As he begins his journey, he meets the requisite mysterious stranger who tells him to get the king to give him a ship filled with cheese rinds, bread crumbs, and carrion. In this tale, a poor and obscure young man is sent, through a variety of circumstances too involved to go into here, to rescue the King of EnglandвЂ™s daughter from imprisonment.

And savvy readers and listeners know, the moment that he makes it, that heвЂ™s going to come out on top.ДЄn even better example of the kind of exchange that IвЂ™m interested in, however, appears in the fairy tale вЂњThe Ship with Three Decks,вЂќ which appears in a number of different cultures. So he trades the cow for magic beans, and in the topsy-turvy sense of fairy tales, this bad decision is the best decision he could make. A smarter hero than Jack would have exchanged the cow for some coins and made economically responsible decisions. There are hundreds of these tales-вЂњThe Brave Little TailorвЂќ and вЂњJack the Giant KillerвЂќ are two-and what they have in common is a poor and slow-witted hero who uses luck or trickery to triumph over an enemy and ends up rolling in some of that unspecified wealth IвЂ™ve just been talking about. Jack is the ideal example of the classic fairy tale simpleton who makes good. So when there are exchanges in fairy tales, they are worth thinking about, precisely because they happen in such a way as to demonstrate the complete unsuitability of trying to apply a realistic understanding of moneyвЂ™s function as a medium of exchange within such an unrealistic setting. ItвЂ™s just there as a marker of status, as a sort of Hitchcockian MacGuffin for the young hero or heroine to aspire to. There are kings and queens, princes and princesses galore, and they all have untold wealth that simply exists. The magic purse and the donkey are in the story, in most tales, in order to be stolen and to allow a villain to take the place of the hero or heroine until everything ends happily ever after.ДЇairy tales do contain a lot of static wealth. No one ever spends the gooseвЂ™s golden eggs or the money dropped from the enchanted girlвЂ™s mouth. Even these magically provided types of money do not function like money. I mentioned in an earlier columnВ that aside from the admittedly frequent appearance of magical and comical manifestations of money-like the occasional enchanted girl who drops gold from her mouth when she speaks, the purse that always contains one gold coin no matter how often you spend it, the goose who lays golden eggs, or the Italian tale about a donkey who provides gold from вЂ¦ elsewhere вЂ¦ money is not a frequent player in fairy tales. Its functioning does not depend upon who is spending it or who is receiving it. And, combined with this interchangeability, money is also universal. Unless youвЂ™re a 4-year-old, you arenвЂ™t likely to have a strong preference among being given a five dollar bill, five singles, or a roll of quarters. And it can be changed for different versions of itself. Among other things, it is, as Simmel notes, interchangeable. LetвЂ™s think about some of the major attributes of money. And it does not work, in the fairy-tale context, for precisely the reasons that it does work in the real world. Money, which German sociologist Georg Simmel in his 1907 book The Philosophy of Money called вЂњthe absolutely interchangeable objectвЂќ and вЂњinterchangeability personified,вЂќ does not work as a medium of exchange in the context of the fairy tale.

He and his mother could have used the money to plant crops to sell at the market, or to move to another town, or to start a small business.

A beanstalk grows, a giantвЂ™s property rights are repeatedly violated, and Jack comes home with untold wealth and (in some versions) a beautiful princess as his wife. Instead of selling the cow, Jack trades her for some magic beans. Soon, JackвЂ™s mother decided that they had no choice but to sell their cow, get what they could for her, and hope that the money would last them long enough for times to get better. They were so poor that they had nothing but their little shack, the clothes that they wore, and one milk cow. Jack lived with his mother and they were very poor. Once upon a time there was a boy named Jack.

Magic bean story