From the Coin’s Point of View

“Money talks” is an old adage in need of a fresh interpretation. Building upon the foundational narratives of modern novelists, numismatists may now use theories of memes and object agency to explain the behaviors of coins as if our money were independent of human control. This exercise allows the reader to think of coinage in an entirely new way, giving coins an active life cycle that is Darwinian in its struggles to survive and replicate. This explains in turn some odd human behaviors, such as deferring important decisions to flipped coins, manufacturing coins that cost far more than their face value, idling large amounts of change into “nuisance jars,” and making most coins round for the past 2,600 years.