Coined: The Rich Life of Money and How Its History Has Shaped Us

by Kabir Sehgal

  77. Brian Knutson et al., “Nucleus Accumbens Activation Mediates the Influence of Reward Cues on Financial Risk Taking,” NeuroReport 19 (2008): 509–13.

  78. “Brain Scam?,” editorial, Nature Neuroscience 7, no. 683 (2004).

  79. Brian Knutson et al., “Neural Predictors of Purchases,” Neuron 53, no. 1 (2007): 147–56.

  80. Camelia M. Kuhnen and Brian Knutson, “The Neural Basis of Financial Risk Taking,” Neuron 47 (2005): 763–70.

  81. Ibid.

  82. Camelia M. Kuhnen, Brian Knutson, and Gregory R. Samanez-Larkin, “Serotonergic Genotypes, Neuroticism, and Financial Choices,” PLoS ONE 8, no. 1 (2013): e54632.

  83. Ibid.

  84. Paul Gabrielsen, “Stanford Scholar Looks to Genes to Make Sense of the Dollars You Invest,” Stanford News Service, March 4, 2013, retrieved April 4, 2013, from http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2013/pr-genes-invest-attitude-030413.html.

  85. Blakeslee, “Brain Experts Now Follow the Money.”

  86. Josh Fischman, “The Marketplace in Your Brain,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 4, 2012.

  87. Paul W. Glimcher, Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 427.

  88. Blakeslee, “Brain Experts Now Follow the Money.”

  89. Fischman, “The Marketplace in Your Brain.”

  90. Ibid.

  91. Many use the terms nucleus accumbens and ventral striatum interchangeably, even though nucleus accumbens is a part of the ventral striatum (along with ventral putamen and ventral caudate).

  92. Gregory Berns and Sara E. Moore, “A Neural Predictor of Cultural Popularity,” Journal of Consumer Psychology (2011).

  93. Anna Teo, “Spotlight on Neuroeconomics,” Business Times, March 1, 2013.

  Chapter 3. So in Debt

  1. Michael Lewis, Liar’s Poker (New York: Norton, 1989), p. 99.

  2. Lewis Hyde, The Gift (New York: Random House, 2007), p. 13.

  3. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (New York: Random House, 2000), p. 166.

  4. Katherine Rupp, Gift-Giving in Japan: Cash, Connections, Cosmologies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

  5. Benjamin Okaba, Why Nigerians Bury Their Money: An Ethnography of Ijo Contemporary Burial Ceremonies (Port Harcourt: Emhai, 1997).

  6. “Factors Affecting Reserve Balances,” Federal Reserve, March 27, 2014, http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h41/20140327.

  7. Professor Steven Garfinkle prefers the word commercial instead of market sphere. He suggests that market has a connotation found in economics that may suggest “capitalist.”

  8. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Knopf, 1991), pp. 19–22.

  9. Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, ed. W. Playfair (Hartford: O. D. Cooke, 1811), p. 17.

  10. L. Randall Wray, ed., Credit and State Theories of Money: The Contributions of A. Mitchell Innes (Cheltenham, England, and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2004), pp. 16–18.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Caroline Humphrey, “Barter and Economic Disintegration,” Man 20, no. 1 (March 1985): 48–72.

  13. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Kindle ed. (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011), loc. 540.

  14. Ibid., loc. 627–29.

  15. Ibid., loc. 648–60.

  16. Ibid., loc. 773–89.

  17. Paul Sillitoe, “Why Spheres of Exchange?,” Ethnology 45, no. 1 (2006): 1–23.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Marcel Mauss, The Gift (London: Norton, 1990).

  20. Hyde, The Gift, pp. xx–xxii.

  21. Ibid., pp. 20–25.

  22. Aafke E. Komter, Social Solidarity and the Gift (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 58–60.

  23. Ibid.

  24. Mauss, The Gift, pp. 23–24.

  25. Hyde, The Gift, pp. 13–20.

  26. Komter, Social Solidarity and the Gift, pp. 58–59.

  27. Hyde, The Gift, p. 18.

  28. Lakshmi Gandhi, “The History Behind the Phrase ‘Don’t Be an Indian Giver,’ ” NPR, September 2, 2013, http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/09/02/217295339/the-history-behind-the-phrase-dont-be-an-indian-giver.

  29. Hyde, The Gift, pp. 3–5.

  30. Ibid., pp. 35–40. Kwakiutl is part of the larger Kwakwaka’wakw society.

  31. Gail Ringel, “The Kwakiutl Potlatch: History, Economics, and Symbols,” Ethnohistory 26, no. 4 (1979): 347–62. Sergei Kan points out that the new chief could also be the firstborn or most capable son of the sister of the old chief in matrilineal societies such as the Tlingit.

