New Economic Perspectives

By L. Randall Wray

Last week we examined the origins of coins, arguing that coinage is a relatively recent development. From the beginning, coins did have precious metal content. We examined a hypothesis for that, because from the MMT view, the “money thing” is simply a “token” or record of debt. If that is true, why “stamp” the record on precious metal? For thousands of years, debts were recorded on clay or wood or paper. Why the switch? We argued that the origins of coins in ancient Greece must be placed in the specific historical context of that society. Use of precious metal was not a coincidence, but also was not consistent with the commodity money view. While it is true that use of precious metal was important and perhaps even critical, this was for social reasons and was tied to the rise of the democratic polis. This week, we examine coinage from Roman times to the present in Western society.

Roman coins also contained precious metal. But there is very little doubt that Roman law adopted what is called “nominalism”—the nominal value of the coin is determined by the authorities, not by the value of embodied metal in the coin (termed “metalism”). The coin system was well-regulated and although precious metal content changed across coinages, there was no significant problem with debasement or inflation. In Roman law, one could deposit a sack of particular coins (in sacculo) and when repaid demand the same coins to be returned (vindication). However, if one were owed a sum of money (rather than specific coins), one had to accept in payment any combination of coins tendered that were “money of the realm”—officially sanctioned coins with payment enforced in court (condictio).

This practice continued through the early modern period, in which one deposited for safe keeping either sealed sacks of coins (and could demand exactly the same coins back in the still-sealed bag) or loose coins (in which case, any legal coins had to be accepted). Hence, “nominalism” prevailed in the general, although what appears to be a form of “metalism” applied to specific coins in sacculo.*

In reality, it had more to do with the view that coins were a “moveable chattel”, something the owner had a property interest in. However, once the owner’s loose coins were mixed with other coins, there was “no earmark”—no way of determining specific ownership and hence the claimant only had a claim to be repaid in legal money—the legalis moneta Angliae, for example in England, which was stipulated to be a sum of “sterlings”. There was no sterling coin (indeed, England did not even coin the Pound, its money of account), rather, the debt was paid up by providing the appropriate sum of coins declared lawful money by the Crown—and could include foreign coins—at the nominal value dictated by the King.

The authorities that issued coins were free to change the metal content at each coinage; penalties for refusing to accept a sovereign’s coin in payment at the value stated by the sovereign were severe (often, death). Still, there is the historical paradox that when the King was paid in coin (in fees, fines and taxes), he would have them weighed—and reject or accept at lower value the coins that were low weight. If coins were really valued nominally, why bother weighing them? Why did the issuer—the King—appear to have a double standard, one nominalist, one metalist?

In private circulation, sellers also favored “heavy” coins—those that weighed more, or that were of higher fineness (more precious metal content). They certainly did not want to find themselves in the situation of trying to make payments to the Crown with low weight coins. Hence, a “Gresham’s Law” would operate: everyone wanted to pay in “light” coins, but to be paid in “heavy coins”. There was thus obvious concern with the metal content of coins, and fairly accurate (and quite tiny) scales were manufactured and sold to weigh coins individually. This makes it appear to modern historians (and economists) that “metalism” reigned: the value of coins was determined by metal content.

And yet we see in the courts rulings indications that the law favored a nominalist interpretation: any legal coin had to be accepted. And we see Kings who imposed long prison terms (the sentence was usually to serve “at the King’s pleasure”—a nice way of putting it! One can just imagine the King’s pleasure at holding indefinitely those who refused his coins.), or death, for refusing any coin deemed legal. It all appears so confusing! Was it nominal or was it metal?

The final piece of the puzzle appears to be this: until modern minting techniques were invented (including milling and stamping), it was relatively easy to “clip” coins—cut some of the metal off the edge. They could also be rubbed to collect grains of the metal. (Even normal wear and tear rapidly reduced metal content; gold coins in particular were soft. For that reason they were particularly ill-suited as an “efficient medium of exchange”—yet another reason to doubt the metalist story.)

