Hidden Brain - Emotional Currency

Episode Date: January 14, 2020

What's the point of money? The answer might seem obvious: we need it to get paid for our work, and to buy the things we need. But there's also a deeper way to look at the role of money in our lives. This week we explore an anthropologist's take on the origin story of money. What if the cash and coins we carry are not just tools for transactions, but manifestations of human relationships?

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the spring of 1985, Bill Mora was wrapping up his high school education and getting ready to move to Pukipsy, New York. Come fall, he'd be starting his freshman year at Vassar College. Like many incoming college students, Bill was concerned about how he would pay for his education. My financial aid package in my freshman year was basically a combination of student loans and work study. But at the end of Bill sophomore year,

he received an unexpected letter in the mail. I get this letter congratulating me for receiving something called the Hager Scholars Award. And the letter explained that the award would take the place in my financial aid package of my student loan. And here's what it said, this is an interest-free loan with a moral obligation to repay. And I was like, what? Like, what does that mean? Okay, I will take the money. Like, you know, I think my young self was like,

I will take the money, and I don't have to have a student loan anymore. Thank you very much. It wasn't that simple though. The phrase moral obligation to repay, stuck with Bill, it made him think. So, you know, at the time, I was like, what is that? I don't know what this is. I showed it to my mom.

She's like, yeah, it's just a grant. You're fine. Just take the money. But, you know, I graduated, I show it to my mom, she's like yeah, it's just a grant, you're fine, just take the money. But you know, I graduated, I went to graduate school, I became a professor, I paid off all my actual student loans, and when I had done so, I thought to myself, oh wait, I'm not done yet, there's that Hager award. And so I like, you know, go online and look it up. And I'm like, yeah, there it is. Like, I have a moral obligation to repay. I better start repaying this thing. And that letter, that line, that thing about how, you know, you have a moral obligation, it

caught me, it grabbed me and pulled me right in. The award made explicit something that's often overlooked in the way we think about money. At its core, money is about human relationships. And at a macro level, loans and gifts and paychecks and the dollars that come out of ATMs are clues to a culture, even the structure of a nation. I'd like to cash these nickels and I'll have them in quarters please. Thank you so much. On a good day it's about a half a million dollars. I'm a man. You got a dollar? Open your purse.

I see you right there. Give it. Give me your dollar and I'll have you cash. Well that's right. You can go out and get yourself whatever you want. Hi dad. I just wanted to let you know that I'm just going to win the million dollars. Well, that's right. You can go out and get yourself whatever you want. Hi, Dad. Hi. I just wanted to let you know that I'm going to win the million dollars. This week on Hidden Brain, we examine the intangible elements of cold, hard cash. Coins and currency are not just tokens of economic value, but markers of emotional connection and shared history. There's a story we tell about what the world looked like before we invented money. It's a story built on the idea of butter.

This is the standard story that we read in the economics textbooks and that has been handed down to us at least since the mid-19th century if not before. This again is anthropologist Bill Morer, who told us the story of his moral obligation to repay that student loan. He's now the dean of the School of Social Sciences at the University of California Irvine, and he studies the origins and nature of money. And it goes something like this. In the beginning, before there was money, if I had something that you needed,

I would approach you with that thing and see if you had anything that I needed. So if you wanted some fish and you needed some acorns and I had them, I could approach you with those acorns and we could basically barter on the spot, figuring out how many acorns equals how many fish. The problem with barter is it really does depend on us each meeting each other's needs in that moment.

And so the origin story of money that we have is that humans invented money essentially to be a mediator in these sorts of exchanges. In other words, if you, for example, had acorns, but I didn't actually want acorns, I wanted pots, for example, and I wanted to trade my fish for pots, and all you had to offer me was acorns,

then essentially we couldn't negotiate. And economists sometimes have a term for this. They say that butter requires something called a double coincidence of wants. What is that? The double coincidence of wants essentially means that in that moment, I've got what you need. You've got what I need.

There's a coincidence of our needs in the instance. And that rarely happens, right? So the idea here is that humans wizard up this kind of third thing, money, this magical substance that can put all things on one scale of value and use that as sort of their measuring stick, then, to make these kinds of transactions. So there's a problem with the story, and the problem is that it runs into some facts.