  32. Ibid.

  33. Homer G. Barnett, “The Nature of the Potlatch,” American Anthropologist 40, no. 3 (1938): 349–58.

  34. Ringel, “The Kwakiutl Potlatch.”

  35. Barnett, “The Nature of the Potlatch.”

  36. Joseph Masco, “Competitive Displays: Negotiating Genealogical Rights to the Potlatch at the American Museum of Natural History,” American Anthropologist 98, no. 4 (December 1996): 837–52.

  37. Ringel, “The Kwakiutl Potlatch.”

  38. Markus Giesler, “Consumer Gift Systems,” Journal of Consumer Research (2006): 283–90.

  39. Ibid.

  40. Ibid.

  41. “Kickstarter Stats,” retrieved March 27, 2014, from http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats.

  42. Rob Trump, “Why Would You Ever Give Money Through Kickstarter?,” New York Times Magazine, February 8, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/magazine/why-would-you-ever-give-money-through-kickstarter.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

  43. Komter, Social Solidarity and the Gift, p. 67.

  44. Ibid., pp. 56–57.

  45. Ibid., pp. 42–43.

  46. George Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 4–8.

  47. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, “Conceptual Metaphor in Everyday Language,” Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 8 (1980): 453–86.

  48. Shawn Tully, “The Toughest Guy on Wall Street,” Fortune, March 2006, http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/05/13/jamie-dimon-jpmorgan.

  49. Marc Sandalow, “Bush Claims Mandate, Sets 2nd-term Goals,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 5, 2004, http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Bush-claims-mandate-sets-2nd-term-goals-I-2637116.php.

  50. Wilfred Dolfsma, Rene van der Eijk, and Albert Jolink, “On a Source of Social Capital: Gift Exchange,” Journal of Business Ethics 89, no. 3 (October 2009): 315–29.

  51. David B. Wooten, “Qualitative Steps Toward an Expanded Model of Anxiety in Gift-Giving,” Journal of Consumer Research 27, no. 1 (2000): 84–95.

  52. Jean-Sébastien Marcoux, “Escaping the Gift Economy,” Journal of Consumer Research 36, no. 4 (2009): 671–85.

  53. Ibid.

  54. Ibid.

  55. Rupp, Gift-Giving in Japan, pp. 1–3.

  56. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (New York: First Mariner Books, 2005), pp. 100–108. Her account is somewhat dated, but her main points are important and relevant to gift giving in Japan today.

  57. Ibid.

  58. Ibid., pp. 100–104.

  59. Ibid., pp. 112–18.

  60. Ibid., pp. 132–36.

  61. Ibid., pp. 146–48.

  62. Takie Sugiyama Lebra, Japanese Patterns of Behavior (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1976), pp. 96–100.

  63. Rupp, Gift-Giving in Japan, pp. 105–8.

  64. Professor John Sherry raises a thought-provoking point about the wedding registries in Western society. Newlyweds can use the registry to give themselves gifts by invoking the social debt that their guests may feel. The newlyweds are able to obtain items that may have been difficult otherwise, and without taking on financial debt. By accepting these gifts, the newlyweds continue their role in the circle of gift giving, and will be expected to recriprocate, perhaps, at a later date. Some $19 billion is spent on gifts via registries per year. For more, read Tonya Williams Brad
ford and John F. Sherry Jr., “Orchestrating Rituals Through Retailers: An Examination of Gift Registry,” Journal of Retailing 89, no. 2 (2013): 158–75.

  65. Rupp, Gift-Giving in Japan, pp. 57–59.

  66. Ibid., pp. 68–70.

  67. Fritz M. Heichelheim, An Ancient Economic History (Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1958), pp. 54–56.

  68. Ibid.

  69. Jamie Stokes, ed., Encyclopedia of the Peoples of Africa and the Middle East (New York: Facts on File, 2009), pp. 664–65.

  70. Steven J. Garfinkle, “Turam-ili and the Community of Merchants in the Ur III Period,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 54 (2002): 29–48.

  71. Steven J. Garfinkle, “Shepherds, Merchants, and Credit: Some Observations on Lending Practices in Ur III,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 47, no. 1 (2004): 1–30.