This is why the King had them weighed to test for clipping. (As you can imagine the penalty for clipping was severe, including death.) If he did not, he would be the victim of Gresham’s Law; each time he recoined he would have less precious metal to work with. But because he weighed the coins, everyone else also had to avoid being on the wrong side of Gresham’s Law. Again, far from being an “efficient medium of exchange”, we find that use of precious metals set up a destructive dynamic that would only finally resolved with the move to paper money! (Actually, even paper is less than ideal; perhaps some readers have experienced problems getting older paper money accepted—as I did even in Italy before it adopted the euro—due to Gresham Law dynamics. Thank goodness for computers and keystrokes and LEDs.)

Kings sometimes made those dynamics worse—by recanting his promise to accept his old coined IOUs at previously agreed upon values. This was the practice of “crying down” the coins. Until recent times, coins did not have the nominal value stamped on them—they were worth what the King said they were worth at his “pay houses”. To effectively double the tax burden, he could announce that all the outstanding coins were worth only half as much as their previous value. Since this was the prerogative of the sovereign, holders could face some uncertainty over the nominal value. This was another reason to accept only heavy coins—no matter how much the King cried down the coins, the floor value would be equal to the value of the metallic content. Normally, however, the coins would circulate at the higher nominal value set by the sovereign, and enforced by the court and the threat of severe penalties for refusing to accept the coins at that value.

There is also one more aspect to the story. With the rise of the Regal predecessors to our modern state, there were the twin and related phenomena of Mercantilism and foreign wars. Within an empire or state, the sovereign’s IOUs are sufficient “money things”: so long as the sovereign takes them in payment, its subjects or citizens will also accept them. Any “token” will do—it can be metal, paper, or electronic entries. But outside the boundaries of the authority, mere tokens might not be accepted at all. In some respects, international trade and international payments are more akin to barter unless there is some universally accepted “token” (like the US Dollar today).

Put it this way: why would anyone in France want the IOU of France’s sworn enemy, the King of England? Outside England, the King’s coins might circulate only at the value of precious metal contained in them. Metalism as a theory might well apply as a sort of floor to the value of a King’s IOU: at worst, it cannot fall in value much below gold content as it can be melted for bullion.

And that leads us to the policy of Mercantilism, and also to the conquest of the New World. Why would a nation want to export its output, only to have silver and gold return to fill the King’s coffers? And why the rush to the New World to get gold and silver? Because the gold and silver were needed to conduct the foreign wars, which required the hiring of mercenary armies and the purchase of all the supplies needed to support those armies in foreign lands. (England did not have huge aircraft to parachute the troops and supplies into France—instead they hired mainland troops and bought the supplies from the local outfitters.) There was a nice vicious circle in all this: the wars were fought both by and for gold and silver!

And it made for a monetary mess in the home country. The sovereign was always short of gold and silver, hence had a strong incentive to debase the currency (to preserve metal to fund the wars), while preferring payment in the heaviest coins. The population had a strong incentive to refuse the light coins in payment, while hoarding the heavy coins. Or, sellers could try to maintain two sets of prices—a lower one for heavy coins and a high one for light coins. But that meant toying with the gallows.

The mess was resolved only very gradually with the rise of the modern nation state, a clear adoption of nominalism in coinage, and—finally—with abandonment of the long practiced phenomenon of including precious metal in coins.

And with that we finally got our “efficient media of exchange”: pure IOUs recorded electronically. Precious metal coins were always records of IOUs, but they were imperfect. And boy have they misled historians and economists!

Admittedly, I have not yet made a thorough case that money must be an IOU, not a commodity. We need some more building blocks first.
References

* I thank Chris Desan, David Fox, and other participants of a recent seminar at Cambridge University for the discussion I draw upon here.

By L. Randall Wray

Thanks for all the responses—this might have been a record number for the MMP. Coins are fascinating. I have to admit that even though my approach downplays the role of coins in monetary systems, I always head right to the coin displays in the museums. Indeed, when in Cambridge recently I was treated to a quick tour of the collection of the late Phillip Grierson, who not only was among the greatest numismatists who ever lived but also one of those who recognized that the origins of money are not to be found in markets. Rather, it was his hypothesis that money came out of the penal system (debts again!)—a view that I believe must be correct. But that is a topic for another day.

