The US dollar having been the world currency for some time, I don’t find this that surprising for people outside of the US to be okay with accepting that currency.

For Canada, the US dollars has long been of greater value, so there were no risk in accepting it. Most cashiers that deal with tourists had little signs that would say something along the line of “We don’t reimburse difference of rate.” Now the two dollars are more or less at parity. If Canadian dollar ever gets much higher, commerces will probably shy away from the USD.

@Al West:

“It seems like an insurmountable obstacle to explain such things. I find it instrumental to look at examples where these things fail…”

Good idea–look at where the system of belief and habit starts to unravel. You know what came to mind for me: what happens when a bill of currency is ripped or torn or damaged in some way. Suddenly everyone starts to worry if it still counts. Hmmm.

@Jennifer:

“Canada and Mexico should really stop being so accomodating until the US learns to reciprocate the favour.”

Hmmm. That would be pretty interesting. My guess is that the tourists from the US would freak out!

@Meesh:

“The further I have to travel in order to transform the bills you gave me into actually useful money, the more you’ll have to pay me in order to cover what it’s actually costing me to accept those bills.”

I’m sure that’s part of it…but I wonder what other reasons or motivations might be behind these kinds of choices? This is me just guessing, but I wonder if some folks just don’t accept US money in some cases to make a point, or because of principle, etc?

@Nicole:

“I think that what is interesting here Ryan also is your “something is going on here” observation focuses on what’s up with the money in Mexico rather than what is up with money in the US.”

Ya, I definitely agree with you that there’s plenty of material when it comes to money in the US. My focus on Mexico here has more to do with the fact that I have been here for the past six months than anything else. You bring up some good points about money in the US…I am always wondering why we still have pennies in circulation. Maybe for the coin collectors or something…

@John:

“Not offered as a complete answer, but it might be worth considering the role of the penny in marketing, e.g., selling something for $1.98 instead of $2.00…”

I like that avenue. But even then, some of that pricing has more to do with the idea of pennies (or just one cent) than the actual little metal things we carry around in our pockets (or used to at least). Funny how one cent matters in some of these ways (pricing, etc) but still many people feel that pennies in and of themselves are a waste of time.

Thanks again for all the comments everyone. If you have more examples, post away.

In marketing, pricing is a black, and not always successful art. In one case, famous in Japan, the suppliers of Johnny Walker Black whiskey decided to reduce the bottle price from ¥5000 to something less, thinking that a lower price would sell more whiskey. Their sales collapsed. Most, it turned out, had been for obligatory gifts, which are priced in increments of 3, 5 and 10 thousand. Lowering the price took it out of the category in which it had been a popular item.

Also, did you know that contact lenses are an enormously profitable business because if you try to sell lenses at a price much lower than wearing glasses, easy to do because contacts are dirt cheap to manufacture, people start worrying about their safety.

The Scottish pound has the same problem in England as the Northern Irish, although I’ve found cashiers usually accept Scottish notes after giving them a good look over.

You mentioned the usefulness of small change – what about its opposite? A hundred pennies is generally less desirable than a dollar bill. Here in the Netherlands, this idea has even been institutionalized: every purchase in a store is rounded off to the nearest 5 cents. If the cash-register in the supermarket says you owe 5.64 Euros, the cashier will ask you for 5.65 – and won’t accept less (though I admit I’ve never actually tried it). It works the same way with rounding down.

And (to continue what Jennifer started with the Canadian examples) if you’re collecting examples of interesting ways people behave with money and what it might mean for identities and power, here’s another one: try using Northern Irish money in England. It’s the same currency, printed with the head of the same Queen, but it looks different and says “Bank of Ireland” on it. Getting it accepted can involve a conversation with the manager. Bank of England notes in Northern Ireland, on the other hand, are no problem at all.

Nice post!

Much of what we do is habit. Some is impulse.

Indeed, but even habitual and impulsive action results from some form of calculation in the brain – and this calculation depends on some kinds of mental states that we could call “beliefs” and “desires”. “Desires” are also referred to as “pro-attitudes”, to encompass habit (a “desire” or inclination to perform an action for its own sake), obligation, etc, which are (arguably) based in deeper desires. An obligation will only sway you if it’s backed by something, whether your desire to please the person obliging you or your desire to avoid punishment. It is in this sense that all action is “desire-dependent” – caused by your beliefs and desires (which are really just the causes of your actions and ultimately chemical phenomena in your nervous system). This is your “broad sense” in which all action is desire-dependent.

However, this is what Searle calls the “classical model” (or the Davidsonian model), and he rejects this on the grounds that humans have some kind of free will (and can therefore exhibit true weakness of the will and choose to follow rules or not – not on the basis of a calculation of beliefs and desires but a free choice). I find his argument here a little ridiculous to be honest, and it causes him to make a mistake regarding the nature of rules. It seems like an arcane point to say that all action is ultimately desire-dependent, but it has repercussions.