  72. Ibid.

  73. Ibid.

  74. Steven Garfinkle, email correspondence, June 22, 2014 (K. Sehgal, interviewer).

  75. Douglas Garbutt, “The Significance of Ancient Mesopotamia in Accounting History,” Accounting Historians Journal 11, no. 1 (1984): 83–101.

  76. Garfinkle, “Shepherds, Merchants, and Credit.”

  77. Michael Hudson, “How Interest Rates Were Set, 2500 BC–1000 AD: Máš, Tokos and Fœnus as Metaphors for Interest Accruals,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 43, no. 2 (2000): 132–61. According to Steven Garfinkle, máš means “goat.”

  78. Garbutt, “The Significance of Ancient Mesopotamia in Accounting History.”

  79. Hudson, “How Interest Rates Were Set, 2500 BC–1000 AD.”

  80. Suzanne Daley, “Paris Journal; A Green Light for Sinful Drivers: It’s Election Time,” New York Times, March 26, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/26/world/paris-journal-a-green-light-for-sinful-drivers-it-s-election-time.html.

  81. Marvin A. Powell, “Money in Mesopotamia,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 39, no. 3 (1996): 224–42.

  82. Steven Garfinkle, email correspondence, June 22, 2014 (K. Sehgal, interviewer).

  83. Hudson, “How Interest Rates Were Set, 2500 BC–1000 AD.”

  84. Ibid.

  85. François Thureau-Dangin, “Sketch of a History of the Sexagesimal System,” Osiris (1939): 95–141.

  86. Hudson, “How Interest Rates Were Set, 2500 BC–1000 AD.”

  87. U.S. Department of State, “Trafficking in Persons Report,” 2012, http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/192587.pdf.

  88. Alain Testart, “The Extent and Significance of Debt Slavery,” Revue française de sociologie 43 (2002): 173–204.

  89. Instead of being just an instrument of governance, as Garfinkle notes, the Code of Hammurabi may have been “royal propaganda” that wasn’t always enforced.

  90. Graeber, Debt, locs. 3591–92.

  91. Testart, “The Extent and Significance of Debt Slavery.”

  92. Edward M. Harris, “Did Solon Abolish Debt-Bondage?,” Classical Quarterly 52, no. 2 (2002): 415–30.

  93. Richard Ford, “Imprisonment for Debt,” Michigan Law Review 25, no. 1 (November 1926): 24–49.

  94. Walter Thornbury, “The Fleet Prison,” Old and New London 2 (1878): 404–16, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45111.

  95. Jason Zweig, “Are Debtors’ Prisons Coming Back?,” Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2012, http://blogs.wsj.com/totalreturn/2012/08/28/are-debtors-prisons-coming-back.

  96. Ford, “Imprisonment for Debt.”

  97. Charles J. Tabb, “The History of the Bankruptcy Laws in the United States,” American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review (1995): 5–51.

  98. U.S. Department of State, “Trafficking in Persons Report.”

  99. Jessica Silver-Greenberg, “Welcome to Debtors’ Prison, 2011 Edition,” Wall Street Journal, March 16, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704396504576204553811636610.html.

  100. Susie An, “Unpaid Bills Land Some Debtors Behind Bars,” NPR, December 12, 2011, http://www.npr.org/2011/12/12/143274773/unpaid-bills-land-some-debtors-behind-bars.

  Chapter 4. Hard and Heavy

  1. This quote is inscribed on the wall next to the door to the vault in the basement of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York building.

  2. Aristotle, Politics. trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Dover, 2000), p. 42.

  3. David Boyle, ed., The Money Changers (London: Earthscan, 2002), p. 41.

  4. Federal Reserve Bank of New York, “Gold Vault,” retrieved June 16, 2013, from http://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/goldvault.html.

  5. Ibid.

  6. HowStuffWorks, “How Much Gold Is There in the World?,” retrieved June 20, 2013, from http://money.howstuffworks.com/question213.htm.

  7. Georg Friedrich Knapp, The State Theory of Money (London: Macmillan, 1924).

  8. U.S. Department of Treasury, “Legal Tender Status,” retrieved June 1, 2014, from http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/currency/pages/legal-tender.aspx.

  9. Paul Davidson, “Monetary Policy in the Twenty-First Century in the Light of the Debate Between Chartalism and Monetarism,” in Jeff Biddle, John B. Davis, Steven G. Medema, eds., Economics Broadly Considered (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 335–47.

  10. Jacob Goldstein and David Kestenbaum, “The Island of Stone Money,” NPR, December 10, 2010, retrieved May 25, 2013, from http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/02/15/131934618/the-island-of-stone-money.