Today I will address the first set of comments on the MMT approach to “commodity money coins”. In Blog 12 I began to explain why the MMT view is that gold or silver coins are not examples of commodity money. Rather, they are simply IOUs of the issuer that happen to be stamped on precious metal.
On to the comments and questions.

Q1: What is MMT’s view of the reserve currency?

Answer: Well, today it is the Dollar; a century ago it was the Pound. MMT principles apply—it is a sovereign currency issued through keystrokes. The issuer of the reserve currency can either float (in which case the issuer does not promise to convert at a fixed exchange rate) or it can fix. As I have argued, fixing reduces domestic policy space. Reserve status probably increases external demand for the nation’s currency—which is used for international clearing. To satisfy that demand, the reserve currency issuer (the US today) either supplies the currency through the capital account (lending) or the current account (trade deficit, for example).

Many believe this allows the nation that issues the reserve currency to “get something for nothing”, often called “seigniorage”. This is largely false—did American consumers get free goods and services over the past decade as the US ran current account deficits? No, of course not. They are left with a mountain of debt. Did the US government get “something for nothing”? Well, perhaps—but all sovereign governments can be said to get something for nothing, since they purchase by keystrokes.

But that is not seigniorage—it results from the fact that sovereign government imposes liabilities on its population–taxes, fees, and fines. The US does it; but so does Turkey. Sovereign government first puts its population in debt, then it uses keystrokes to move resources to the public sector and its keystrokes create its IOUs that provide the means through which taxpayers can retire their tax debt. The sovereign’s currency can circulate outside the country to varying degrees, but that is ultimately because the sovereign’s citizens need it to pay taxes domestically—since foreigners are not normally subject to the tax.

So in principle the issuer of the reserve currency is not unique—although the external demand for the reserve currency is greater. We’ll study this more later; think of this brief response as an appetizer that is no doubt going to spur some “hegemonic” objections!

Q2: The CPI has increased by a factor of 7 since 1966. Is the currency still a store of value?

Answer: Well, sure it is–but as the commentator noted, it is not a good store of value in terms of purchasing power of a basket of consumer goods and services over a period as long as a half century. We can quibble about the use of the CPI as a measure of inflation—it has well known problems we will not pursue in detail here.

As Keynes argued, you need some “stickiness” of wages and prices in the money of account—or you might abandon money. That is what can happen in a hyperinflation. You try to find something else. But clearly except for a few gold bugs, US inflation since 1966 has been sufficiently low that the Dollar remained a useful money of account, and currency has been voluntarily held.

In truth, economists are hard-pressed to find negative economic effects from inflation at rates under, say, 40% per year. But clearly people do not like inflation when it gets to double digits.

Returning to Keynes, he said that no one would hold money as a store of value in the absence of uncertainty. Holding wealth in a highly liquid form like money makes sense only if you are uncertain, and even scared, about the future. In a financial crisis, everyone runs to cash. It gives a very low return, but that is better than a huge loss!

If you wanted a good store of wealth, and you were making a decision back in 1966 as to the portfolio you would hold until 2011, it is unlikely that you would have held much cash. There would have been many assets that would be better stores of value. However, if we are talking about a desirable portfolio to be held over the next few months, you probably would hold some cash. There is a trade-off between liquidity and return.

I know the gold bugs like gold; but those who bought it in 1980 were kicking themselves for the next 30 years, and still have not recouped their losses. In general, commodity prices fall over time in real terms—they are terrible inflation hedges—plus they have storage costs.

Let me just say I have no knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons—I suppose it is a board game like Monopoly–so I cannot answer Neil’s question about gold, silver, and copper pieces. But I think Monopoly still uses the same paper currency and same prices and rents? Not sure what the question is. Games don’t have to have inflation? OK—games have rules. I suppose inflation is not built into the rules of those games.

On Karl’s statement that past labor is not equivalent to today’s labor, hence, it is not surprising that wages and prices are higher today, I do believe he is onto a point.

