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2. The Arts of ‘‘Scientific’’ Money: Monetary Policy as Moral Policy
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TWO The Arts of ‘‘Scientific’’ Money Monetary Policy as Moral Policy The subject of money as a whole is a very extensive one, and the literature of it would fill a very great library. Many changes are now taking place in the currencies of the world, and important inquiries have been lately instituted concerning the best mode of constituting the circulating medium. —Jevons 1919 [1875] Because this book aims to examine the daily usage and rhetoric surrounding a variety of competing currencies, it is vital to provide a rigorous analysis of the monetary theories, histories, and structures that distinguish each currency from the others. This chapter will describe the similarities and di√erences among the theories and structures that organize the localcurrency movement and those that organize more standard paper money, including the Swedish krona and the euro. I will argue that there are specific mechanisms by which currencies can tie people together into bounded groups. In Gaonkar and Povinelli’s (2003) terminology, I am looking into the ways in which currencies can serve as a ‘‘transfiguring’’ device for the populations that rely on them. Knowledge of these mechanisms is essential to any ethnography that seeks to connect currency and social borders. At the beginning of my study of local-currency movements, I was most struck by two related matters. First, they had trouble attracting members. ∂≠ THE EURO AND ITS RIVALS Second, they openly announced a desire for stringent borders to restrict monetary usage. I began to focus on the lack of a reserve system as the most idiosyncratic aspect of the local currencies’ monetary theory, and posited that this specific aspect of its structure constituted not only its problem of attracting new members, but also its ability to police the borders of monetary usage.∞ In other words, the very thing that made these movements unpopular for a broader audience was precisely what they needed in order to maintain their founding goals. It was this discovery that led me down the path of studying the role of reserves in all modern currencies. The reserve system (or lack thereof ) illuminates a whole host of policy and moral issues related to modern paper money. Issues such as whether the money should circulate rapidly or slowly, whether it should be safely hidden in a vault or openly circulate, and whether it should represent labor (production) or leisure (consumption) all came to the fore.≤ In short, despite scientific claims to complete objectivity and moral neutrality, there are ethical concerns well outside the realm of the economy embedded within the structures and theories that undergird a currency’s purported value. Further, each wave of theorizing about money reveals a desire to finally achieve human control over money. Modernist economists treated money in much the same way as external nature was treated by modernist scientists : money was seen as a natural force external to human whims, and society required a scientific revolution in order to control it in ways that it had resisted since its birth. Money was yet another force of nature that needed to be quelled and channeled by humanity, as science has tried to conquer nature. Underlying much of these debates, therefore, is a continual drive toward seeking the ‘‘perfect,’’ utopian money—a money that will transparently and consistently represent the material world and deliver us from corrupt governments, wily businesspeople, and an indi√erent natural world. I approach money in this way in order to develop an anthropological means of discussing the impacts and changes ushered in by the euro. A currency’s relationship to boundaries makes it pertinent to the construction of spaces such as the EU, the Øresund Region, and the tiny confines of the local-currency rings. And the various methods of regulating money depend upon di√erent moral configurations. Thus, it becomes clear that, [3.231.217.209] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:07 GMT) The Arts of ‘‘Scientific’’ Money ∂∞ when people are arguing about money, they may well be arguing about other things at the same time. Early Monetary Ferment and Nation-Building A famous Swedish economist, Knut Wicksell, asserted that Swedish ‘‘currency history until 1830 is indeed an almost uninterrupted succession of debasements and bankruptcies’’ (Wicksell 1935: 45; for more detail, see Peebles 2003). Such endemic problems provoked an ongoing debate over the locus of value. This debate continued for many years, and it is worth outlining briefly here, for it connects with the ethnographic...