  11. Mark Kurlansky, Salt (New York: Penguin, 2002), p. 63.

  12. Wayne G. Sayles, email correspondence, June 28, 2014 (K. Sehgal, interviewer).

  13. François Velde, “A Brief History of Minting Technology,” June 18, 1997, retrieved April 5, 2014, from http://frenchcoins.net/links/technolo.pdf.

  14. Ute Kagan, email correspondence, June 16, 2014 (K. Sehgal, interviewer).

  15. J. N. Postgate, Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 18.

  16. Ibid., p. 204.

  17. Ibid., p. 53.

  18. Ibid., p. 51.

  19. Stephen Bertman, Handbook to Life in Ancient Mesopotamia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 249.

  20. Postgate, Early Mesopotamia, pp. 202–203.

  21. Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat, Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002), pp. 267–68.

  22. Bertman, Handbook to Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, p. 257.

  23. Luca Peyronel, “Ancient Near Eastern Economics: The Silver Question Between Methodology and Archaeological Data,” Proceedings of the 6th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (2010): 926–27.

  24. Catherine Eagleton et al., Money: A History (New York: Firefly Books, 2007), p. 17.

  25. Ibid., p. 19.

  26. Ibid., p. 18.

  27. Nemet-Nejat, Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, p. 264.

  28. Eagleton, Money, p. 18.

  29. Ibid., p. 19.

  30. Wendy Christensen, Empire of Ancient Egypt (New York: Chelsea House, 2009), pp. 9–10.

  31. Barry J. Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 124–25.

  32. Ibid., pp. 124–26.

  33. A. Rosalie David, Handbook to Life in Ancient Egypt (New York: Facts on File, 2003), pp. 318–20.

  34. Ibid.

  35. Ibid., pp. 318–21.

  36. Eagleton, Money, p. 21.

  37. British Museum, “The Wealth of Africa,” retrieved July 1, 2013, from http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/online_tours/africa/the_wealth_of_africa/ancient_egypt.aspx.

  38. David P. Silverman, ed., Ancient Egypt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 64–65.

  39. Peter Tyson, “Where Is Punt?,” December 1, 2009, retrieved April 22, 2014, from NOVA: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/egypt-punt.html.

  40. David, Handbook to Life in Ancient Egypt, pp. 334–56.

  41. Silverman, Ancient Egypt, p. 40.

  42. Rosemarie Klemm and Dietrich Klemm, Go
ld and Gold Mining in Ancient Egypt and Nubia (New York: Springer, 2013), pp. 20–28.

  43. David, Handbook to Life in Ancient Egypt.

  44. Christensen, Empire of Ancient Egypt, pp. 73–89.

  45. G. K. Jenkins, “An Egyptian Gold Coin,” British Museum Quarterly 20, no. 1 (1955): 10–11.

  46. “Lydia,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 26, no. 5 (1968): 199–200.

  47. Koray Konuk, “Asia Minor to the Ionian Revolt,” in W. E. Metcalf, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Coinage (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 43–60.

  48. Forthcoming research suggests that electrum was man-made and not naturally occurring in the mountains or nearby river.

  49. Donald Kagan, “The Dates of the Earliest Coins,” American Journal of Archaeology 86, no. 3 (1982): 343–60.

  50. Glyn Davies, A History of Money: From Ancient Times to the Present Day (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1994), p. 63.

  51. Robert W. Wallace, “The Origin of Electrum Coinage,” American Journal of Archaeology 91, no. 3 (1987): 385–97.

  52. Richard Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 136–46.

  53. Eagleton, Money, p. 24.

  54. Konuk, “Asia Minor to the Ionian Revolt.”

  55. Jack M. Balcer, “Herodotus, the ‘Early State,’ and Lydia,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 43, no. 2 (1994): 246–49.

  56. David M. Schaps, “The Invention of Coinage in Lydia, in India, and in China,” 2006, retrieved July 6, 2013, from XIV International Economic History Congress, Session 30.

  57. Ibid.

  58. Madhukar K. Dhavalikar, “The Beginning of Coinage in India,” World Archaeology 6, no. 3 (1975): 330–38.

  59. Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind, pp. 102–14.

  60. Ute Wartenberg Kagan notes that there were more weight standards than just the Attic one.

  61. Davies, A History of Money, p. 80.

  62. Peter G. Van Alfen, “The Coinage of Athens, Sixth to First Century B.C.,” in The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Coinage, ed. William E. Metcalf (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 88–104.

  63. There were still barter and debt transactions in Athens. In the rest of Greece, it took more time for coinage to flourish.