Against The Pound
how the new £1 coin can re-enchant your world
When I was a child we collected frosted glass at the beach. The technical term for the stuff is sea glass; but we called it treasure, and the name was more than a label — we treasured it. Not very well, but as well as we could. I kept my treasure in the beige-coloured Boots bag that came with my sunglasses. They were pretty great sunglasses, so that was more of a thoughtful decision than it might sound.
Different colours of treasure were worth different amounts to us. I forget the exact figures — white and green were good, brown and blue better, red and purple exceptional and highly prized — but the precise values weren’t the point. Finding those beautiful pieces of glass at the beach was like stumbling upon a seaside world of magic. The unknown history of each piece of treasure, and the process of finding them, was enchanting.
A few years later, I was collecting coins. My best coin was the one with a hole in it, which I think was worth 50 Japanese yen — not much really, and again, not the point. I knew at the time that it wasn’t worth much; but I also knew that its existence was special to people in some far away land and, crucially, that it had a hole in it. My hands still remember how it felt.
Japan isn’t the only country with holes in its currency. The pacific island of Yap doesn’t have metal, so for hundreds of years they have quarried huge disks of limestone from the nearby island of Palau. The dangerous journey makes them hard to come by, so they work effectively as units of value. These millstone-like disks can vary hugely in size, being anywhere from a few inches to 12 feet in diameter. Since many of the stones are too large to move, the system relies on an oral history of ownership — transactions require no physical movement, just an agreement that ownership has changed. It’s a system thick with trust.
Perhaps unexpectedly, the value of each stone is determined not only on by its size, beauty and craftsmanship, but also by its history. Most stones in Yap have a pedigree, the names of all previous owners being passed down along with the stone’s ownership: if many people died during the stone’s transportation, or a respected sailor was its first owner, then it will be worth more. The story goes that during a return voyage from Palau, one freshly quarried stone was lost forever at sea. When they returned, the sailors all testified that the owner wasn’t guilty of its loss; and it was thus publicly agreed that the value of the lost stone remained in possession of its owner. Such was the level of trust within this community that they even had the power to enchant objects at the bottom of the ocean.
The communal trust on display in Yap is stunning, but not exceptional. In her essay “Finding Trust In Our Economy”, Sarah Hamersma notes that:
“if we take a closer look at our economic interactions, we’ll find trust hiding in plain sight. We engage in transactions that would be ridiculous if we did not place trust in the people and institutions managing them. We use signatures as our bond — one signature for a credit card transaction, about a hundred to buy a house (a house!), but the same fundamental trust underlies both. We purchase consumer goods assuming they aren’t defective; we assume restaurant food is not poison. We put stamps on our letters and have a remarkable level of confidence that they will reach their destinations. Every day we pay sales taxes at the register and trust that the retailer will pass them along to the government, and at the end of the year we even — with remarkably high compliance in North America — pay our income taxes. The fact that it is considered an aberration when one of these things doesn’t happen confirms that trust is the norm.”
If you don’t think the world is enchanted, take a look in your wallet. Communities are forever enchanting their coins with trust: when a coin is first imagined and designed, when it’s minted and first takes physical form, when its spent, when its given — each stage in a coin’s story invests and enchants it with meaning and magic that can only be exercised through faith. Your pocket contains embodied forms of trust. Why else would anyone swap a coffee for a few small pieces of metal?
If you’re lucky, one of the coins in your pocket might be the new pound coin. I’m not lucky, but I did go to the bank and trade them a £10 note. When you look at a £10 note, you’ll notice that what I actually did was ‘promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of 10 pounds’. The note doesn’t claim to be ten pounds itself, but rather the promise of 10 pounds. But 10 pounds of what? Not gold, the link between gold and currency was severed internationally by the early 1980s. John Lanchester comments on our dilemma:
“The fact is, there’s no answer to the question, ten pounds of what? The ten pound note is worth what it claims it is because the state, in the form of the Bank of England, says so, and we choose to believe it. This is what students of currency call ‘fiat’ money, money whose value has been willed into being by the state. The value of fiat money is an act of faith.”
It’s hard to say what an enchanted object is made of, because it’s made of more than matter. Perhaps the closest we can come to answering the question ‘10 pounds of what?’ is ‘10 pounds of trust’. For currency to hold that much trust takes a strong community and special coins.
The new pound coin is described as “the most secure coin in the world”, which is one way of saying that you can fit a lot of trust between its 12 sides. It has an exceptional level of craftsmanship, including features such as latent imagery and micro-lettering; and its shape and milled edges make it instantly recognisable to the touch. It even has a hidden high security feature to protect it from forgery for years to come.
That last point is important, because 3% of the old, round pound coins in circulation were forgeries — which is why a new coin is taking its place. The new pound coin is an incredible work of craftsmanship, but it’s the product of a weakening community. It takes a strong community to enchant physical objects, a community like the one found in Yap. The weaker our community becomes, the more special and secure our coins will need to be if we are to enchant them with the trust that’s required of them. The new pound coin is a sacred relic in a world that’s being disenchanted, a world being emptied of trust.
The idolisation of money, and of what money can do, is one reason for that breakdown of trust. It’s the mindset that births forgeries, but most of us are guilty of it in one way or another. In his essay “The Cornerstone The Economists Rejected”, Brian Dijkema references a study from a daycare in Haifa which showed just that.
“This daycare had challenges with parents arriving late to pick up their children. They had to do something to address this, as it was becoming a problem for staff who were in turn having difficulty keeping their own commitments. In other words, lateness was a community problem.
Their solution was to impose fines on the tardy parents. Parents who arrived late would be tacked with an additional charge on top of the fees they paid for daycare. The solution was simple: make them pay and they’ll stop coming late.
Except “it did not work. Parents responded to the fine by doubling the fraction of time they arrived late.”
What happened?
Well, the parents did the math. Imagine a young chemical engineer working in Haifa. He thinks to himself “I only need twenty more minutes to finish this project, and it will look really good if my boss sees this on her desk tomorrow morning. It’s worth the extra few bucks if I’m late picking up my daughter.””
The trust essential to the functioning of that daycare was totally undermined when it was replaced with a financial incentive. The people of Yap, gathered after the storm, knew something that the daycare in Haifa forgot: you can make money out of trust, but you can’t make trust out of money.
Trust is a diminishing resource. In a world that’s being filled with money even as its emptied of trust, the Royal Mint has made a coin that doesn’t need much of it: it’s easy to put your faith in the new pound. They have created a coin so easy to enchant with trust that even a faithless community like ours can do it, usually without a second thought. The Royal Mint may just have made the most enchanting coin in history.
Next time you spend a new pound coin, stop to recognise the level of craftsmanship you’re handing over. That craftsmanship is testament to an enchanted world. It’s the product of a weakening community, but it could be the start of something else. Allow its beauty to make you hungry for re-enchantment. Imagine what little trust it’s enchanted with growing like a seed into a blossoming and strong community, a community rich with trust.
The new pound coin is worthy of such a community. It’s worthy of children. The love of one pound is the root of all kinds of evil, but the love of one pound coins can be the first glimpse of a re-enchanted world.
