ENGL 200 D: Reading Literature: Literature in the Marketplace

Essay One Ideas

For my essay, I would like to address the first prompt: “What makes money challenging to use?”
Money is challenging to use because its value is difficult, if not impossible, to conceptualize.

I plan on using Locke and Stein as my sources.

From Locke, money is representative of property, which has real value. But money is not the same as property because it doesn’t spoil and you can hoard it, losing the concept of property being things you need to survive. Money is an intermediate representation of value.
“The greatest part of things really useful to the life of man…are generally things of short duration; such as, if they are not consumed by use, will decay and perish of themselves” (Locke, Book II, Ch. 5, P. 46)
“if he would give his nuts for a piece of metal, pleased with its colour; or exchange his sheep for shells, or wool for a sparkling pebble or a diamond, and keep those by him all his life…he might heap up as much of these durable things as he pleased” (Locke, Book II, Ch. 5, P. 46)

The points I want from Locke: money represents objects that we value, and we can hoard money.

This is important because as we use money, we stop thinking of it as representing the objects we really value (the things we can acquire with money) and start to value money on its own. Paradoxically, at that point if money represents itself, there is no reason for it to be valuable at all.

The concept of money representing value and being hoarded leads to the dilemma that Stein brings up: once we have more than “three” dollars, we can’t keep track of it anymore. What does a million dollars actually mean? Interestingly, when we have too much money to count, we being to think of it in terms of what we can buy with it, which is a more “pure” way of representing its value (restores money to its original purpose of representing value).
“It is awfully hard for anybody to think money is money when there is more of it than they can count.” (Stein)
“That came to be what we all used to say when anybody used numbers that they could not count well anyway a million or three.” (Stein)

Points I want from Stein: once we have a lot of money (from hoarding), we forget what it represents.

Main Point: Money is challenging to use because we lose sight of what it represents. There is a disconnect between what we do to earn money, and what we can obtain with it.

I wasn’t sure if I should use Locke and Stein as my source articles. Stein’s paper is quite short, and there isn’t too much I can take from it. However, those two papers seem to be the most directly related to the topic I’m thinking about (why we can’t conceptualize money).

I also don’t know if my topic is too broad, or if my point is too vague. Money is an idea what people agree on. But the fact that it’s only an idea is what makes it so challenging to use. I’m not sure how to narrow down the topic further.