I have access to Anthropological Quarterly and shall track down your article – sounds good.

f you have access to back issues of Anthropological Quarterly, you may want to have a look at a piece I wrote titled “Getting to Persuasion,” whose starting point is the observation that social and cultural explanations too often assume that the rules in question are taken for granted and that people don’t have to be persuaded to follow them.

For real though, I have had people look at me like I’m trying to rip them off and ask “what is this?” when I’ve tried to slip a Canadian coin into my payment down there. “It’s a nickel, it’s the same as yours,” doesn’t fly. I’ve even had this experience over pennies.

Canada and Mexico should really stop being so accomodating until the US learns to reciprocate the favour.

It’s crazy, but it works anyway…and why or how it works is a massive, but important question I think.

It’s not such a massive question, and the proposed resolution is pretty elegant (or at least, the route to it is). But most of the comprehensive theories need tweaks. Searle’s treats social facts as if they’re true whether you care about them or not – you’ll apparently follow them whether you have any investment in the outcome of following the rule or not (or, as he puts it, they’re “desire-independent” reasons for action, which to my mind makes them not reasons for action at all). That doesn’t make any sense to me, and I thought at first that I’d misunderstood Searle. I hadn’t, and the claim he made about the desire-independence of rules depended on a theory of action he proposed in a book called Rationality in Action. It turns out that changing our view of rules and social facts has a huge impact on how we understand all of human action, which makes this a particularly tricky area.

Rust takes on Searle’s claim but doesn’t propose a resolution; as far as I remember, he only shows that Searle’s proposal isn’t very naturalistic and that it fails at its task. But it’s still pointing in the right direction, especially as it is an attempt to make naturalise our understanding of society. It just needs to be put to the test of explaining why people don’t like small change or credit in certain situations, and other sorts of ordinary life challenges. My view is that rules and social facts are entirely desire-dependent (as all reasons for actions must be), but it’s complicated.

You’re right: money is prima facie absurd, but so is government. Government has no real substance, and money is just bits of stuff (or, imaginary bits of stuff) with no inherent value. It seems like an insurmountable obstacle to explain such things. I find it instrumental to look at examples where these things fail to see that they’re not so metaphysically challenging at all. There are, of course, plenty of examples of this from both recent and ancient history.

I’d also suggest looking at Michael Suk-Young Chwe. Good game theorist who has developed some interesting ideas about ritual (oddly) using the idea of common knowledge.

Thanks for the comment, and for pointing me to Searle’s 2010 book–sounds like something I definitely should read (Rust too). The big question about what, exactly, upholds the value of money is endlessly fascinating. A lot of things have to come together for such a system to work, and to keep working day in and day out. If you look at it from a certain perspective, it makes almost no sense to exchange something immediately useful or desirable (like food) for little pieces of paper or bits of metal or even some numbers on a plastic card. It’s crazy, but it works anyway…and why or how it works is a massive, but important question I think. Anyway, that’s why I have been getting into reading more econs and economic anthropologists in the past few years, because there’s some pretty good stuff out there about this sort of thing. Thanks again Al.

@Jennifer:

“I find it really funny that Americans expect to be able to use American money in Mexico, especially in out of the way towns away from the border, when even people in border towns up north will look at you like you’re some kind of idiot…”

Exactly. It is funny because there is a definite double standard. Some of the same folks who might get irritated about a lower exchange rate in the middle of Baja would not even *think* about accepting pesos back home in the US. In fact, I can’t think of any place in the US that freely accepts pesos in a similar way that many businesses accept dollars in Mexico. Thanks for the insight about Canada–that was something I didn’t know. Interesting how the use of different money is pretty flexible and open in Mexico and Canada, no? Definitely not the case in the US…

One question that always gets me thinking is this: what exactly upholds the value of money? State power? Trust? The symbolic meanings that people attach to money? Habit? A big global conspiracy? All of the above!?!*

This is a fundamental question in anthropology, because the answer is the same answer to the question of “what makes a government a government” and “what gives words conventional meanings” – basically, the answer to the question of how “social facts” exist. The answer from philosophers and game theorists is based in the tricky concepts of collective intentionality or common knowledge (they’re not exactly the same), which amount to thoughts about other people’s thoughts and mental abstractions based on the same. Searle has an influential but flawed theory of collective intentionality that he has outlined in several recent books. His recent [2010] book Making the Social World has the most thorough treatment of it, and Joshua Rust’s books on Searle and his theory of social facts are also a good source. Rust also presents problems with Searle’s views that could be resolved by social scientists (or social-scientifically-inspired philosophers). Many of your observations about how money is used would make good fodder for ameliorating Searle’s theory, although there are plenty of other formal adjustments to make, I think.

Good post, by the way!