Planet Money - Summer School 1: An Economic History of the World

Episode Date: July 10, 2024

Planet Money Summer School is back for eight weeks. Join as we travel back in time to find the origins of our economic way of life. Today we ask surprisingly hard question: What is money? And where did it come from? We travel to a remote island in the Pacific Ocean for the answer. Then we'll visit France in the year 1714, where a man on the lam tries to revolutionize the country's entire monetary system, and comes impressively close to the modern economy we have today, before it all falls apart. Check out our Summer School video cheat sheet on the origins of money at the Planet Money TikTok.The series is hosted by Robert Smith and produced by Audrey Dilling. Our project manager is Devin Mellor. This episode was edited by Planet Money Executive Producer Alex Goldmark and fact-checked by Sofia Shchukina. Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Here at Shortwave Space Camp, we escape our everyday lives to explore the mysteries and quirks of the universe. We find weird, fun, interesting stories that explain how the cosmos is partying all around us. From stars to dwarf planets to black holes and beyond, we've got you. Listen now to the Shortwave podcast from NPR. Thank you for listening to Planet Money. We wanted to check in with you to see what we're doing well and how we could improve. If you can, please take a short anonymous survey at npr.org slash PM survey. That's all one word. It takes less than 10 minutes and you do all of us at Planet Money a huge favor by filling it

out. We especially want to hear from people who haven't taken a survey before or are new listeners. That's npr.org slash pm survey. Thank you. This is Planet Money from NPR. It is finally summer, a time to relax, touch some grass, and think about nothing but the sun on your face, the breeze in your hair, and the entire economic history of the world. Welcome back everyone to Planet Money Summer School. Whenever the temperature rises and nature beckons, we show up with a new batch of stimulating lessons to make sure your brain has something to do on the long drive to the beach. Every Wednesday till Labor Day, we will tackle the biggest questions in economics.

In summer's past, we've covered Econ 101, investing skills, and business strategy. This summer, we'll look back, way back, at how we got to the bewildering economy we have today. Consider it the world's easiest master's degree in economic history. I'm your host, Robert Smith. Now I know, you might be thinking, Robert, the past is dead and gone. No grown-up needs to know about the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 or the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. True, you do not have to know this stuff. You want to know this stuff. Because everything we take for granted in the economy today had a start somewhere.

When you hear about banks collapsing or inflation surging, strange new forms of money and tariffs, you can be the one to say, I know why this is happening. We have been here before. Now, if you talk to historians, they will tell you, you have to be careful. The past never exactly repeats itself. You cannot step in the same time twice. That's Rebecca Spang, a professor at Indiana University Bloomington. And she'll be our guide for this first episode. The mistake that is often made in history

is that people look to a past example and think they know, ah, this is what I should do now in the present. So if history isn't a roadmap, why study it? History shows us examples over and over again of when things changed. Things changed because people took certain actions. And if you remember that nothing that's happened in history is actually inevitable. It's not set in stone.

It's the product of actions that people make at particular times in particular situations. I think that helps us to feel that we have a little bit of power to affect the world that we live in today. Empowerment, we will take it. On this season of Summer School, we'll bring you some classic yarns from economic history.

You'll meet the rogues and murderers who created modern finance. We'll watch as the workers try to start a revolution against the machines. We'll travel with the Vikings and fight mythical creatures for rare and valuable cinnamon. On today's show, we will jump right in with a surprisingly hard question. What is money?

Money is mysterious. Money works best, I think, if we don't actually think about why it's working. If we pay too much attention to the things we do with money, I mean, how bizarre is it that I can go into a store and I can take all this food and I just give somebody a piece of plastic and they say, okay, fine. Then I walk away with all the food. I mean, it's really amazing.

But if I stopped and thought about it, if we all sort of stopped and thought about, hold on, what are we doing here? The whole thing would just kind of come crashing down around our heads. All right, well, let's put on our hard hats then because we have two history stories today that will definitely make you think too hard about money.

