Page 29 - 3rd-year-tourism-2021_Neatترم اول
P. 29
Money
Money has various uses in the modern world: it is a measure of the value of
goods and services, a means of exchanging such goods and services, and a way to
store up buying power so that one can use it later.
As a measure of value, it is of the very greatest use. If I work in an office, how
can my employer know what to pay me for my services if there is no generally
recognized measure of value? He may decide to pay me a certain number of loaves
of bread each week; but then I shall have to exchange some of these loaves for other
things that I need; and how am I to know how many loaves I should give for a pair
of shoes or for the rent of my house, for example?
Money gives us a very useful means of measuring such relative values. My services
are worth, let us say, 7 pounds a week to my employer; my rent is thirsty shillings a
wee; a pair of shoes costs one pound and so on.
Money is also of very great use as a means of exchanging goods and services.
If, for example, I am a shoemaker, it will not be at all convenient to me always to
have to exchange the shoe I make for other goods or services. A doctor may want to
buy a pair of shoes from me, then have to find something else that I want, or look for
another shoemaker who needs him. Without money, the tax collector would come
back to his office with an extraordinary collection of objects.
Considered as a means of storing up buying power, money has good and bad
points. It can more easily be kept a long time than such things as food, which rots, or
buildings, which slowly fall to pieces, or machines, which rust. It takes up very little
space, and if you put it in a bank, it is as safe as anything in this world can be.
But modern money has some very serious disadvantages as a means of storing
up baying power. In the old days, when money was in the form of gold and silver
coins, the metal in each was really worth the amount stamped on the coins, the metal
in each was really worth the amount stamped on the coin. But the paper in modern
28