The English economist William Stanley Jevons described a wor…
The English economist William Stanley Jevons described a world tour during the 1880s by a French singer, Mademoiselle Zelie. One stop on the tour was a theater in the Society Islands, part of French Polynesia in the South Pacific. She performed for her usual fee, which was one-third of the receipts. This turned out to be three pigs, 23 turkeys, 44 chickens, 5000 coconuts, and “considerable quantities of bananas, lemons, and oranges.” She estimated that all of this would have had a value in France of 4000 francs. According to Jevons, “as Mademoiselle could not consume any considerable portion of the receipts herself, it became necessary in the meantime to feed the pigs and poultry with the fruit.” (Source: W. Stanley Jevons, Money and the Mechanism of Exchange, New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1889, pp. 1-2.) Do the goods Mademoiselle Zelie received as payment fulfill the three functions of money?