Curious Kids - Why Does Money Exist?

1st January 2023

Readers of this we site will have noticed we often feature articles from The Conversation web site. It has many different sections with articles written by academics from all over the world.

One section is Curious Kids where the authors answer questions posed by young people. Aimed at kids the listings have great articles on a wide range of topics posed by children and young people. Today here is one Curious Kids - Why Does Money Exist?
A links is at the bottom of he page if you want to see many more. If you are not a kid then adults will find the well researched articles very interesting and easy to read. Curious Kids become Curious Adults. I am one of them - Bill Fernie

The Conversation allows republication of their articles and that is why we often use some of them particularly in their business, economy and finance topics but not restricted to those sections.

So to this kids question.

Why does money exist?
Imagine a world without money. With no way to buy stuff, you might need to produce everything you wear, eat or use unless you could figure out how to swap some of the things you made for other items.

Just making a chicken sandwich would require spending months raising hens and growing your own lettuce and tomatoes. You'd need to collect your own seawater to make salt.

Imagine a world without money. With no way to buy stuff, you might need to produce everything you wear, eat or use unless you could figure out how to swap some of the things you made for other items.

Just making a chicken sandwich would require spending months raising hens and growing your own lettuce and tomatoes. You'd need to collect your own seawater to make salt.

Specializing and bartering
Economists like me believe that using money makes it a lot easier for everyone to specialize, focusing their work on a specific activity.

A farmer is better at farming than you are, and a baker is probably better at baking. When they earn money, they can pay others for the things they don't produce or do.

As economists have known since David Ricardo's work in the 19th century, there are gains for everyone from exchanging goods and services - even when you end up paying someone who is less skilled than you. By making these exchanges easy to do, money makes it possible to consume more.

People have traded goods and services with one kind of money or another, whether it was trinkets, shells, coins and paper cash, for tens of thousands of years.

People have always obtained things without money too, usually through barter. It involves swapping something, such as a cookie or a massage, for something else - like a pencil or a haircut.

Bartering sounds convenient. It can be fun if you enjoy haggling. But it's hard to pull off.

Let's say you're a carpenter who makes chairs and you want an apple. You would probably find it impossible to buy one because a chair would be so much more valuable than that single piece of fruit. And just imagine what a hassle it would be to haul several of the chairs you've made to the shopping mall in the hopes of cutting great deals through barter with the vendors you'd find there.

Paper money is far easier to carry. You might be able sell a chair for, say, $50. You could take that $50 bill to a supermarket, buy two pounds of apples for $5 and keep the $45 in change to spend on other stuff later. Another advantage money has over bartering is that you can use it more easily to store your wealth and spend it later. Stashing six $50 bills takes up less room than storing six unsold chairs.

Nowadays, of course, many people pay for things without cash or coins. Instead, they use credit cards or make online purchases. Others simply wave a smartwatch at a designated device. Others use bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies. But all of these are just different forms of money that don't require paper.

No matter what form it takes, money ultimately helps make the trading of goods and services go more smoothly for everyone involved.

The Youtube video featured - How to Make a $1500 Sandwich in Only 6 - Months is a good example of how life would be difficult without money

Note
This article of from The Conversation web site. To read it with links to more information go HERE

To read many more Curious Kids Questions go HERE