you're right, i think i would very much like that program.

how amazing -- and disturbing -- that one tribe has the monopoly on producing these shells for use as currency among other tribes.  effectively, they are like a dowry (or is that cowry?) shell central bank!

did the program suggest any other kind of such division of labor among the tribes, e.g. one tribe focusing on making baskets, another tribe on fishing hooks, etc.?

on the question of what makes a good "medium of exchange", Wikipedia cites:

  1. transportability
   2. divisibility
   3. high market value in relation to volume and weight
   4. recognizability
   5. resistance to counterfeiting

To serve as a medium of exchange, a good or signal need not have any inherent value of its own, that is, it need not be effective as a store of value in itself. Paper money is a useful medium of exchange in part because it has no such value, thus, it cannot lose that value if damaged, and so damaged paper money is easily replaced. Gold was long popular as a medium of exchange and store of value because it was convenient to move large quantities and was inert, and so would not tarnish or lose weight or value.

But in the age of electronic money, haven't we moved beyond such physical concerns?

And while I don't think water is traded as a commodity yet, and much less am advocating that, it occurs to me that if I could know what the price of a liter of drinking water on the international markets is, that would give me a very different kind of information of what my holdings in RMB, euros, pesos, yen, baht, dollars, etc. are "worth" (as opposed to the sort of information that knowing what the price of gold internationally gives me.)

But rather than talk about water as a medium exchange, what about using it as the basis for a currency peg?  The author of this article seems to think pegging the dollar back to gold would be a good idea.  Supposing that pegging currency to a commodity could be a good idea at all, I simply wonder why it wouldn't be more reasonable to use a commodity that in and of itself has direct and obvious value to people, or at least to human society, something like water, or energy.

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.