We must adjust the CPI or other measures of price for quality improvements. How much would a modern laptop have cost in 1966? Millions of dollars? Billions? As Warren Mosler always jokes, your IPhone has more electronic wizardry than NASA was able to muster for the trips to the moon. The CPI is more of an art than a science—since we have to put prices on things that did not exist, and make imaginary quality adjustments.

Further there is something called the Baumol disease. A symphony orchestra back in Mozart’s time was as large as one today—give or take a few. And it took about the same time to perform a piece—depending on the conductor. There has been no productivity improvement. Yet, workers in other fields are infinitely more productive than they were in Mozart’s day. There is a similar problem in many other areas, mostly services where you really cannot improve productivity much (think barbers, teachers, doctors). The relative price of these things should have become insanely expensive over the past 200 years relative to, say, manufacturing output with tremendous productivity gains. And if we rewarded workers only for productivity gains, our musicians would still be working for Mozart era wages. It still takes one barber to keep one hundred heads of hair looking good. By contrast, a single farmer feeds as many hungry consumers as 100 farmers used to feed. But the farmer and barber still earn about the same living (give or take). Rather than vastly underpaying the farmer we choose to overpay the barber. At the same time, the Baumol disease thesis is that an ever growing portion of our nation’s output is in those sectors that suffer the disease. So we overpay ever more workers in those sectors. The trend for wages (and, thus, prices) is up.

(Wages grow faster than productivity because we have those low productivity sectors that get the same wage increases. And to carry the analysis a bit further, the thesis is that over time government tends to take over more of these “diseased” sectors—so government tends to grow as a percent of GDP. This is not meant to be a criticism, and of course there are countervailing tendencies. But think of healthcare and projected tens of trillions of dollars of government budget deficits and you’ve got the picture.)

Blame the concert violinist for erosion of the value of the dollar.

In a sense, a part of inflation is to even these things out—otherwise, all our musicians and artists would live like paupers relative to our factory workers. Think of it this way, inflation is the cost of preserving culture. Occasionally we like fine art, too. And we like our Kindergarten teachers to maintain class size of 15 kids. To keep pace with productivity growth in manufacturing, each Kindergarten teacher today would have to have hundreds of 5 years olds crowded into every classroom. It didn’t happen. (Well, with state and local government budget cuts, it might.)

To preserve “inefficiency” in the Kindergarten classroom we need inflation.

Sorry, that was rather long-winded, but the comment by Karl was on the right track.

Finally, as Neil hints, some inflation is probably good. Keynes argued it helps to encourage investment, by increasing nominal returns and making it easier to service debt. When I graduated from college with mountains of student loan debt, I really appreciated the Carter years’ inflation! The alternative would be rapidly declining prices in every sector that does not suffer from the Baumol disease—but deflation itself is a dangerous disease. This would be like fighting the common cold with a good dose of terminal cancer.


Q3: What about Chinese holding of Dollars—what is the impact on the US?

Answer: I want to hold off on this a bit, but clearly the Chinese do not really lend Dollars to the US and especially not to the US government. Every dollar they got came from us. Our problem is that we allow imports to displace US workers—we could put them to work in other jobs. But instead we leave a lot of them unemployed. We do not fully enjoy the advantages of running a trade deficit—consuming more than we produce—because we operate our economy below capacity and keep millions unemployed. But clearly the answer is not to go begging to the Chinese to keep those dollars flowing to the US (as VP Biden is doing right now)! Rather it is to put the unemployed to work doing useful things to improve our living standards.

Q4: Could use of gold be linked to anti-counterfeiting measures?

Answer: That sounds right to me! Yes, government could attempt to control gold supply making it harder to counterfeit coins.

Q5: What about the state of Utah accepting gold coins?

Answer: Heck, I’ll accept them, too. Send me yours! Worst case scenario is that gold prices will collapse and I’ll have to use the coins at nominal value. More likely, they will remain collector’s items.

I also like platinum: I’d like Treasury to coin ten $1 trillion dollar coins, and give me one. The other nine could buy back Treasuries so that our debt hysterians could worry about something else for a while.