And we'll have our professor along to offer lessons for today. Let's start with a giant stone coin lost, but not forgotten at the bottom of the ocean after the break. Jim and Pam, Janine and Gregory, Carmy and Sydney, Meredith and McDreamy. You know how it goes, two television characters, obvious chemistry, and you know deep down that there's only one question. Will they or won't they get together? We're breaking down these relationships and why we love them and hate them. Listen now to the pop culture happy hour podcast from NPR. On this week's episode of Wild Card, actor Ted Danson says it's possible to embrace your regrets. I wish I hadn't become a liar, you know, early in life, but even your wounds, you kind

of have fondness for if you've lived through it and made amends and all of that stuff. I'm Rachel Martin. Join us for NPR's Wild Card Podcast, the game where cards control the conversation. Welcome back class to Planet Money Summer School. In every lesson, we'll provide a few historical flashbacks and then bring our professor back to draw out the economic lesson inside.

We're gonna start with the most basic question you can have in economic history. Who invented money? Our professor, Rebecca Spang, says the answer is not so simple. Because money is many different things. It doesn't have a single invention. It happens lots of different times, lots of different places. For lots of different reasons. Around 5,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, money was written into clay tablets

to keep track of debts and promises. And paper money shows up in China in the 11th century. Sometimes money seems to arise naturally. Humans have something shiny that they value and becomes a tradable form of wealth. Other times it takes a king or ruler to create a form of money that can be used as a sort of tool.

Today in summer school, we'll have both kinds of origin stories. Let's start with the shiny stuff. And I don't mean gold or silver. I mean shiny stones. Very, very large shiny stones on a tropical island in the Pacific, the island of Yap. Now, we don't have records of how long the people of Yap used stone money, but when explorers encountered the island hundreds of years ago, they found that value was stored as giant stone disks with holes in the center. Let's play some of the episode we did about Yap in 2010 with hosts David Kestenbaum and Jacob Goldstein. They were talking with Scott Fitzpatrick, an anthropologist now at the University of Oregon.

Scott says the stones probably began with a navigator from Yap who canoed to another island and found something really, really nice. Well, oral traditions talk about a Yapese navigator named Nagumong who traveled from Yap to Palau. And Palau is about 250 miles south southwest of Yap. And they talk about this navigator going and finding this milky white crystalline stone, which is limestone, and Palau has an abundance of that.

So Nagumong finds this strange, beautiful thing. And it's not like his first thought is, hey, I'm going to invent money. He's just thinking, you know, I'm going to carve some beautiful fish out of this stone. But remember, all he's got is this little canoe. And according to the story, he looks up at the moon one night, and he thinks to himself, you know, a big piece of stone in the shape of the moon, that would be a lot easier to bring back to Yap than a great big stone fish. So he carves this big round disk out of stone, and then he puts a hole in the middle of it, probably so he can stick like a branch through it

and maybe roll it back to his boat. So he brings this stone back to Yap, and then people go crazy. They love it. Pretty soon anybody who is anybody wants one of these stones. And, you know, money often starts out this way. Like gold coins, before we had gold coins, you know, gold was just something that rich people

and kings kept around and they made like, I don't know, what did they make out of it? Like a crown maybe? I'd go to king, right? You know, but before it was money, it was just something that people liked. And that says you're rich, right? Like, hey, I'm the king, I got gold.

So anyway, the people of Yap, they start sending lots of expeditions over to this other island. People are going out in these little boats and bringing back these huge stones. Some of the evidence that that we've looked at and trying to estimate, you know, how how big of a stone could a bamboo raft actually move? We're probably talking about, you know, not an excess of two meters.

How heavy would that have been? Well, it's on the range of four to five metric tons. So that's about the size of two small cars. It's pretty big. So David, let's pause to reflect here. You have this pre-industrial society. You have these guys carving these giant stone disks that are taller than a man,

putting them on these tiny little rafts, and taking them hundreds of miles across the open ocean. But they do this. They do it over and over them hundreds of miles across the open ocean. But they do this, they do it over and over again because you know the stones are really pretty. They don't have gold or silver on the island, but they do have these nice shiny stones. If you scrub them, they're really beautiful. Just kind of this milky crystalline white.

