Name: お金と借金：クラッシュコース世界史202 (Money & Debt: Crash Course World History 202)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T05:49:53.000Z
Duration: 14 min 4 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

Hi, I'm John Green. This is Crash Course World History and today we're going to make it rain.

We're going to talk about money, the stuff that makes the world go 'round.

程度の副詞

Mr. Green! Mr. Green! I'm sorry, but money doesn't make the world go round.

It's actually conservation of angular momentum. It's the same thing that allows, like, figure

John: Look, me from the past. I know you came in fourth for physics, among all "C" students

in the entire state of Alabama in the 1994 state academic decathlon tournament, but that

doesn't actually make you good at science.

So, here is what economic textbooks say about money. In general it has three functions:

medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value. And its first function is by far

Like, this is a quote from my actual, physical high school econ text book: "In primitive

economies, food might be traded for clothing, or help in building a house might be exchanged

for help in clearing a field. But exchange today in all economies -- market as well as

command -- takes place through the medium of money."

A couple things about that quote, first off, primitive is a cringe-y word. Secondly, a

market economy is basically all economies these days, and a command economy is what

we called the Soviet Union's economy back in the eighties.

Anyway, money is very important to history--like, our old friend Adam Smith thought that, quote:

"property money and markets not only existed before political institutions, but were the

very foundation of human society." Ehh, he was pretty into economies, so he was probably

a little biased toward money, but it is important.

Smith also thought that before there was money, there was barter, but barter could be cumbersome;

like if I make cheese and you make shoes, and you're lactose intolerant, then barter

breaks down because I need shoes, but you don't need cheese. Then I have to live like

a hobbit and get this very powerful ring, it's like, really stressful, I end up having

to go to Mordor, it's just very complicated.

So, Smith's ideas that rather than adapt to shoelessness, humans created a commodity that

they would agree upon ahead of time could be used in exchange, and that commodity is

Stan, I forgot to mention this, but you are buying lunch today.

Now, we generally think of money as like coins, or later, bills, but the material of money

is arbitrary. Smith wrote: "In all countries, however, men seem at last to have been determined

by irresistible reasons to give the preference, for this employment, to metals above all other

commodity." A sentence that shows you why we didn't teach him in Crash Course Literature.

But of course, it's really inconvenient to like, weigh and measure metals every time

you wanna buy or sell something, so people hit upon the idea of making coins with a standard

size and weight. Now, Smith is probably right that coins are much more convenient than bartering,

right? Like, especially if the main store of value in your community is something like

cattle. I mean, let's say you still need a pair of shoes, well, they aren't worth an

entire cow; trading in partial cows... fairly messy. It's also very bad for the cow's health,

and the cow loses a lot of its value, because, you know, it's no longer living.

So that all makes sense, but it's problematic when Smith universalizes that observation

by claiming that as a matter of convenience, every prudent man in every period of society

must naturally have endeavored to create money.

Smith -- man of the enlightenment that he was -- is positing that the creation of money

is part of human nature. Like, in the second chapter of Wealth of Nations, Smith explicitly

says that the division of labour is the, quote: "consequence of a certain propensity in human

nature ... to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another."

But yet, no! Like, what made sense for eighteenth century city and town dwellers like Adam Smith

doesn't necessarily apply to like, all human beings over the course of many millennia.

And if you don't believe me, you can just ask anthropologists. They love to talk about

So, here's the fascinating thing to me: when you look at places where the social order

is not based on money, we find that people actually don't barter at all. So David Graeber's

book "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" surveys the literature of anthropology and discovers

that in societies without money, people don't actually barter, but they do find ways to

exchange. He quotes an anthropologist named Caroline Humphrey, who concluded: "No example

of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence

from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there has never been such a thing."

Now, that's not to say that barter doesn't exist or that it never has, I mean, I just

traded Stan two copies of my book Paper Towns for the candy left in this pinata. Big money,

no whammies. Two things of Sweet Tarts?! Stan! That's not fair.

So, according to Graeber, barter was reserved for trade between strangers, even enemies.

For most of human history, humans lived in small communities, and in those small communities,

most exchange took place using forms of credit. Basically, when people know each other well,

they're willing to trade with the future expectation that what one gives today will be repaid at

some future date with something of roughly equivalent value. So in small, localized communities,

everyone is in debt to everyone else, and there's no real need of physical money, like

coins, as a way of keeping a count, because, you know, you remember when someone owes you

We see this historically in the early civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, where the basic monetary

unit was the shekel, and one shekel's weight in silver was the equivalent of a bushel of

barley. Money in Ancient Sumer was actually created by bureaucrats in order to keep track

of resources and move things back and forth between departments. But that doesn't mean

that silver actually circulated freely. Graeber writes: "While debts were calculated in silver,

So while some people seem to think that money is naturally backed by precious metals, usually

gold or silver, that doesn't seem to have been the case. It was enough to establish

that something was worth a shekel or a fraction thereof, and then trade for something of equivalent

value -- meat, or whatever else, without actually having to have the shekels change hands.

And this was especially helpful in economies where taxes and payments to workers were both

Thanks, Thought Bubble. So, first, Graeber blows our minds by telling us that Adam Smith

was all wrong about money evolving from barter societies, but what about credit as the precursor to money?

I mean, it's basically saying that credit cards aren't an advancement so much as they're

a return to the glorious past, except instead of trust, there are like, large, faceless

So the essence of credit is debt, and at least according to Graeber, that's the glue that

holds social orders together, at least, if you consider debt at its heart, to be about

obligation. At least one of the things that binds us together as a community is the recognition

that we owe our neighbors something and that they owe something to us in return. It's like

keeping your lawn mowed so that you can keep your neighbor's property value high. It doesn't

make sense to have a lawn -- they're expensive and time consuming, and you can't eat grass.

But you take care of your lawn for the same reason your neighbors take care of theirs.

But money changes our understanding of those obligations, right? Because once we're able

to put a price on our obligations, we can make them transferable, which wouldn't be