Anthony,
Here is a link to an article from Psychology Today regarding monkeys and
"money." But one of the researchers was Marc Hauser, who has become
notorious of late for "fudging" his experimental results.
Charles McCann
In a message dated 8/14/2013 6:25:29 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
An
English friend of mine, a novellist who writes about the
Elizabethan
period, has decided (perhaps taking a page out of Margaret
Attwood's
book) that she wants to do something on money.
I warned her about
reinventing the wheel and advised her to make a
search of existing
material. The excerpt from her letter, below, lists
some of her
concerns. [I have no idea what she means about 'treating
an economy
as an ecology'.]
If any contributors to this List can help I should be
much obliged,
and would pass on their answers to my
friend.
QUOTE:
I have so many questions about money.
The one
about the Roman empire's system of state and private credit is
something I've been wondering about for years - IF they used a
credit
note system and IF the temples (especially the temple of
Apollo) acted
as clearing houses for them, that would account for
why Christian
rioters normally burnt the records kept in the temples
and also might
explain why the Empire fell apart only 20 years after
becoming fully
Christian. Has anyone done any kind of study on
this?
Is there any evidence that the legend of Midas is an account of
the
first major inflation caused by the King's debauching of the
currency
(everything he touched turned to gold... Lydia was the
first to use a
touchstone and the first to come up with currency
that was guaranteed
a certain purity by the state.)
Has anybody
published any work that treats an economy as an ecology?
Did they
run any models?
I know there has been some work done on macaques, teaching
them to use
tokens that buy grapes as currency. Do any other animals
do this? Do
any of them do it naturally? Who did the stuff with the
macaques?
Anthony
Waterman