Years ago, most Americans were paid in cash. These “greenbacks” were based on gold or silver held by the U.S. government. They meant something.

But nowadays, things are different. No one gets paid in greenbacks anymore. Most of us get checks or direct deposit instead– a piece of paper showing that some numbers have been deposited into an account. It is surreal in many ways.

The poor and middle class work for money. The rich make money. The more real you think money is, the harder you will work for it. If you can grasp the idea that money is not real, you will grow richer faster.
–”Rich Dad”, as quoted by Robert Kiyosaki in “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”

Take a look at some definitions of money, as found by Google. Yes, it is a slip of paper with a dead president or a queen on it. But money is really just a symbol– a “symbolic representation of wealth.” It is what we agree it is.

Why is that dollar bill in your pocket worth anything? One answer is that it’s valuable because it says it is. To the left of the portrait of George Washington, the dollar proclaims: “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.”
–from “Why Is That Dollar Bill in Your Pocket Worth Anything?” by Professor Hal R. Varian, The New York Times, January 15, 2004

If someone doesn’t accept your one dollar bill, it isn’t even worth the paper it is printed on. This can actually happen. It happened at the end of the Civil War, when the Confederacy fell. And it nearly happened on February 20th, when a cashier at Best Buy in Maryland received payment in $2 bills, did not know that denomination existed (I will spare you from my judgements of their intelligence), and had the customer arrested by the Secret Service.

He remembers the cashier marking each bill with a pen. Then other store personnel began to gather, a few of them asking, “Are these real?”

“Of course they are,” Bolesta said. “They’re legal tender.”
–from “A Tale of Customer Service, Justice and Currency as Funny as a $2 bill” by Michael Olesker, The Baltimore Sun

(Editor’s note: The Baltimore Sun article requires free registration to read. It isn’t our fault. But you can read a summary of it, and get login details, here.)

But even if their money is accepted when they want it to be, many Americans find money to be the root of evil. They are in a constant struggle for more of it. They hate it. And the topic is taboo in some families.

Americans live in the richest country on earth, and we share more wealth than ever before. Yet money causes much conflict in our daily lives. I don’t just mean Enron. It goes way beyond that. It has torn into our homes, our families, our marriages, and goes as far as pizza delivery guys being murdered for a few dollars, sometimes no money at all.

More people are worried about money than at any time since the Great Depression. Families are divorcing over money, they’re fighting over money; 51% of Americans just responded to a survey saying money is the most sensitive topic in the household.
–Elizabeth Warren, as quoted in “Running in Circles”, SmartMoney Online

So if money isn’t real, why does it cause so many problems? How can this fake representation of wealth be the single largest reason for divorce? I just can’t make any sense out of it.

Update: FMF caught a new USA Today article about how money worries hinder job performance. Though six months after I first wrote about it, the problem doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Popularity: 6% [?]