I'm wondering if you can tell me about the work that you and other anthropologists have done, for example, in the Highlands of New Guinea, that call into question this origin story. The problem is that when we look around the world and in the historical and archeological record, for instances of this kind of direct barter, unfortunately, we don't find it. What we find instead really are systems where people are taking some kind of object, let's take a kind of a big shell valuable in the highlands of New Guinea, and using it to mark relationships. They're using it to mark relationships among people, among kin, that serve as a kind of indicator of enduring obligations that people have to one another.

It's kind of like an open-ended IOU, right? If I give you this big shell thing, then that implies for us, but also for everyone around us, that we have a bond, we have a relationship that will essentially allow us to have a flow of goods between each other and between our families for the rest of our lives, essentially. So it's not so much that I'm giving you this shell so that you give me some pigs. It's I'm giving you this shell, so as to say, hey, someday I'm going to need some pigs. Some other day I might need your help in the field.

Some other day you might need me to help you out with something. This shell kind of marks that relationship. It signifies to everyone around us that we have these ties of enduring obligation and responsibility. So in other words, it's not about a transaction, at least not in an immediate sense, it's about a transaction that perhaps unfolds over time more to do with obligation. My son is marrying your daughter, I'm giving you this precious necklace that I have and my expectation is over the next 20 years, our families are going to help one another in

all kinds of ways. That's right. It's really a memory device to indicate an ongoing enduring relationship, an ongoing set of obligations. And is some of this connected with the more basic idea, if you will, of just gift giving? When you think about gifts, part of what we're doing when I'm giving you a gift.

And presumably, this is true for people all over the world in different cultures. The gift is partly my telling you here something nice for you, but it also binds us in some kind of relationship that says down the line, you know, it's not explicit, but there's some implicit understanding that you're going to do something nice for me down the road. This is exactly how it works. Yeah, and the the early anthropologist Marcel Mos wrote about this quite explicitly saying that in the gift there's the obligation to give, there's the obligation to receive, but then also the obligation to reciprocate.

This obligation to reciprocate can be seen across human societies and across time. Some years ago, Bill stumbled on another interesting example of this. He was in Washington, DC, visiting a colleague who worked at the Smithsonian. She curated the museum's collections that relate to the history of money. Bill was with her inside a vault. And there's an area in the vault in a kind of long closet. And she and her interns call it Narnia because it's sort of like the the wardrobe and Narnia you go in and it goes on and on and on forever.

Inside this Narnia, there are boxes upon boxes of uncatalog artifacts. So I was there once with her and she said to me, do you want to go to Narnia? And I said, sure. So we go in, pull out a box at random, bring it out. She opens the box and there's a ton of these clay tablets covered in kuneiform and there's a sort of moment where both of us back away from the box. You know and I'm like oh don't touch anything don't break anything don't breathe.

The clay tablets that they pulled out of the box were used 5,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia. They were used to keep records of obligations. When people lived in small groups, monitoring obligations was easy. I just remembered what you had said and done, and you remembered what I had said and done. But as human societies grew larger. People needed a way to systematically keep track of who owed what to whom. And we just can't keep track of all of that in our heads. What emerges essentially are systems of public administration,

where you've got centralized authorities who are responsible for organizing irrigation, organizing production so that you can have these larger scale settlements who set up systems of record keeping in the case that you mentioned in Mesopotamia using clay tablets so that people basically know what's going on, who's doing what, who owes what to whom. And you don't have the situation of something like a coin circulating from hand to hand

to pay your laborers, for example. Instead, you have these systems of tablets that are basically receipts, keeping track of things like labor, and then promising that, you know, after a certain period, if the labor has been done, the laborer is entitled to X. In a lot of our ancient Mesopotamian receipts, it's things like beer and grain and livestock. And it's just unbelievably magical to see these materials, and then to imagine the system that created them and the systems that they supported. It's really quite an incredible thing

to just put yourself back into that world, into a world that's so alien from the kind of system of market-based society that we live in today, and think about what it would be like to be that scribe, or to be the person who is, you know, asking the scribe to write this tablet, or to be, you know, the common person whose whole life is subjected to a kind of organization of production

and a system of centralized administration based on these written records based on writing. This isn't a market the way that we traditionally understand markets, right? It's not sort of the idea that people come together in a place and exchange goods either by barter or by money. This is much more a kind of hierarchical system of organization to essentially allow for the creation of these larger-scale societies. So you've talked about this idea of centralized administration, and in some ways this brings us to another aspect of our story. We've talked a little bit about the idea of gift-giving and mutual obligations.