They're almost blind you. They're so bright. So at some point, we don't know when, the people on Yap realize what almost all societies realize. They need something to store value. They need something that everyone in society agrees you can use to pay for stuff. And like many societies, the people of Yap, they took the thing they had that was pretty and hard

to get, the thing that was their version of gold. And they decided these giant stone discs were going to be money, even though they were giant and stone. So a piece of stone money, it was really valuable. It wasn't like you would roll one of the big ones down to the corner store and buy some fish. I mean, it seems like for day-to-day stuff,

they would maybe use shells. But for big stuff, special occasions, you would use stone money. I mean, you can think of it like a $10,000 bill. In oral traditions, they talk about, for example, a couple getting married, and their family members or friends might give them, you know, a certain number of pieces of stone money. If somebody was in real dire straits, and they were, you know, something happened to their crop of food or they were running low on provisions and they had some stone

money, they might trade those for food or for help. So let's get back to this question of what is money and see how the stone money holds up. Now, economists actually have a three-part definition they use for money. Part one is money should be a store of value. So you couldn't, for example, use coconuts because coconuts will rot. So stone money definitely meets that one. We can check that one. The second is usually it has to be a unit of account. And here things get a little slippery for classifying these stones as money.

Unit of account means there's broad agreement that there's a specific value attached to it. And it wasn't like people priced things in stones like, hey, you want to buy that canoe? That's three stones. On the other hand, some stones were clearly worth more than others. There were bigger ones or some famous guy went and got it. It might be worth more. So I think you can give stone money sort of a half check mark on unit of account. All right. So we got one and a half checks so far. The third item on the list is money should be what economists call a medium of exchange,

which basically means something you can use to buy stuff. One economist who was writing about the stone money said, you need something to be storable, recognizable, divisible, and portable. So for storable and recognizable, yeah, giant stone disks are storable and recognizable, yeah, giant stone disks are storable and recognizable as hell, right? A divisible, that one, it actually doesn't work. You cannot, in fact, break a giant stone disk in half and have like half as much money. That

doesn't work. And then we get to portable. So, I mean, remember one of these things can weigh as much as two small cars or something, right? And this is where something really profound happens. The people of Yab decide that if you give somebody a piece of stone money, you don't actually have to give it to them. Here's Scott Fitzpatrick. Aaron Ross Powell They often talk about the stone themselves not changing hands at all. In fact, most of the time they wouldn't.

Just the sheer amount of labor it would take to do it. You know, it's so funny because on the one hand, like these are very concrete forms of sort of money, you know, but it also very quickly becomes abstract just because of their size. So they don't actually move it in financial transactions. They just say, okay, it's yours now, even though it's outside my house. Right, right. And the really interesting thing about this whole process, I think, too, is that everybody knows whose it is. So OK, so you can imagine everybody sees the stone and knows somebody owns it.

I know Kestenbaum's stone is the one over there by that tree. But as it turns out, you don't even have to see a stone for it to have value. There's this story that one time a crew of workers was bringing back this great big piece of stone money back to Yap on a little boat. And just before they got back to Yap, they ran into this big storm and the stone ended up on the bottom of the ocean. But the people, they get back to Yap and they tell the story and everybody says, no problem, that's stone money. It's still good, even though it's

sitting on the bottom of the ocean. So somebody owns this piece of stone money even though nobody's ever seen it for over a hundred years or more. Doesn't that seem kind of amazing to you though? Yeah, yeah. It was a huge one. It was giant and more beautiful than anything, but unfortunately I don't have it here. Man, that is the definition of abstract money.