Q6: Today, are there two “commodities” serving as medium of exchange, currency and demand deposits?

Answer: Neither are commodities. Sorry, we are using the word commodities in two senses. One is the Wall Street terminology: “natural resource” inputs to production: oil, soybeans, corn, copper, silver…and, yes, gold. These are now the subject of a speculative boom driven by pension funds buying futures contracts. The other is in the sense of “products of labor, produced for sale in markets”. But on neither definition is currency nor demand deposits an example of a “commodity”. Both are IOUs, either stamped on base metal or paper, or recorded electronically through keystrokes.

Q 7: In what sense does the state go into debt to the public when it issues money?

Answer: It must accept back its own IOUs. What it “owes” you is the right to redeem its IOU for the tax debt it imposed on you. Government “redeems” by accepting its own IOU. All debtors must accept back in payment their own IOUs. Even government. Refusal to accept is a default.

Q8: Were clipped coins accepted at original value?

Answer: Yes. And No. More on Gresham’s Law next week. Roman Law was nominalist as I discussed. Deviations from nominalism, however, were common in early modern society. But that does not make metalism correct. Read next week.

To finish up, a few more comments and responses:

Thanks much to Ramanan for providing citations to the St Augustine statement on Christ’s coins. I will update the blog. : St. Augustin on Sermon on the Mount, Harmony of the Gospels and Homilies on the Gospels: Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Part 6″ (Sermon XL) ; Just above Sermon XLI here.

Alternatively; toward the end of the page: Christ’s coin is man. In him is Christ’s image, in him Christ’s Name, Christ’s gifts, Christ’s rules of duty

A commentator noted: “People as coins” just might be a rabbinic allusion: “When Caesar puts his image on a thousand coins, they all look alike. But when God puts His image on a thousand people, they all come out different.”

LRW: Thanks, I will look into this.

Dave said: People might find this of interest:

LRW: I agree! His view of money is similar to mine, I believe. In a word, debt.

Lewis, you appear to be channeling A. Mitchell Innes. Good job.

Darwin: yes, if you play by the rules on a gold standard, the quantity of gold constrains coin issue. You can call in gold, you can raise the price for gold paid at the mint, you can put less gold in your coins, and you can use hazelwood tally sticks and bar tabs. All of the above.

Anon Marx: I agree with you. Some Marxists do want to find commodity money in Marx. I do not. Marx’s whole analysis requires nominalism. I interpret his statements on gold as contingent—special cases having to do with operation of the gold standard.

Oil Drum Anon: “I think this particular installment of the MMP is weak…. Where is there an axiomatic development of MMT, uncluttered by asides about ancient history?

Answer: Well, Anonymous you’ve found the right site but you started in on #12. Begin at the Beginning. (Hint: they are numbered consecutively, so the beginning would be #1.) Further, many or even most people have this belief about commodity coins of the past, and believe that all would be right with the world if we only went back to coining gold. But that is an imaginary past. That is what I am trying to correct, since stories color our understanding. Indeed, our understanding really boils down to stories—it is how we sort things out. Humans are born story tellers. All of them are false, of course.

OK: done for today. Thanks for comments and questions. Part two next week. That will get more into the nitty and the gritty.

By L. Randall Wray

Last week I asserted that coins have never been a form of commodity money; rather they have always been the IOUs of the issuer. Essentially, a gold coin is just the state’s IOU that happens to have been stamped on gold. It is just a “token” of the state’s indebtedness—nothing but a record of that debt. The state must take back its IOU in payments made to itself. “Taxes drive money”—these “money things” are accepted because there are taxes “backing them up”, not because they have embodied gold. As promised, this week I will begin try to dispel the view that coins used to be commodity monies. Next week, we will finish up the discussion.

In this Primer I do not want to go deeply into economic history—we are more interested here with how money “works” today. However, that does not mean that history does not matter, nor should we ignore how our stories about the past affect how we view money today. For example, a common belief (accepted by most economists) is that money first took a commodity form. Our ancient ancestors had markets, but they relied on inconvenient barter until someone had the bright idea of choosing one commodity to act as a medium of exchange. At first it might have been pretty sea shells, but through some sort of evolutionary process, precious metals were chosen as a more efficient money commodity.