We've talked about the idea of receipts and record-keeping and essentially basic contracts that sort of bind us to one another over time. But talk also about this idea of the central administration of these systems and the introduction of what eventually become authorities that basically are overseeing how the whole system works. So to make a money work, you need something that is both that system of reckoning and record keeping, but also an authorizing power that says, in effect, this is the way that we keep our records here. So even in the Highlands of New Guinea, and then again in Mesopotamia, you've got both of those things going on, the system of record keeping and the authorizing force.

And that's essentially what we have with modern money still today. We don't necessarily think of it that way. But basically money is a unit of account that in our case is authorized by the state. The state essentially sets the standard, and then that standard is used by people to reckon their relationships with one another, figure their debts and credits. people to reckon their relationships with one another, figure their debts and credits. So, the story that emerges about the origins of money is very different in the way we usually think about it. In this model embraced by Bill and other anthropologists, money is partly a mechanism of social obligation and partly a mechanism to keep track of who was what to

whom. It's also a mechanism that cements the relationship between ordinary people and authorities who maintain records. In other words, it's a story about power. Stay with us. You've heard the old joke, nothing is certain except death in Texas. Now, taxes may feel inevitable to us, but they were not always a part of human existence. Bill Morris has systems of taxation emerged as societies expanded and became more complex. So in most of these systems, what you see is the development of something like attacks or a tribute or a tithe, where a thing is sort of put out into the world that can start off with just being grain or something like that.

But often what happened in ancient societies is rulers would take something that symbolize their own elite status, usually precious metal, and send some of it out into the world and say, here, you know, you get this in exchange for serving in my army, or you get this as a token to hold on to to remind you that you are subject to my rule. And in return, on some regular cycle every year, every seven years, you're expected to bring some of that back to me to demonstrate your field to demonstrate your loyalty. And in effect, what we get is the origin of the first coins, things that look like coins to you and me, that are really serving as these kind of political tokens that express sovereignty.

So I would get one of these things, and then I'm obligated at some point to, you know, get one of them or some of them back to you, that instantly creates a market in these things. Everybody has to get their hands on these new tokens of political authority in order to give some back to the center. So what's interesting is if I'm a king and I'm basically saying, you not only need to pay me taxes but you need to pay me these taxes using my tokens, using my system of currency. The currency not only gains value because of course people are now trading the currency and doing things with it involving transactions, but it also sort of binds them to me and establishes my power over them because that's I'm basically

saying this is the language in which transactions can take place and that's extraordinarily powerful. It's unbelievably powerful and it's sort of the invisible power of the king in that sense. You can see this invisible power of the state each year when it comes time to file out tax returns. In the United States, citizens are obliged not only to pay taxes, but also to figure out how much they owe. Here's a sketch from the social media platform TikTok about this idea.

Yeah, so you actually owe us money, it's called taxes? Okay, how much money do I owe you guys? Actually, you have to figure that out. Okay, so I can just like pay whatever I want. Well, not exactly. Like, we know, like, the exact number of how much you owe, but you also have to figure it out. Well, what if I mess up and get the number wrong? You got a prison.

That's hilarious. So, talk about this idea of Bill, which is that some ways this is how many Americans feel about that taxes. What is this? Tell us in some ways about the nature of money, power, and the state. Yeah, well, you know, it's sort of right out there, isn't it? That, you know, it's sort of on you to report your income. And if you do it wrong or, you know, don't quite get it right,

we're going to come after you through an audit or something. It really does kind of elevate the power of the state above us mere mortals. And, and again, represents, you know, the authority the state has both in terms of the standard of account or money. And in terms of daily affairs having to do with that money. So one of the interesting things to consider here is that they might be actually different competing ideas about the nature and origin of money.