Yeah, it really is, isn't it? So Jacob, when we're reading these stories, they seem kind of funny. And then at some point you realize, oh, you know, I use stone money all the time. I mean, if I write you a check, right, what actually changes in the world? In the physical world, essentially nothing, right? Like the numbers in your bank account change a little and the numbers in my bank account change a little. But it's in my bank account change a little. But it's essentially like there is some stone on the bottom of the ocean that you used to

own and now that stone belongs to me. Even though we have this much more advanced financial system, money, it's basically faith in something that you can't see. There's mutual agreement that there's something out there in the world that has a certain value. It's like trust plus invisibility. Equals money. That was David Kestenbaum and Jacob Goldstein

from an episode we did in 2010. Joining us again is our professor today, Rebecca Spang. Hello, I'm glad to be here. So Rebecca, like what is the modern day equivalent of these giant stone coins on Yap? Do we have things like it today? In many ways, we don't. So what you need to think about is the giant stone coins

are not part of what we think of as the market economy. They're used in the prestige sphere for really important events like weddings or to cement a political alliance. So they're things that you would never, ever consider using as ordinary money. In the same way that we today, some of us, may have things that we value, but that we would actually feel really bad about cashing in. So imagine if you have jewelry that you inherited from your great-grandmother.

You want to hold onto it instead of putting it into circulation. Economists love the story of YAP because it shows how money might arise naturally when a society needs it, you know, when you need to store value or make transactions easier. Economists love the story of YAP because it shows how money might arise naturally when a society needs it, you know, when you need to store value or make transactions easier. But as a historian, I know that you focus on something else that gives rise to money, which is power, governments, kings.

Why do they need money to exist? And how do they make it happen? So the state, a government, an administration, uses money as a way of bringing people and communities into their orbit. So once you know that you use little shiny coins with owls on them, then you feel like you're part of the owl community, right? You are part of that sort of system of belief. So it's actually one of the ways that communities recognize themselves.

There's another reason why governments need to have something like money, because governments in many parts of the world at many times have armies and armies are expensive. If you can pay your army in little shiny things and then if your army can force other people to accept the little shiny things in exchange for food, then you can keep your army fed. And as your army keeps advancing, the territory where your little shiny things

circulate and are accepted gets wider and wider. And over time, new forms of money keep popping up. After the break, we'll take money to the next level and hear what happens when one man, a rogue and a murderer to be exact, tries to create a whole new financial system from scratch. The Bear is still one of the most interesting and stressful shows on TV. And yes, Chef, we're recapping the new season. What do we make of Carmi, Sid, and the rest of the kitchen staff? What do we think of all the celebrity cameos?

And how does this all compare to the first two seasons? We've got thoughts on thoughts. So listen now to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR. New from the Embedded podcast, what happens when three Republican women challenge their own party? Maybe we need to speak out a little bit bolder. Maybe we need to do something to get people's attention.

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We're going to set the summer school time machine to the 1700s now and across the globe from the Pacific Ocean to Europe. It's the story of a giant leap forward in modern finance, followed closely by finance collapsing and blowing up the entire world. You know how that works. It's a cautionary tale for any economy that moves beyond stone coins. It starts with a Scotsman named John Law. L-A-W. John Law. He's in his early 20s, well off, and living the high life in London. He's gambling, fares with women. We don't know the exact reasons, but John Law kills a man in a duel.

A sword fighting duel. He's convicted, sent to prison, then he escapes and heads to continental Europe. That's the personal drama. But now, the economic drama begins. Jacob Goldstein and Mary Childs pick up the story around 1714. So John Law is on the lam. He's popping up in one city after another across Europe, Amsterdam, Venice, Paris, and he's always at the gambling tables playing cards. And he's always winning. People are starting to notice this gambler who's getting rich. When he arrives in Paris, the chief of police sends this warning letter to the foreign minister. He writes, quote,

a Scott named law, gambler by profession and suspected of evil intentions toward the king, appears at Paris in high style, and has even bought an impressive home, although no one knows of any resource except fortune and gambling, which is his whole profession. But law caught a break. The minister wrote in the margin of that letter, he is not suspect he may remain in peace. So John Law is living in Paris, gambling, making money, but he's also got this, I don't know, a hobby, a little side hustle he's been trying to get going. He's trying to convince France, the whole country of France,

