3 Responses to Stone Money Rough Draft—Youngthug03

1. ichverdustehier says:

   September 24, 2023 at 7:24 pm

   what’s the word count minimum btw

   Reply
   • davidbdale says:

     September 25, 2023 at 2:55 am

     This is a 1000-word essay.

     Reply
2. davidbdale says:

   September 24, 2023 at 7:34 pm

   Thanks for posting early, YoungThug (and for asking for Feedback Please). I hope the feedback I leave for you here will be helpful both to you and to your classmates who may read along.

   I recognize you’ve posted this as an early draft and that you’re not particularly comfortable with your approach to the assignment. That’s OK, too. When in doubt, post early. no matter how rough or incomplete your draft, and ask for help. I couldn’t be happier about helping out. Early feedback on a rough draft is MUCH BETTER than posting two weeks late because you wanted to continue working on your first effort.

   We won’t have time or space to analyze every aspect of your first draft, so let’s start with Argument. In later sessions, if you ask for them, we can address Rhetoric, Mechanics, and Scholarship. I’ll leave notes on every paragraph.

   P1. What would you do as a child if you saw a dollar on the street? I would have picked it up as a child and showed my mom immediately. I would have thought I was rich because now I had a dollar. However, if I saw a dollar on the street today, I would just keep walking. Money is valued and seen differently by different ages of people, different cultures of people, and even the form in which the money is. From learning and researching about the economy these past few days, I have realized there is so much more to money than I initially thought. Money is being spent and used every day throughout the US. Yet, only some worldwide use the same currency, let alone have the same value for their money as everyone else. In addition, money is just used as a placeholder to show value or wealth while it can be much bigger than that.

   This introduction covers a lot of important aspects of the odd thing we call money, YoungThug, but that “lots of aspects” approach is its problem. Instead of preparing your readers for a theme you can follow throughout, you touch on:
   1. Wealth is different at different ages and in different circumstances
   2. Money takes different physical forms
   3. Currencies vary worldwide
   4. Money is a “placeholder for value.”
   It might be possible to mention these or others or even more aspects of money than these, YT, but you give each of them equal weight. The result is that we don’t know what your thesis will be besides “money weird.”

   One example of one form of currency that was used was limestone. The Yap people used this to trade or buy things from each other on their island. Milton Friedman explained in his article titled “The Island Of Stone Money” stating “[A]s their island yields no metal, they have had recourse to stone; stone, on which labor in fetching and fashioning has been expended, is as truly a representation of labor as the mined and minted coins of civilisation.” (Freidman , 1991).

   You don’t indicate why you’ve selected the Yap to single out for their currency, YoungThug. They use limestone, but you express no surprise. Friedman says stuff, but you don’t alert us to anything in particular.

   Due to having no metal on their island, the Yap people used boats to go over 100 miles around from their island to retrieve limestones and bring them back to their island to use as money. These limestones were not minor; most would not move from their spot on the island when sold or used. The ownership of the limestone would just change to the next person.

   Again, your presentation is very matter-of-fact and not persuasive of anything in particular. Surely it’s odd to our understanding that an object so valuable that it could buy a house or serve as a dowry DOESN’T MOVE when it changes hands. But we wouldn’t know that to read your description.

   The people of Yap also did not refer to their currency as stones or limestones. Instead, they called it fei. These large pieces of Fei seem to be unrealistic due to their size, the location in which they are from, and since they are so heavy and can’t be moved easily. However, all of the Yap people agreed that the Fei had value and it was their currency that they would use on the island.

   Agreed the size of the stones is remarkable. Disagree that the distance from Yap is remarkable: when we used gold as money, it was often mined continents away from where it was circulated. That it doesn’t move is truly remarkable, but that it doesn’t have to be “locally possessed” by its owner is the strange part, and you don’t mention that. Please do remember YOUR READER has not listened to the podcast or read the Friedman dissertation. It’s YOUR JOB as the writer who did the research to SHARE just enough context with readers so they’ll understand what’s TRULY REMARKABLE about what you’ve learned.

   Thinking about that today, it seems funny or weird that they would just use some rocks or stones, but it is not that much different than how the economy in the US works today.

   Your work here is much too similar to the essay of your classmate BlogUser. I’ll leave the same response to you that I left for BU, or you can go read it yourself. “The Yap economy may be just like the US economy, but you can’t just say so, YoungThug. We need your explanation WHILE you’re making your claim or immediately after. DON’T string us along. I’m going to hold my breath. Tell me how our currency is like massive stone disks before I have to breathe.

   P2. Today, we use cash, checks, and banks to exchange money in the US. However, we started with gold and then moved to cash. We never see the gold but simply understand that cash, check, and money in the bank has value. This is similar to the people of Yap and their Fei.

   I don’t see how the Yap economy is like the US economy based on this, YoungThug. The Yap DO IN FACT see their huge fei hulking on the landscape, except for the one that resides at the bottom of the sea (but you didn’t mention that one, so your READER knows nothing about it).

   When changing from gold to cash, the Bank of France became involved. In the article “The Island of Stone Money,” Milton Friedman explained that when the New York bank handed over the gold to the Bank of France by changing the name of ownership and word of mouth, it upset the people of the US. The people of the US could not fully understand and trust that the US dollar was of as much value as the amount of gold given to France. Later on, the people realized that the US’s new currency was valuable since they could purchase and use the money in the same way with no issues.

   I passed out waiting for your explanation. Your text is much too similar to BlogUsers, YoungThug, so be careful to guard against overinfluence. Plus, BlogUser’s paragraph isn’t very persuasive, so it doesn’t make a good model. The example of the French Labels anecdote DOES provide a good lesson about currency ownership, though. The Germans “took” the Yap’s money by painting black crosses on them; the US “gave” the French money by labeling gold in some drawers. In neither case did money physically change hands, but in BOTH the donor gave something to or took something from the recipient, and the recipient felt either impoverished or enriched.

   There are many similarities between the US dollar, and the Yap people’s Fei. Both currencies DEPEND ON THEIR POPULATIONS TO HAVE FAITH IN THE SPENDABILITY OF THEIR MONEY. The Yap people used their limestone to show wealth, while today, the US uses paper dollar bills to show their wealth. How we today use money to buy things is no different than how the Yap people did, just in different ways.

   It’s actually hard to say how the Yap economy and ours are similar these days, YoungThug, but a few things are common. We both trust our money. We don’t hand over cash for big purchases very often. We trust that other people have money if they can make us wealthy when they make purchases from us.

   I hope that was helpful, YoungThug. My primary advice for your next draft would be to select a specific aspect of money you can focus on throughout your several examples of different economies. The most common choice for most students is “the increasingly abstract nature of money.” That certainly applies to the Yap’s sunken fei, the totally digital nature of our bank accounts, the entirely invented Brazilian Real, and Bitcoin—a currency that NO country stands behind.

   Please respond in a Reply below, and by all means request Feedback Please again as soon as you’ve made substantial revisions.

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