Workshop on Money as A Value System

Description : 

Economics textbooks often attribute the existence of money to the absence of a double coincidence of needs and proceed by attributing three functions to money: means of payment, unit of account, and store of value. A common feature of this view is that it focuses on the function of money and explains it in terms of its utility and convenience. This explanation can be defined as the "functional view" of money, because it explains money in terms of its functions. This view can be traced back to Aristotle and Adam Smith and has been reinforced by economists such as Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger. This view has been criticized for being too narrow or lacking historical foundation. Indeed, as Keynes points out, we don't know when or how money appeared, largely because we lack a conceptual definition of money. We can date the appearance of means of payment, but as we know, these are only one of the manifestations of money. Recent studies on the theory of money seek new insights into money, beyond simple functions. 

Other observers in various fields have proposed different views of money. John Ruskin, for example, asserts that "money is correspondent in its nature to the title-deed of an estate. Though the deed be burned, the estate still exists, but the right to it has become disputable." Georg Friedrich Knapp defines money as a creature of legal structure. More recently, David Graeber collects historical cases of the emergence of money within a community, focusing on the sharing of value within the community. Akinobu Kuroda describes a community that uses the same currency as a "monetary circuit". While the methodology and theoretical background vary, a general feature of this view is to focus on the relationship between people who use the same money. This view can be broadly interpreted as the "charter view" of money because it focuses on a charter or a formal agreement among people.
In this interdisciplinary project, we explore alternative ways of looking at money and try to integrate different conceptual frameworks of money. To achieve this goal, we will examine the history of money as a "system for sharing and communicating the value of things" in line with the perspectives of Graeber and Kuroda. Speakers from anthropology, economic history, the history of economic thought, sociology, and economics will discuss the evolution and development of money from this perspective. We will look at historical cases from Europe, the

Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific from different periods and discuss how we integrate the cases with reference to theory and economic thought. We focus on the dynamics of money when a group of people who shared a money faced challenges from outside. These episodes provide us with different perspectives to re-examine money from different angles.

The workshop will be hybrid with in-person and online, and the working language will be English. We will discuss the outline of the project, the research interests of participants, and the direction of future collaboration. It is opened to interested scholars and students. 

Program : 

Organizers: Vincent Bignon (Banque de France), Anders Ögren (Uppsala University), Masato Shizume (Waseda University)