to completely change the way it is running its economy. So France has been fighting war after war, spending all this money, and now the country is basically broke. Farmers can't borrow money to plant seeds. At one point, the king had to melt down his silver and gold plates to pay his soldiers, which was kind of emblematic of the whole bigger problem. The whole economy ran on gold and silver, and there wasn't enough gold and silver to go around. John Law knew something about this problem in particular. His father was a goldsmith, and during John Law's lifetime, goldsmiths in Britain were kind of becoming banks. What happened was goldsmiths had safes in their shops, so people started storing the

gold with the goldsmiths. Goldsmiths started giving people receipts for the gold, and after a while, people started to use the receipts themselves to buy stuff or to settle debts. The receipts were like proto-paper money. They were money adjacent. This wasn't the first time people in the world had used paper money. China had actually used it hundreds of years earlier, but it's a new thing in Western Europe. Then the goldsmiths went further. They started making loans. Goldsmiths would give you a

claim check for gold that you could go out and use as money, but you didn't have to deposit any gold. Your claim check is for gold that kind of doesn't exist. The goldsmith is creating money out of thin air. So if everybody with a claim check came for gold that kind of doesn't exist. The goldsmith is creating money out of thin air. So if everybody with a claim check came back to the goldsmith and asked for their gold back, the goldsmith would not have enough. To be clear, this is basically how banks work today. We call it fractional reserve banking. And similarly today, if everybody with a bank deposit

came and asked for their money at the same time, we call that a bank run, the bank doesn't have the money. That is just how banks work. But on the flip side, if your economy, say, runs on silver and gold and you are so low on silver and gold that you just melted down your very favorite chalice, fractional reserve banking is exactly what you need. So John Law is ready to pitch this idea in France. Normally, the kind of guy is he would just go straight to the top, pitch to the king,

but the king of France at this moment, Louis XV, five years old. Not super into finance or banking. And France at this time is being run by a regent, a duke, the Duke of Orleans, or Leon. Or Leon. Okay. So the duke's hobbies include working in his home chemistry lab,

composing operas, and staying up all night with nobles and opera singers and actresses who would all get drunk, sleep with each other, and say, quote, vile things at the tops of their voices. So I bet you know who the Duke is going to love. John Law. We talked about this with Anne Murphy. She is a historian, but she also used to work as a derivatives trader. So she knows a few things about finance bros like John Law.

He's out there networking, getting to know the right people, and he manages to convince them to allow him to set up a private bank. A bank owned and run by John Law. And France doesn't really have banks as we know them at this point, right? It's not a thing in France, banking, like we have banks. Not really, no. There's a bit of a suspicion about what banks are and what they can do. I mean, there's a suspicion of banks here and now, but they exist, nevertheless.

Yes, and every country, I think, has to figure out how to make its peace with what banks are and what they do. So this is step one of John Law's scheme. In 1716, he sets up the first real bank in France. He's jumped from card game banker to actual real banker. It's called the Banque Generale, which is a fancy name, but it's run out of his house. He prints paper money backed by gold and silver, but everybody thinks his bank is kind of a joke.

The next year though, John Law got another break. His drinking buddy, the Duke, made a new rule that said, everybody in Paris has to use the bank's paper banknotes to pay their taxes. And you know, a reasonable definition of money is, it's the thing you pay your taxes with. Because once the government says you have to use this thing to pay your taxes, whether that thing is silver coins or cloth or dollars or paper money from the bank general, then everybody knows that at some point they're going to need to have that thing to pay their taxes. When the Duke forced people to use John Law's paper money to pay their

taxes, his paper bills became real money. So France's economy is now running on the full faith and credit of John Law. So let's pause here for just a moment and go to Law's biographer, Antoine Murphy, for the recap. He killed a man in a duel. He was sentenced to death, and then he escaped from prison. So you wouldn't have expected a great monetary economist to develop from such a figure. Depends on your views of monetary economists. It sure does. It sure does. Yeah. Antoine Murphy says John Law really believed that if you build an economy right, everybody

can get richer, including but not limited to John Law. And so he thinks, okay, now that I have the bank, I'm going to go even bigger. I'm going to go international. I'm going to create a company that will be bigger and better than any that has ever existed. It'll come to be called the Mississippi Company. And law gets the Duke to grant the company a monopoly on trade with all of France's territory in North America. It's literally half of the landmass of the current United States.

