn’t exist, or, rather, everything that existed was money. If I sold you a cow for six goats, you were charging it on your Goat Card. Anything that’s used to measure value, if it has value itself, is “commodity money.” Societies that didn’t have fifty-dollar bills picked one or two commodities as proto-simoleons. The Aztecs used cocoa beans for money, North Africans used salt (hence “salary”), medieval Norwegians used butter and dried cod, and their ATM machines were a mess.
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