You know, one of them says it's transactional, it's functional, this is sort of what you learn in economics 101. The model that you're painting is that this is much more about relationships and mutual obligations and histories of those obligations and how those are recorded and preserved over time and the state authorities that might be involved in preserving them and their relationship to you and so forth. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about what happened when these different systems, if you will, clashed with one another. You've talked about how when European colonists went to Africa and Asia, in some ways they encountered different systems and the ones they were used to, and in some ways you had not just a clash of people and a clash of civilizations, if you will, but a clash of how you define what money actually is during these encounters. Yeah, Europeans consistently misidentified things like shells or metal rods or bracelets and things like that around the world as the kind of money that they were used to.

And so what would they do? Well, one thing that they would do is they would forcibly introduce their own standard, that's kind of a typical means of colonization and subjugation in Sub-Saharan Africa, was to demand that colonized people pay taxes in European money, right, that then meant that they had to get that European money, which meant that they would have to do things like grow crops or sell things or engage in the slave trade or something like that that would generate that money they could give back. Or in other cases, European powers would just reset the standard by saying, you know, these shells before were good, but this other shell is better.

And we're going to demand our taxes in this other shell. Again, similarly setting up a market in these other shells, which then completely contorted the societies that were subject to colonial rule. Hmm. So it's interesting, money in some ways was a tool of colonization. Absolutely. I think money has always been a tool

of political authority. I think money has always been a tool of political authority. Build says political authority is drawn not just from issuing money, but from the act of designing it. The images you see on a bill or a coin can say a great deal about the nation's values and aspirations. In 2015, the Treasury Secretary invited Bill and other scholars to Washington DC.

They would have discussed a proposed redesign of the $10 bill. I was invited to come and just have a kind of brainstorming session about what could be done, what sorts of figures would be appropriate, what sorts of iconography would be appropriate for the new banknote. And it really was like a kind of graduate seminar. We just kind of had a wide-ranging conversation about women's history in the United States, about the history of slavery and emancipation and the civil rights movement, and about the kinds of things that you could do on a bank note, the kinds of stories that you could tell on the money about the nation, and the ways

those stories could make people feel included in the nation in a new way. Again, this was happening in 2015. That was the same year that the musical Hamilton debuted on Broadway. And it reminded everyone of the role that Alexander Hamilton played in establishing our banking system. The figure on the ten currently is Alexander Hamilton and then we thought maybe we want to keep him. So Bill and the group decide that instead of redesigning the $10 bill, they should update the 20.

Since the 20 is a more ubiquitous bank node, it's the one that comes out of all the ATMs. It's much more common in people's daily transactions than the 10. The image of Andrew Jackson, the 7th president of the United States, has been on the $20 bill since 1928. Jackson's tenure was marked by the signing of the Indian Removal Act, which resulted in the debts of thousands of indigenous people. Bill and other members of the group in Washington felt a woman should take Jackson's place. They gravitated toward a hero of the underground railroad.

There was really strong consensus around Harriet Tubman in part because having her on the bill would help to sketch and then complete a story arc about American society, about increasing the franchise, about emancipation, about the civil rights movement. And one of the things that got all of us very excited was when the then treasurer of the United States, Rosie Rios, passed around her favorite bank note, which is the $2 bill. And she passed it around for us to look at.

And she's like, take a look at the back. We look at the back. We look at the back. Unlike all of the other American bank notes, the $2 bill has a scene. It has people standing together, signing the Declaration of Independence. And she said, you know, what can you do if you activate the back of the note with people?

And then, you know, our minds kind of went racing around that idea of, you know, you could have, you could have the $5 bill, keep the Lincoln on the front, keep the Lincoln Memorial on the back, but populate it with the Civil Rights March and a tiny little Martin Luther King giving his I Have a Dream speech or something like that. There was a point where I think we got a little too excited and too creative and the treasurer said, bear in mind, there's a limited amount of real estate on this thing and there's only so much that designers can do and don't forget that

all of the counterfeit detection stuff has to go in there too. So like there are a few moments where she's like, okay settle down people, too creative. We're not going to have a graphic novel on the bank note. But that's kind of really where our minds went because we started thinking about all of the stories that you can tell on this thing that really is still one of the most ubiquitous forms of mass media in the United States. The announcement about the $20 bill redesign was made in April 2016. Harriet Tubman, who helped more than 300 slaves find freedom through the Underground Railroad, will be the new face of the $20 bill.

