This is actually apocryphal, I think from Adam Smith & before him Aristotle, pull quote from 1985 anthropology professor “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money"
This article isn’t super convincing to me. It seems like the author had a preconceived goal and didn’t try hard to falsify it. For example, what about the “gimwali” exchange? That’s clearly a barter system. I believe Mesopotamia also had some barter-type systems (eg cuneiform tablets show exchanges of one good for another).
And realistically we just don’t have records going back to the time that we would expect most barter systems to have existed. It doesn’t really prove they didn’t.
Sure, gift economies were also prominent, perhaps more than barter. But it’s hard to believe that you would use them on outsiders.
TL;DR the concept of money and the concept of coinage are separate, with the former significantly predating the latter. Even after coins were a thing, most accounting was still done without them, especially for peasants:
> So let’s say you live in a small community – like a peasant village working beneath a large landholder’s manor – and you need to transact some things, but you don’t have any actual silver because coins are scarce and valuable (and being a subsistence farmer, you grow most of what you need yourself), how do you do it? Well, one way is to do it ‘on accounts’ – you need wool and so when the shepherds come down from the hills, you trade for some of their wool during the shearing with a family you know and both you and they make a mental note that you owe them for the wool. You might express that amount of debt in silver (as a unit weight – see how we get to coinage as a pre-measured weight of silver?) but there’s no reason to measure out silver (even if you had any) because you see these folks every year and next time they’ll ask you for some grain and so on.
> Note that this is not the same as the concept of ‘barter’ – there is, in fact, a notional ‘money’ intermediary, it’s just not a physical coin or bill, its expressed as an account, a purely notional unit of value.
If that were true, and I'm not saying it isn't, how is that any different than the money we're discussing? Do you think that I trudge down to the bank, withdraw cash (if only it were still silver!), and buy lunch with that? Do I put some in my pocket to pay the mortgage later in the week (even if it's not at the same bank)?
The money is just expressed as debt that we all keep track of (some of us worse than others), and if we express the amounts in modern monetary units that's only because there's little else we could agree on to quantify it.
Not super related to your comment but that's not how it happened. This idea of barter -> coin money as natural progression is a fairy tale economists tell people but doesn't really have any bearing on real historical events
Barter is so bad for complex transactions that it couldn't go that way. Every transaction that needs to based on more than trust that you will get your gift back later needs some universal coinage. A trader can only take grain in your village, then in the city only pay in grain, but anything more complex needs money.
bglusman|1 year ago
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-...
zeroonetwothree|1 year ago
And realistically we just don’t have records going back to the time that we would expect most barter systems to have existed. It doesn’t really prove they didn’t.
Sure, gift economies were also prominent, perhaps more than barter. But it’s hard to believe that you would use them on outsiders.
magicstefanos|1 year ago
mplanchard|1 year ago
TL;DR the concept of money and the concept of coinage are separate, with the former significantly predating the latter. Even after coins were a thing, most accounting was still done without them, especially for peasants:
> So let’s say you live in a small community – like a peasant village working beneath a large landholder’s manor – and you need to transact some things, but you don’t have any actual silver because coins are scarce and valuable (and being a subsistence farmer, you grow most of what you need yourself), how do you do it? Well, one way is to do it ‘on accounts’ – you need wool and so when the shepherds come down from the hills, you trade for some of their wool during the shearing with a family you know and both you and they make a mental note that you owe them for the wool. You might express that amount of debt in silver (as a unit weight – see how we get to coinage as a pre-measured weight of silver?) but there’s no reason to measure out silver (even if you had any) because you see these folks every year and next time they’ll ask you for some grain and so on.
> Note that this is not the same as the concept of ‘barter’ – there is, in fact, a notional ‘money’ intermediary, it’s just not a physical coin or bill, its expressed as an account, a purely notional unit of value.
NoMoreNicksLeft|1 year ago
The money is just expressed as debt that we all keep track of (some of us worse than others), and if we express the amounts in modern monetary units that's only because there's little else we could agree on to quantify it.
Nothing's changed really.
snapcaster|1 year ago
bluGill|1 year ago