week 10/31- 11/4 reading

In RA Radford's The Economic Organization of a P.O.W. Camp, it is stated that the social norms that transpire in the free world are but the same in P.O.W. camps. Each prisoner holds the prison group to be of a vital importance for their futures but are aware that the outside world remains unaffected by the social group of their prison. What we take granted such as razor blades, cigarettes, or writing paper is wanted by prisoners in a level of urgency that is far higher than the norm. This makes trade among them nothing other than essential.  The essential factor comes from the fact that prison economy arises from a response to needs and wants rather than an imitation of another country. Prison economy is very small and simplistic, very enviable qualities for an economy, but is mostly sociological dealing through bartering. Cigarettes are the currency of the land and is usually traded for food(or another cigarette brand sometimes). Later on, "goodwill" became a market method to leave your cell with a certain amount of food and return with more than you left with. Their market is not perfect as increase in volume would result in very rough trade scales. Cigarettes continued to be the currency until around D-Day when the people who owned/helped the POW camp decided to host a restaurant and established paper currency for the restaurant. It worked relatively well with no loss of market value. Price fixing and changes stirred public opinion, deemed unfair to those with few cigarettes, forcing prices to shift in accordance with cigarette supply. In summary, 1944 it started out very well. However, deflation and cigarette shortage in 1945, left things in an unknown state. From that point on, economics was the science of distributing limited means among unlimited and competing ends. This lasted until it was agreed that with infinite materials, economics has no place.
Short Main Lessons from reading

• trade-offs can occur anywhere
• money is not the only currency by any means
• an organized economic system can arise in response to a group's wants/needs
• whether we're aware of this or not, we will use economics to obtain goods so long as scarcity exists