Not counting Alaska. And law, once he gets the Mississippi Company moving, he's sending ships over to North America and they're coming into a small little port in the Gulf of Mexico, which he says to the Regent, we'll name after you. We'll call it La Nouvelle Orléans, New Orleans. And suddenly you have New Orleans named after the Regent. Now there is an important twist here. A twist!

A twist. Then, as now, government debt was one of the most important parts of finance and of the economy as a whole. England, France's rival, had started this new kind of bank, the Bank of England, that was helping it deal with government debt. France also had this huge national debt from fighting all these wars against England. France had borrowed all this money, sold all these government bonds, and it's having a hard time making the interest payments on the bonds. The national debt is just killing the French economy.

So law comes up with a plan to help the Duke, to help France really solve its national debt problem. When he first sells stock in the Mississippi Company, law says to the public, okay, instead of paying for the stock with money, pay for it with government bonds. You give me some of those bonds that the government isn't going to be able to pay back and I'll give you a share of my company, a share of all the riches in the new world. It is amazing how fast this is happening. This truly is one of those moments in the history of money when everything is happening all at once. You know, it's just 1717 right now. Not long ago, France was a country where the king was melting down

his forks to pay the bills. Now in France, you can borrow paper money, lend that to the government to get government debt, and then trade that debt in to get shares in a multinational corporation that controls half of North America. And John Law, by the way, gets a cut of all of this. John Law's scheme is working. Paper money is working. It's easier for people to borrow money. In the countryside, farmers are growing more food. In Paris, artisans are making more dishes and clothes. And John Law and the Mississippi Company are taking over more and more. Essentially all of France's foreign trade, tobacco sales, the entire French national debt,

all flowing through John Law and the Mississippi Company. If we can say that John Law created modern finance, which he sort of did in ways, then we can say that he also created the first modern financial collapse. The trouble started in Mississippi, where the big plans were really not working out. As of 1719, French settlers had built a total of four houses in New Orleans. Most of the people moving to the territory died of disease or starvation. The company does have tons of other businesses going by this point, but the price of the company's stock is so high that all of the businesses put

together are not enough to justify it. What ends up happening is lots of people sell their stock back to the company and Laws Bank prints more and more paper money to buy back the stock. People start getting nervous now about Laws Scheme. Suddenly everybody wants to go to the bank and turn in their paper money for gold and silver. But once people started trying to convert their paper money into gold and silver, problems arose because there wasn't enough gold and silver to pay them. The law said, sorry, you can't have that. He had spent years promoting this dream of paper money, and now it was all unraveling. So he starts kind of flailing around, looking

for ways to save his system, to save paper money. He decides that by the end of the year, paper money will no longer be redeemable for gold and silver. It will just be paper. Oh, and by the way, the value of each paper bill will be half of what it is now. This was too much for the people of France. They flipped out, they took to the streets, they threw rocks through the windows of John Law's bank. The Duke, Law's pal, fired Law, placed him under house arrest, and Law fled France, just like he had fled England decades earlier.

The Duke and France gave up on paper money altogether, went back to gold and silver coins. John Law is remembered as a failure, as a con man. Modern economists don't think of him as one of the great forefathers of their field. But our world today looks a lot like what he had envisioned. Mary Childs and Jacob Goldstein from 2020. This story appeared in Jacob's book Money,, the True Story of a Made-Up Thing. After the break, how John Law's big idea

stayed with us to this day, and how some of the flaws in his system got fixed. Numbers that explain the economy. We love them at the indicator from Planet Money, and on Fridays, we discuss indicators in the news, like job numbers, spending, the cost of food, sometimes all three. So my indicator is about why you might need to bring home more bacon to afford your eggs. I'll be here all week.