Obviously, metal had an intrinsic value—it was desired for other uses. (And if we take a Marxian labor theory of value, we can say metal had a labor value as it had to be mined and refined.) Whatever the case, that intrinsic value imparted value to coined metal. This helped to prevent inflation—that is, decline in the purchasing power of the metal coin in terms of other commodities—since the coin could always be melted and sold as bullion. There are then all sorts of stories about how government debased the value of the coins (by reducing precious metal content), causing inflation.

Later, government issued paper money (or base metal coins of very little intrinsic value) but promised to redeem this for the metal. Again, there are many stories about government defaulting on that. And then finally we end with today’s “fiat money”, with nothing “real” standing behind it. And that is how we get the Weimar Republics and the Zimbabwes—with nothing really backing the money it now is prone to causing hyperinflation as government prints up too much of it. Which leads us to the gold bug’s lament: if only we could go back to a “real” money standard: gold.

In this discussion, we cannot provide a detailed historical account to debunk the traditional stories about money’s history. Let us instead provide an overview of an alternative.

First we need to note that the money of account is many thousands of years old—at least four millennia old and probably much older. (The “modern” in “modern money theory” comes from Keynes’s claim that money has been state money for the past 4000 years “at least”.) We know this because we have, for example, the clay tablets of Mesopotamia that record values in money terms, along with price lists in that money of account.

We also know that money’s earliest origins are closely linked to debts and record-keeping, and that many of the words associated with money and debt have religious significance: debt, sin, repayment, redemption, “wiping the slate clean”, and Year of Jubilee. In the Aramaic language spoken by Christ, the word for “debt” is the same as the word for “sin”. The “Lord’s Prayer” that is normally interpreted to read “forgive us our trespasses” could be just as well translated as “our debts” or “our sins”—or as Margaret Atwood says, “our sinful debts”.*

Records of credits and debits were more akin to modern electronic entries—etched in clay rather than on computer tapes. And all early money units had names derived from measures of the principal grain foodstuff—how many bushels of barley equivalent were owed, owned, and paid. All of this is more consistent with the view of money as a unit of account, a representation of social value, and an IOU rather than as a commodity.

Or, as we MMTers say, money is a “token”, like the cloakroom “ticket” that can be redeemed for one’s coat at the end of the operatic performance.

Indeed, the “pawn” in pawnshop comes from the word for “pledge”, as in the collateral left, with a token IOU provided by the shop that is later “redeemed” for the item left. St. Nick is the patron saint of pawnshops (and, appropriately, for thieves), while “Old Nick” refers to the devil (hence, the red suit and chimney soot) to whom we pawn our souls. The Tenth Commandment’s prohibition on coveting thy neighbor’s wife (which goes on to include male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor) has nothing to do with sex and adultery but rather with receiving them as pawns for debt. By contrast, Christ is known as “the Redeemer”—the “Sin Eater” who steps forward to pay the debts we cannot redeem, a much older tradition that lay behind the practice of human sacrifice to repay the gods.*

We all know Shakespeare’s admonition “neither a borrower nor a lender be”, as religion typically views both the “devil” creditor and the debtor who “sells his soul” by pawning his wife and kids into debt bondage as sinful—if not equally then at least simultaneously tainted, united in the awful bondage. Only “redemption” can free us from humanity’s debts owing to Eve’s original sin.

Of course, for most of humanity today, it is the original sin/debt to the tax collector, rather than to Old Nick, that we cannot escape. The Devil kept the first account book, carefully noting the purchased souls and only death could “wipe the slate clean” as “death pays all debts”. Now we’ve got our tax collector, who like death is the only certain thing in life. In between the two, we had the clay tablets of Mesopotamia recording debits and credits in the Temple’s and then the Palace’s money of account for the first few millennia after money was invented as a universal measure of our multiple and heterogeneous sins.

