the Almighty Dollar makes vampires of the many of us and blind to everything but “the dollar.
The arrival of this spiffy new symbol for the rupee suggests that it’s possible to come up with new currency symbols, perhaps to account for changes in the world economy. I thought we might look at introducing a new symbol for the almighty dollar. This one seems appropriate for most of us –
Currency and its effects on the community:
Welcome to Urban Bible. I am Tricia Irene and you’re joining in on a series of podcasts surrounding currency and its effects on the community.
The purpose of this series is to take this Sir the Baptist song and dissect it line by line in the hopes of revealing some of the strategic lyricism behind a very relevant and impactful topic that affects us all daily. Come closer as we study & challenge epistemology in areas of culture, religion, business and the betterment of global issues.
The lyrics that I want to discuss today are this: “What’s the difference between a hundred dollar and a dollar bill? Not the ink, not the paper, that’s real.”
What IS the difference between a hundred dollar and a dollar bill? They are made from the same material, written with the same ink, come from the same mint… So what decides that one holds so much more value than the other?
Trust in American banks is at an all time low right now because people are starting to realize that there is not much difference between the dollar bill and the 100 dollar bill.
Money is something that people use every day. We earn it and spend it but don’t often think much about it.
Money is an idea, backed by confidence.
A hundred dollar bill is just a piece of paper. If you want to buy something with it, and the person you are buying from is not CONFIDENT that he also can buy something with that $100 bill, then it is not worth anything. It is only the IDEA of the $100 bill and the confidence that people place in it that makes it worth anything.
Money isn’t just pieces of paper. Money is a good that acts as a medium of exchange in transactions. It facilitates trade. Money is a mathematical measurement of a person’s earthly influence. This definition means that money is a thing that is used to swap one thing or service for another thing or service.
Money is created by a kind of a perpetual interaction between concrete things, our intangible desire for them, and our abstract faith in what has value: money is valuable because we want it, but we want it only because it can get us a desired product or service. How much money in circulation determines how valuable it is.
All of America’s money is controlled by the FED. By raising and lowering federal interest rates and creating money, the FED essentially manipulates the economy and tries to balance the rate of inflation and employment rates.
Remember when grandma used to say money is the root of all evil? Money’s seat between good or evil is decided by those who use it.
I hope I have created some revolutions in your mind and made you think a little more deeply into these lyrics. Once you understand how strategic these lyrics are, the message becomes clear and empowers you as a listener to put yourself in position to make wise and educated decisions based upon positive outcomes of your purposeful actions.
Across cultures, the idea of money has dual positive and negative connotations. Consistent with this notion of duality, money-priming theory posits that the salience of money makes individuals work harder for themselves while reducing the concern they have for others. Although research has also tended to support these expectations, it has almost exclusively done so using between-persons designs in controlled lab settings.
To address these limitations in the literature, we used a within-persons design in two work settings to test individual behavior change as a function of the salience of money. We did so using two samples of professional athletes and tested the extent to which priming individual pay affected both self-serving and cooperative behaviors. We operationalized the money prime in these samples as the final year of individuals’ employment contracts—a time when money is made particularly salient relative to surrounding years.
Consistent with money-priming theory, within-persons analyses using a sample of basketball players from the National Basketball Association revealed that self-serving behaviors significantly increased in the final contract year relative to surrounding years. However, we did not find that cooperative behaviors decreased during the final contract year. This pattern of results was replicated using a sample of professional hockey players in the National Hockey League. These findings cumulatively suggest that although the salience of money is associated with increases in self-serving behaviors, it is not adversely associated with cooperation or team success.