Wrap up your week and listen to the indicator podcast from NPR. Truth, independence, fairness, transparency, respect, excellence. This is NPR. All right, all right, class, time for discussion and analysis. Returning to the whiteboard is our professor, Rebecca Spang. Hello, Rebecca. I love this story because John Law had all the pieces of a modern financial system going. He was juggling it all for, I don't story because John Law had all the pieces of a modern financial system going. He was juggling it all for, I don't know, two or three years, and then it blew up. And yet today we do the exact same things, paper money, government debt, risky investments, but now it seems to actually work. What's the difference?

So the key word I want to underline there is seems, right? It seems to work today until it doesn't. And we never know when it's not going to work. And so we continue to operate on the assumption that it will. And that's because it's no longer new. It's familiar. We take it for granted that, that there's a federal reserve bank, that governments have debt. These are normal parts of the world.

When John Law introduced them, they were new, they were shocking. Some historians have argued they were revolutionary. And so many people who didn't like this change opposed it and called attention to it. It is different when you have an institution, a government creating debt, companies who are investing, a central bank

that is sort of producing money, rather than some guy that you see at the gambling table. Right, right, right, right. I mean, part of the problem for John Law is that he already had a reputation as a gambler and a foreigner. That sort of international playboy thing doesn't necessarily go very well

with the senior banker position that he tried to craft for himself. I know you've written entire books on this and of course taught year-long courses, but give us a take-home message that we can bring with us, a principle of money and banking that will allow us to understand the world. I think people tend to assume that money has value because of where it's coming from, because

of what it's quote unquote backed by. So people get a little freaked out when they're like, you mean there's nothing backing the dollar? I think that what really gives money its value isn't where it's come from, but where it's going. Money has value as long as there's somebody who's willing to accept it from you.

And it's when that transaction, that transaction into the future, becomes more and more risky, more and more uncertain. That's when we get a financial panic, a monetary crisis. Before we finish up our lessons on summer school, we like to leave the listeners with a sort of study guide on the big ideas we've covered today. We have, of course, the three things that economists say is needed to make something

money. Money should be one, a store of value, which means that it lasts. It's worth something in the future. Money should be two, a unit of account, like a measuring stick for what something is worth. And money is three, a medium of exchange. You can use it to get stuff. And in the more anthropological sense, Rebecca, you brought up the term prestige good when talking about the Yap stones. What does that mean?

There are goods that basically cannot be bought and sold for ordinary money, but that nonetheless might sometimes change hands. Rebecca Speck, thank you so much for being our professor for this episode. Thank you for the invitation. And students, I hope you were taking good notes. We'll have a quiz at the end of the season

and a not quite legal diploma for you if you pass. No need to cram though, because this year we also have videos. Our crack Planet Money TikTok team will be distilling one economic lesson each week into an entertaining few minutes. You can find it in our show notes or by searching TikTok and Instagram. Next time, our Planet Money history of the world makes a stop at the Black Death and the Industrial Revolution. So bring your mask and your pitchforks because the workers of the world are mad as hell

and they are not going to take it anymore. Before we end today, we'd like to ask a favor of you. We wanna hear what you think of the work we're doing. You can find a short anonymous survey at npr.org slash PM survey, all one word. It takes less than 10 minutes and you do all of us a huge favor by filling it out. We especially wanna hear from people who haven't taken a survey before or our new listeners.

Welcome. That's npr.org.slash.pm survey. Planet Money Summer School is produced by Audrey Dilling. Our project manager is Devin Miller. This episode is fact-checked by Sophia Shukuna and engineered by Sina LaFreda, Planet Money's executive producer and our editor today is Alex Goldmark. We will be back with Summer School every Wednesday until Labor Day and you can find your brand new episodes of regular Planet Money on Fridays. I'm Robert Smith. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. Hey, it's Ayesha Roscoe from NPR's Up First podcast. I'm one of thousands of NPR Network voices coming to you from over 200 local newsrooms across the country. We bring all Americans closer together through free and independent journalism, music, politics,

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