Tubman will be the first woman featured on the front of the U.S. Carrier. Andrew Jackson will remain on one side of the bill, and Harriet Tubman will be on the other. The rebranding was announced during President Barack Obama's final year in office. Then presidential candidate Donald Trump called a decision pure political correctness. He was asked about the redesign on NBC's Today Show. I think Harriet Tubman is fantastic. I would love to leave Andrew Jackson and see if we can

maybe come up with another denomination. Maybe we do the $2 bill. Less than a year after the redesign was announced, Donald Trump became president. In the overlauthess, he hung a portrait of his favorite predecessor. It was Andrew Jackson. And in the summer of 2019, Andrew Jackson is keeping his place on the $20 bill for now that's according to Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin, whose department oversees the design of currency. The Trump administration tabled the redesign just months before the bill was expected to be released. The ultimate decision on the redesign will most likely be another secretary's down the road.

So it seems like the project is on hold right now and we'll see how things develop. the project is on hold right now and we'll see how things develop. Regardless, the notes will have to be redesigned because of the overriding reason for which they're redesigned, which is anti-counter-fitting. So we'll see what happens. The faces and scenes we see on our money communicate our values as a nation. And the way we use that money communicates something about us as individuals. When I give you money, I'm not just giving you a piece of paper. I'm giving you my word, my bond. Society is a thing of ongoing, continuous relationships and unsettled debts, right?

The settling and unsettling of debts on and on and on and on and on. Stay with us. Some years ago, economists Joel Walfogal wrote a paper. It was titled, The Dead Weight Loss of Christmas. He argued that it made no sense for me to give you gifts that you don't like, and for you to give me gifts that I don't like. We would both be better off keeping our money and spending it on the things we do like. Bill has many disputes with how economists

see the world of money. Joel Walfourgel's argument might be ground zero. I think one of the things that economists are always imagining is that the end of transactions is to have them settled, right, that we enter a relationship of debt, and then we want to settle that debt. So you hand me over something at the store, and I give you money at the till, and then it's over, and then we go our separate ways. They love that kind of vision of the frictionless market where parties come to the market anonymously, and money is the thing that mediates their relationship so that then they continue to go on anonymously.

The problem is that if you imagine a world where all debts are settled, then what is that world? That's a world then of no more relationships, of no more mutuality, of no more obligation. of no more obligation. Society is not a society of settled debts. Society is a thing of ongoing continuous relationships and unsettled debts, right? The settling and unsettling of debts on and on and on and on and on. There's no moment where it ends or at least if there was a moment where it ended, we'd all just be alone in bunkers hiding, doing nothing. So I'm wondering if this is connected to some very interesting phenomena that we see, which is that even after coming up with this remarkable invention money, we've also come

up with lots of ways to make money inefficient and difficult to use. So we give our friends gift cards to restaurants that limit in some ways how they can use the money. In some ways it would be easier just to give them cash and they could use it at the restaurant or not use it at the restaurant. What do these inefficient forms of money tell us about the the role that money plays in personal relationships? Yeah, I love this kind of stuff because it really shows you that money is never purely fungible. We're continuously putting boundaries around different pots of money. Those boundaries are often moral boundaries.

They signify a moral or ethical or relational stance that we want to take with respect to one another. This kind of earmarking of money for special purposes, this kind of sequestering of some money, taking it out of circulation and keeping it in a special place for only a special purpose, really does help us make the stuff of social life, helps us stitch ourselves together and bind us to one another in ways that far exceed the imagination of money as just a neutral medium of exchange. far exceed the imagination of money as just a neutral medium of exchange. The tensions between these two models of money, between the economist model and the anthropologist model, exist within each of us.

