Healthy Money Healthy Planet - library.uniteddiversity.coop

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accept money as payment, we unconsciously or consciously believe it is going to be useful
in the future. That is, we believe that other people will believe it to be valuable in the
future. What we have, as Bernard Lietaer points out, is not just a belief but a belief about a
belief. 9 Since nobody can control what others believe, the value of the money is vulnerable
to gossip and rumour. Given a choice of accepting Chad francs or the equivalent in
American dollars, most people will probably opt for US dollars because it is generally
believed that the US dollar is almost certain to be valuable in the future and it is more
widely accepted than the other currency. Such a belief in money can disappear overnight,
and communities that endow bits of paper with value can then snatch them back just as
easily.
This process of trusting money is not one that is fully conscious, and sometimes that
is just as well. If we had to think about whether the supermarket trusted the bank to
honour our money every time we came to pay the cashier, for example, life would be
burdensome indeed.
Forms of Currency
From earliest times, communities have given various items value as money. These have
ranged from mats and bark­cloth in Samoa to pigs in the New Hebrides, shells and teeth in
the Solomon Islands, edible rats in the eastern Pacific, tallysticks (long notched sticks that
were divided in half and used for the payment of taxes) during the reign of Henry I in
England, and hides in Russia. New Internationalist magazine says that the earliest known
record of the use of money is around 2400BC in Mesopotamia and Egypt.[5] 10 The first
people to have started making coins from precious metals appear to have been the Lydians
in the seventh century BC. Gold, silver, copper and brass became the commonest currency,
used by the Chinese, Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Indians, and paper money came into use