I’ve been reading a book recently on Monetary Policy, not so much because it’s a subject I’m drawn to, but rather it was the first book that came to hand when there was talk of gardening and I’m now kind of stuck with it.
However, one of the fascinating things about the use of money is that many people don’t know its value. By ‘many people’, of course, I really mean my children, but it’s true of ancient civilisations too.
In early times, goats were used as a means of commercial transaction. This works well when the price of something is three goats, but in a recession, when the price drops to two goats seventy-five it becomes somewhat more problematic.
As a result, goats were replaced by coins, so now when something was priced at 2 coins seventy-five, the problem could be rectified by the simple expedient of a Black & Decker Workmate, a vice and a hacksaw. And by dumping the hot filings in the hand of the recipient, the phrase ‘keep the change’ was invented.
Introducing a monetary policy by way of coinage where none previously existed was, of course, very disruptive to the existing order, and those who couldn’t adapt quickly enough usually lose out.
For example, when coins replaced goats, there were those who continued to leave all their coins out in the fields overnight, hoping they would grow bigger and become more valuable, but in the end losing everything. Interestingly, this caused the invention of crime (enriching yourself at the cost of others) and banking (enriching yourself at the cost of others). Also financial services (enriching yourself at the cost of others) and insurance (enriching yourself at the cost of others).
However, while most coins were silver, putting two coppers in the field at the same time kept everything else safe (and if you paid off those two coppers to protect your interests at the expense of others then, hey presto, you have the birth of the modern police force).
The point I’m making here is about progress. If we were still using goats as a means of financial transactions then we wouldn’t have ATMs, or at least we wouldn’t have an ATM and a small grocers shop in the same place. And it wouldn’t be called an ATM but rather an AGM (Automated Goat Machine), and about as much use as the kind of AGM we have all come to know already.
And without the move from goats to modern finance, we wouldn’t have the Internet. Nowadays you often need a card-reader to ensure security for online banking – but a goat-reader? That would be on the verge of unworkable.
I’m reminded of the expression ‘if it looks like a goat, and talks like a goat, it IS a goat’. But whose goat? They never answer that one, and yet it would be crucial to goat-centred online banking as we know it.
Some say that without Tom Bernard-Lee there would be no Internet, others that it took electricity to make it happen, or that without mass consumer-induced lobotomisation there would be no Web 2.0, but I think we need to look further back.
Had goats not got out of the way, allowing us to finally leave the goat-standard behind and adopt a flexible monetary policy strategy, then we would have had no Internet.
It really was that close.