We couldn't function as economic actors without the capacity to think of money as a neutral form of anonymous exchange. Of course, all of us also intuitively understand how debts and obligations work, and we sometimes become uncomfortable when these two models collide with one another. For example, we have struggled for decades with the challenge of time-consuming and difficult activities like parenting or domestic work or caring for aging parents. Should we think of these things as jobs, put a dollar figure on them, or should some things exist outside the sphere of money? This is kind of a paradox of modern subjects

in contemporary Western societies, is that we think of ourselves as individuals first and members of relationships second. Even though of course it's only through relationships that we get formed, right? I wouldn't exist if it were not for a relationship between my parents and I wouldn't be able to be speaking to you now if there weren't a network of folks around me who taught me language, right? Who taught me how to be in the world and how to be a person that makes connections?

And yet because we have this kind of ideology that we are each a new person and we each stand alone we are our own autonomous agent. We forget about those relationships and when those things are brought forward, we feel sometimes a little, eugh, about them, right? I don't want to be that. I don't want to have that connection. I don't want to be tied to you. Bill, I understand that you have a somewhat unusual living arrangement, and I'm wondering if you can tell me a little bit about it, then talk about some of the relationships that

are embedded in your housing. Sure. Okay, disclaimer, I am not a hippie, and we are not a tribe, but I live with my partner and another married couple. There are four of us together and the other couple has a young son. And before their child was born, we became very close friends. We were living a few blocks away from each other. We ended up kind of eating at each other's houses every night, you know, a kind of close, close little network of friends.

And I live in Southern California, it's very expensive. We are four professionals, but even with four professional salaries, we felt that, you know, we couldn't necessarily have the kind of house that we wanted. So we thought, you know, we're kind of eating together all the time anyway and doing everything together. That's by a house together. And you know, sometimes you just sort of make these decisions and you don't know if they're good or bad or what. But we jumped in, we spent, you know, a year looking for a place with sort of two flats, but with an interior staircase.

So it feels more like one, one big house. They gave birth to their son Carter, and we all moved in together, and we've been living together now for, I guess guess 13 years maybe more. And you know as someone who sort of studies money and economic relationships, if I take a step back and look at my own situation it's kind of interesting because we don't actually have any kind of internal system of accounting. We own the house as tenants in common, we share the mortgage, so we split the mortgage down the middle. At tax time, we split the interest down the middle for filing our taxes. But other than

that, we're basically sharing all of our expenses and just kind of living that way. There's no mental accounting really. There's no, you know, I paid for the groceries this week, so you do it next week. We're just comfortable doing that and operating as a kind of larger economic unit. And yeah, I mean, we really are kind of living in a sort of alternative economic arrangement that's based on these, you know, close, I think you could almost call them kin relationships that we've established together. And in many ways, like the house is the symbol

of those relationships, right? I mean, the house is our shell valuable, right? It's the thing that signifies that connection. So what's so interesting about this arrangement is in some ways it speaks to what you said some time ago by the difference between the way economists want to think about transactions and the way that you're describing them, which is that if you want to live in a world where the transaction

is over, you know, you give me something, I pay you something, we shake hands, we never see each other again. That is not the system that you have set up for your housing, right? Because your system, your setup is a system in some ways of indefinite debts and obligations that are constantly being created and repaid. You're constantly engaged in gift-giving, gift-taking, but that binds you in some ways in a web of obligations that I'm hearing you say in some ways has worked very well for you. It's worked very well.

You know, we actually had an anthropologist want to come live with us. I said no. She's like, I would really love to study this. This is fascinating. No, you can't live in our house So in other words the anthropologist doesn't like it when other anthropologists Study the first anthropologist The anthropologist finds it amusing when others want to do so Bill Mourner is an anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of How Would You Like to Pay and Other Works About the Nature and Origin of Money.

Bill, thanks for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you so much, Shankar. I've enjoyed it. This week's episode was produced by Parts Show and edited by Tara Boyle and Jenny Schmitt. Our team includes Thomas Liu, Laura Quarell, Raina Cohen and our new intern, Lu Shikwaba. Some of our best ideas on the show come from conversations we have with friends. That's why our unsung hero this week is Dominique Monuos. He gave us the idea to explore the story of Harriet Tubman and the $20 bill. Thank you Dominique.

You can find more hidden brain on Twitter and Facebook. If you like today's show, please share it with a friend. Or better yet, buy that friend a cup of coffee and tell them all about it. I'm Shankar Vidantum and this is NPR. you