The money agreement

My son asked me to explain money to him. This was in the context of telling him that his US money, which he had earned doing chores, wouldn't work in Australia - that he'd have to change it for Australian money.

The funniest things happen when I try to explain things to my kids.

This is what I came to. Money is not something that has value. It's something that people agree has value.

They say money doesn't grow on trees. It's true, and you wouldn't want to use leaves as currency, because the rate of inflation would probably be insane; there are just too many of them. But paper money is only one solution. In some areas of Africa, cowrie shells have been used as money; in ancient Japan, rice was used as money. Modern video games will sometimes have a form of currency, given an arbitrary name ("snelfus" in my son's favorite PBS Kids game), that players have to "earn" through various activities and then exchange for objects of value inside the game world.

The key is this: if you have something I want, I either have to

a. give you something you want, that you feel has equal value, or
b. give you something that you feel you can give to someone else in return for something of equal value.

In a lot of fantasy scenarios, you'll see bartering systems. In many of these, you'll also see gold, silver and bronze coins. I think gold, silver and bronze coins are pretty close to being "things of equal value," because you could argue that the metal itself has an empirical value independent of what is stamped on it. This certainly seems to be the case with pirate gold, where some coins would get cut in half to make sure all the pirates got equal shares.

With paper money, the agreement is the key. I offer someone $10 and they take it, not because they think the pretty paper I've given them is worth that much, but because they know that everyone else agrees it has that value and are willing to exchange it for goods of that value. The change of European money from francs, drachmas, etc. to Euros was a change in the fundamental underlying agreement.

I haven't given a lot of thought to how one could extrapolate this principle in an unusual way for fantasy or science fictional purposes. However, I think it has potential to be stretched. When I thought about it this way, for example, it suddenly made sense why certain vendors in foreign countries (I think specifically of Mexico) will accept American money. They accept it because they know other people who share their idea of its value, and with whom they can exchange it for things they want.

We're leaving tomorrow morning to return to the US, so look for me to blog again after I get home. I hope you're all having a good weekend.

My grocery store in Tokyo

Our grocery store was called Kitamura, and to get to it we could either ride bicycles or walk (we had no car, and it would have been highly impractical to have one). It was down a steep hill from our apartment building, on the main road of the neighborhood which was lined with cherry trees.

There were two halves of Kitamura: the food half, and the dry goods half. These stood across the street from one another, and both were very small - but enormous compared to the buildings around them.

The dry goods half included basically everything from toilet paper to pots and pans, clothing, hardware, etc. It also contained a bookstore section, which was where I got my Japanese cookbook. I walked in there shortly after we arrived and said (in Japanese) "I'm looking for a cookbook of Japanese food with lots of pictures." When you don't know the basics of ingredients or of cooking terminology, the pictures are very important. I ended up walking home with a little book from the "new housewife series" called "Yummy! Simple!" (oishii! kantan!) It would have been embarrassing except that it was so exceedingly helpful.

I bought this cookbook for two reasons. First, because I like Japanese food, and second because I wanted to save money.

Food is very expensive in Japan. When I was living there you could buy a box of strawberries - all precisely the same size and shape - for about $7. You could buy a monster apple about five inches in diameter for about $5. The shocker for me was that rice cost so much more there than in the US. I would buy five kilos of rice for about $25. If I'd wanted to try to cook American, the prices would have been much higher than for cooking Japanese food.

So I explored. The store had a whole case dedicated to fish and seafood, which might not seem amazing except that it took up so much shelf space relative to the total size of the store. If you wanted to buy a whole chicken (not one previously carved into cuts), you'd have to special order it, but you could easily buy a whole squid, and take it home while it stared at you out of its styrofoam dish.

By the way, the carts at this store were made to fit the size of the aisles: they were metal carts with spots to put baskets. Since the baskets were about the size of the American over-the-arm shopping baskets, the cart effectively doubled your hauling capacity. Given that you then would have to carry everything you'd bought up a very steep hill on foot (or bicycle), it made sense. You just had to go to the store more often.

You would go through the checkout lines, which were in general very quiet. Nobody in line ever started a conversation with me, and neither did the checkout staff. I, being American in my heart, I guess, started conversations with them, and they didn't seem to mind. Then you'd take your baskets to a counter and bag them yourself, all plastic bags, for the purposes of getting them home.

I love my experiences overseas because they acquaint me with different values on parameters of life that I have never considered. So for all you worldbuilders out there, give some thought to how your people get their food, what markets look like and how much of their total budget they expect to spend on food and lodging. It'll deepen the world, and be fun at the same time.