The first coins were created thousands of years later, in the greater Greek region (so far as we know, in Lydia in the 7th century BC). And in spite of all that has been written about coins, they have rarely been more than a very small proportion of the “money things” involved in finance and debt payment. For most of European history, for example, tally sticks, bills of exchange, and “bar tabs” (again, the reference to “wiping the slate clean” is revealing—something that might not be done for a year or two at the pub, where the alewife kept the accounts) did most of that work.

Indeed, until very recent times, most payments made to the Crown in England were in the form of tally sticks (the King’s own IOU, recorded in the form of notches in hazelwood)—whose use was only discontinued well into the 19th century (with a catastrophic result: the Exchequer had them thrown into the stoves with such zest that Parliament was burnt to the ground by those devilish tax collectors!) In most realms, the quantity of coin was so small that it could be (and was) frequently called in to be melted for re-coinage.

(If you think about it, calling in all the coins to melt them for re-coinage would be a very strange and pointless activity if coins were already valued by embodied metal!)

So what were coins and why did they contain precious metal? To be sure, we do not know. Money’s history is “lost in the mists of time when the ice was melting…when the weather was delightful and the mind free to be fertile of new ideas—in the islands of the Hesperides or Atlantis or some Eden of Central Asia” as Keynes put it. We have to speculate.

One hypothesis about early Greece (the mother of both democracy and coinage—almost certainly the two are linked in some manner) is that the elites had nearly monopolized precious metal, which was important in their social circles tied together by “hierarchical gift exchange”. They were above the agora (market place) and hostile to the rising polis (democratic city-state government). According to Classical scholar Leslie Kurke, the polis first minted coin to be used in the agora to “represent the state’s assertion of its ultimate authority to constitute and regulate value in all the spheres in which general-purpose money operated… Thus state-issued coinage as a universal equivalent, like the civic agora in which it circulated, symbolized the merger in a single token or site of many different domains of value, all under the final authority of the city.”** The use of precious metals was a conscious thumbing-of-the-nose against the elite who placed great ceremonial value on precious metal. By coining their precious metal, for use in the agora’s houses of prostitution by mere common citizens, the polis sullied the elite’s hierarchical gift exchange—appropriating precious metal, and with its stamp asserting its ultimate authority.

As the polis used coins for its own payments and insisted on payment in coin, it inserted its sovereignty into retail trade in the agora. At the same time, the agora and its use of coined money subverted hierarchies of gift exchange, just as a shift to taxes and regular payments to city officials (as well as severe penalties levied on officials who accepted gifts) challenged the “natural” order that relied on gifts and favors. As Kurke argues, since coins are nothing more than tokens of the city’s authority, they could have been produced from any material. However, because the aristocrats measured a man’s worth by the quantity and quality of the precious metal he had accumulated, the polis was required to mint high quality coins, unvarying in fineness. (Note that gold is called the noble metal because it remains the same through time, like the king; coined metal needed to be similarly unvarying.) The citizens of the polis by their association with high quality, uniform, coin (and in the literary texts of the time, the citizen’s “mettle” was tested by the quality of the coin issued by his city) gained equal status; by providing a standard measure of value, coinage rendered labor comparable and in this sense coinage was an egalitarian innovation.

From that time forward, coins commonly contained precious metal. Rome carried on the tradition, and Kurke’s thesis is consistent with the statement of St. Augustine, who declared that just as people are Christ’s coins, the precious metal coins of Rome represent a visualization of imperial power—inexorably doing the emperor’s bidding just as the reverent do Christ’s.*** Note, again, the link between money and religion.

OK, that gets us to Roman times. Next week we examine coinage from Rome through to modern times.

References:
*Payback: debt and the shadow side of wealth, by Margaret Atwood, Anansi 2008.
**Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold, by Leslie Kurke, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1999; xxi, 385; paper $29.95 (ISBN 0-691-00736-5), cloth $65.00 (ISBN 0-691-01731-X).
***If anyone knows the source for St. Augustine’s comparison of people to coins, please provide it. I thank Chris Desan, David Fox, and other participants of a recent seminar at Cambridge University for the discussion I draw upon here.